Mandy rubbish marketier

As part of a college marketing course students were told of one way industry had countered the drift away from drinking tea to drinking coffee. A trend that had begun in America after the Boston Tea Party had spread across the pond to Britain and then greater Europe.
A cunning plan was plotted. A subtle device was constructed. A tea company set up a company selling a particularly bland and mild brand of coffee and spun a line that said – other brands of coffee may be bitter, but not so Mellow (name of the brand marketed by the tea company). The message that stuck in the mind of the viewer, crucially the woman who did the shopping, was that since coffee may be bitter she might prefer to have tea. By apparently trying to sell coffee the advert had turned shoppers away from the whole coffee scene. Brilliant, or what?

When politicians stand up on their hind legs and start slagging off other politicians they are achieving the same as the tea company did – turning customers off the whole political scene. Few people on the average street know who George Osbourne is but a Mr Darling tells us he is practising the politics of the playground, thus messaging that politics is a cruel playground game and Mr Darling is the school bully.
When Mr Brown accused Mr Cameron’s organisation of intending to cut spending of taxpayers’ money the listeners breathed a collective sigh of relief, often verbalised with, “Oh good, now tell us the name of the party that is promising to do that.” Mr Brown duly obliged – his party’s polls rating dropped and remained down.
The message that is emerging from the Westminster village is that the other side are getting it all wrong, even though only one political party is in a position to be doing anything at all, and that politicians don’t know what they are talking about.
Coffee is bitter, and all politicians are detached from reality and talking rubbish? That is the message Mandy has got across with aplomb.
So why would anyone get out of bed and walk to a polling station to cast a vote for the party lording the man who taught us that when they can more easily stay at home and enjoy a cup of tea?