Is Pakatan failing due to bad communications strategy?

THE political secretary of a senior Pakatan Harapan leader recently commented on how the coalition was losing the social media war, and how Umno was successfully using the simple message that Pakatan was insidiously dominated by one race to great effect.

He said: “We have not been able to counter this because of the fact that it has been in-built for so long. We must also admit that as a coalition, we have lost the synergy and effectiveness in social media communications... We simply have lost the social media advantage we once had.”

The point about Pakatan losing the social media war is likely borne out by statistics. Not long after the 14th General Election (GE14) in May, 2018, the social media reach numbers of accounts by figures like Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim (PKR) and Lim Kit Siang (DAP) took a dive, while some people were shocked to see the reach numbers of Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s (Umno) social media accounts shoot up.

One way to look at this is to say of course that the incumbent government is almost always at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to independent media. They run the government, and are thus responsible for their actions, which often makes them defensive.

The Opposition is not fettered by any such responsibility, and is thus often able to say things that people find more invigorating and “exciting”.

It has been interesting to observe the phenomenon where the new government “naturally” learns to talk the way the old government did, in the same way that the new Opposition “naturally” learned to talk the way the old Opposition did.

In swapping their roles almost seamlessly as above, it is no surprise that the new Opposition is popular for the same reasons that the old Opposition was.

That said, this alone likely does not explain the degree of Pakatan’s problem when it comes to communications.

As a communications strategist, I have always counselled that using the word “counter” usually sets you up for inevitable failure right from the start.

Employing this term immediately indicates that you are already dancing to the tune set by your opponent. In doing so, you have already conceded half the battle, if not more.

It is my view for instance, controversial though it may be, that if Pakatan starts talking about race and religion in more or less the same way we’ve been doing so for decades, they will immediately find themselves on losing ground.

I don’t really watch football, but I would guesstimate trying to “counter” the Opposition on race or religious issues is like giving a five-goal advantage to the opponent.

This is a near impossible spread for evenly matched teams. Of course, if you’re massively better than the opponent, you can still cover that spread.

Is Pakatan massively better than its opponent?

Some point to the fact that Pakatan has not really invested either time or money into their communications strategy.

This is true. There is obviously no concerted effort to focus on this in any intelligent, high-level manner.

In what our current Prime Minister probably thinks of as Malaysia’s “golden era”, the concept of “communications” was painfully simple: you decide what you wanted the people to think, then you “instructed” state-owned media to use all their newspapers, radio, and TV to make sure they thought exactly that.

This era is no more. The Prime Minister probably has no interest in or appreciation for the concept of a “meta-narrative”, as opposed to his beloved concepts such as “Malaysia Incorporated”.

Najib, on the other hand, understood the concept of branding and meta-narrative. No matter what you thought of 1Malaysia, one thing was for sure: everyone knew the brand, and everyone associated it with the government of the day.

Indeed, immense amounts of money were spent to ensure this. Who can forget the titillating exploits of communications consultant Paul Stadlen and Apco?

What Najib did not appreciate, however, was that no matter how good your branding and communications pizzazz is, it can’t cover up truly bad governance.

To give a more halal version of a popular saying: you can put lipstick on a donkey, but it’s still a donkey.

Pakatan today seems to be failing on both fronts, however: it does not have a cohesive communications strategy; but even if it did, there appears to be no meta-narrative or overall strategy there worth communicating.

Basically, I would have been excited to work on a central communications team say in the first year of Pakatan’s term, but I wouldn’t want that job now. It’s obvious that if the all-powerful Prime Minister has not seen the value and importance of communications and narrative by now, he’s not going to – and this is the real crux of the problem.

The concept of “narrative” is particularly important in our era of short attention spans. Most people do not have the mindspace to be interested in the nitty-gritty of what the government is doing. They only see the big picture: what are the broad strokes regarding what is going on?

In this sense, there are almost always only a few important impressions and takeaways. Politicians and pundits love to debate details and minutiae, but I contend that those few impressions are all that really matter.

If I had to take a rough guess, I’d say some examples of those key impressions are: Pakatan – all busy fighting over the next PM; PKR – fighting between president and deputy; DAP – behaving like previous ruling parties; and so on.

In those weeks and months after GE14, there was a golden opportunity to do nothing less than redefine Malaysia. There was an opportunity to deracialise political discourse, and build a groundbreaking, new unity narrative.

In the end, everyone was too scared, and that opportunity slipped by, leaving a huge vacuum – one that others were only too happy to fill with the same old toxic racism.

You don’t change these pivotal key impressions by sending out legions of cybertroopers to “counter” the Opposition narrative by responding to what they are saying. The last powers that be probably burned millions upon millions doing exactly that, and a fat lot of good it did them.

You change pivotal key impressions by setting your own agenda and defining your own narrative – and the first step in doing so is thinking long and hard about what it is exactly that you want people to think about you.

The next step is key.

Short-sighted politicians jump immediately into the question of, “Okay, how do we paint that picture?”

The smart and sincere however, think about how to make sure their actions, first and foremost, fit the desired narrative; and then – and only then – do they think about how to make sure people can see them acting in a way that is consistent with the meta-narrative.

“Bikin dulu, baru cakap (do, then talk)”, one might say, as opposed to “cakap tak serupa bikin (not walking the talk)”, or “cakap, tapi tak bikin apa-apa (all talk, no action)”.

All that said, of course, I suppose nobody has time or energy to think about the big picture and overall direction of the country, if everyone is obsessed about who will be the next PM, and for how long.

As I keep repeating: we won’t see real change on that front, until we see incentive structures change. And as long as politicians are too obsessed with that question to figure out the big picture of where we are going, even the best communications strategy in the world won’t help.

NATHANIEL TAN is a strategic communications consultant. He can be reached at [e-mail]. The writer’s views are his own.