Cam Barber on Message Delivery in Victorian Election – Crikey.com.au

The Power of Messaging and Message Delivery

 
Crikey 2I was interviewed by Dan Moss of crikey.com.au on Friday for an article about the image and messaging of the two key candidates in the Victorian election, Denis Napthine and Dan Andrews.
Here are the good bits 🙂 in the second half of the article:
 

“Napthine scored highly on message delivery with Cam Barber, a specialist in coaching public figures in government departments, companies and football teams how to speak to the media. He says when body language and clothes aren’t considered, Napthine has delivered his messages with more clarity.

“The best achievement was really Napthine’s when he said it’s ‘about trust’,” he said, because “trust is a perception”. Napthine is telling voters they can’t trust Andrews, whose characterisation as the mystery man of Victorian politics hurts his perceived trustworthiness.

“If he seems like a good bloke, that goes a long way in politics, and [Andrews] was trying to do that by bringing in his family and doing interviews in the country. I think he did a pretty good job of that,” Barber said.

On Napthine, “he’s just trying to look reasonably confident. His view on messaging was probably ‘don’t stuff it up’,” Barber said. “By coming forward and saying trust is an issue, he was showing great confidence that the unknown aspect of Andrews was playing a big part.”

But Napthine is carrying more baggage into the election. “The greatest challenge was the Abbott factor. I mean we had John Howard coming down and campaigning for Napthine,” he said, speaking of how unwelcome the Prime Minister was in the election.

“We’ve got this national trust issue he’s trying to separate himself from, but still felt confident enough to lead on trust, mainly because of the unknown factor of Andrews.”

(A little over-confident it turned out…)
 
Crikey 2

If you’d like to use the messaging to build a personal brand or sell an idea, consider: