Political Micro Targeting Essay

Case Analysis: Political Micro-Targeting
Operational decision-making systems are structured, common and are used day to day. Managerial decision-making systems are semistructured and are used when established processes aren’t present and changes may need to be made. Strategic decision-making systems are unstructured, uncommon, and are used to develop and support long-term business strategies.
Obama’s campaign team used all three primary decision-making systems to help secure vites from swing voters. The day to day collection and analyzation of data were operational processes. The decisions of which groups to target and how to gain interest from the recognized swing voter target came from managerial decision-making processes. The overall strategy for grouping and analyzing population segments to identify groups of swing voters was a strategic decision-making process. …show more content…
These numbers and trends can be used to compare to goals and benchmarks of the campaign. They can also be used to see if specific strategies are working and if any changes need to be made to the campaign. I do not believe that political micro-targeting signals the dehumanization of politics. The process of collecting and analyzing data has a very human element to it. When data is collected, people are talking about their interests, values and behaviors which are matched to political behaviors. These things are pinpointing very specific details about human nature and the social and political climate. Before the micro-targeting campaigns described in the case study campaigning was based around broad groups of swing state residents. Political behaviors were linked more with demographic information which is very basic and does not account for many variations among people. When information such as values, behaviors, beliefs, and interests are added to the information pool the identified segments become much more