The Philippine Online Chronicles

You can now wear your support for a particular presidential candidate by just buying your favorite beverage at any 7-11 convenience store. In the past, commercial enterprises have rarely ventured into the world of politics thinking that adding partisan color to the business might somewhat compromise the product or service due to the inherent polarizing quality of the topic and certain personalities that dabble in the field itself. 7-11 embraced this concept fully by starting the 7-11 Gulp 7-Elections last March and love it or hate it, it will be a permanent fixture in their stores until the actual day of elections when the Filipino public would decided who they want to vote for as president – a choice that is slightly harder to make than selecting the next beverage you want to drink.

The concept that 7-11 employed is really ingenious.  It somehow combines the Filipino fascination with voting for reality TV shows and singing competitions with the hard-to-swallow topic of politics. The running results are available online and could be even viewed on a per region or ever per branch basis. The latest figures are tallied up and updated every day and individual branches also have a cardboard display on who is leading as far as the branch goes as well as the overall tally.

Interestingly, 7-11 was able to combine their business model with the process of selection. By having six cup designs on hand with different bar codes for each of the candidates, the counting of the votes is simultaneous with the customer’s interaction with the store cashier or clerk. This information gets fed into a system and central collator would then be responsible for crunching the numbers and updating the website. The changes in the recent figures could be seen right about after lunch time.

The six cup designs represent the ten candidates who were still on the ballot when the production of the cups was commenced. Unfortunately, declared nuisance candidates like Peck Cantal and the rest of his ilk don’t have cups of their own and won’t be represented in the 7-11 elections. The five leading candidates – Benigno Aquino Jr., Manny Villar, Joseph Estrada, Gilbert Teodoro and Richard Gordon - in the mainstream surveys got their own cup while the last four hopefuls share a cup. The ones sharing the final cup are Eddie Villanueva, Senator Jamby Madrigal, Nick Perlas and JC delos Reyes. The four candidates have one panel each on the cup. There is also an option to vote for “undecided” in the cup. Despite sharing a cup, each of the four candidates and the “undecided” vote has a distinct and unique bar code that would allow the cashier to properly input the data into the computer.

Controversy

The decision of the company to just give evangelical Christian leader Eddie Villanueva a small panel in the final cup has drawn the ire of many of his supporters. His supporters have been a permanent fixture in 7-11 Philippines’ Facebook page and the responses and comments have been ranging from pleas to add a solo cup for Villanueva to downright trolling. The result is somewhat amusing and borderline irritating but people do go overboard especially when trying to defend and prop up their choice of candidate. With social networking sites, people certainly have found a new town plaza or central square where ideas could be exchanged freely.

It’s hard to scientifically determine if having his/her own cup really changes the game as far as the 7-11 elections are concerned. In actual surveys ran by SWS for instance, Villanueva really is running sixth behind the five front runners who have their own cups. This is not to say however that the 7-11 Elections were meant to be a dry run or another formal survey of sorts. The company has said repeatedly that the purpose of the activity was not to create impressions about particular candidates or establish a trend on who’s on the rise and who is dropping in the eyes of the beverage-drinking community. It’s all in the spirit of fun and for some people who have been taking a tad too seriously, it may be slowly turning into something that it was never meant to be – a place to wage vendetta and settle old scores.

Limitations

It’s really dangerous to read into the results of the Gulp Elections. The most glaring factor about is how the votes are actually cast. You have to buy a drink for your vote to count – that’s about twenty pesos. Since it’s literally like buying a cup of soft drink from another sari-sari store, the act of voting could be done multiple times. It can even be argued that since drinks in 7-11 are sold at a premium compared to say a corner store, the ability of the person to pay and hence his or her social class is also a determinant on just how much votes that person could put in into his or her candidate’s column.

If you grew up in the province or if you attended a low-profile private school that had a Parents-Teachers Association that needed funds year in and year out, you would be very familiar with how their fundraisers work. Little boys and girls would be pitted against each other for a beauty pageant-like “competition” where the supporters (usually their parents and other relatives) buy tickets or donate money to the organization for votes. The candidates who get the most money in to the pot win the title – regardless of how ugly they look. That’s not even a factor since the competition was never about going through the merits of each hopeful.

Just like the run of the mill beauty pageants for kids that we see in schools everywhere in this great country of ours, 7-11 somehow missed the bus in making the project a bit more education. Adding links to the website and allowing people to see the various platforms of the candidates would have been a good move. Since this is a favour that is extended to all candidates, the next effect is balanced and no politicization occurs. The cola-drinking public could also be better informed as to why certain candidates are taking certain positions in issues. Information at this level could help them make a more educated decision. I guess the company just didn’t want to push the envelope to far by sticking its nose too far into the political landscape.

If you’ve been around to Visayas and Mindanao, you would know that 7-11 has no presence there. Even urban centers like Cebu and Davao are devoid of Slurpee Machines and Big Bite Hotdogs. This makes the survey really centrally focused on the island of Luzon.

The poll also uses cumulative data. This means that the votes that were cast during the start of the project are still reflected in the total data. It is possible that people have changed their preferences over the past forty days. Some people who have been undecided a few weeks back could already be buying cups for other candidates so it’s certainly a bit skewed. The more votes come in, the harder it is to affect the baseline of the poll due to the larger pool of figures. As basic statistics go, new figures hardly affect the mean result if the population size continues to increase.

At the end of the day, the elections give us a very good set of data but it is not something that should be treated like a real scientific study. It’s much closer to a Pinoy Big Brother survey were people who want to vote for a particular housemate text their butts off just to make sure that he or she survives the eviction episode. Instead of sending out SMS that cost 2.50 pesos each, the votes are in increments of cups making the entire process a lot costlier for someone who want to affect the votes dramatically. Not only is it more expensive, the impact on one’s waistline and calorie count could also wreak havoc in one’s sense of body image and self-importance!

The beverage-drinking public’s turnout

One of the cool features about the website is the weekly view which allows you to see the general trend of votes through the weeks. During the first week of the 7-Elections, the cup sales were at 165, 003. There is no way to know for sure if this number was inflated due to the general excitement surrounding the project’s launch since the company will surely not release their pre-“elections” figures for comparison.

The rate of Gulp sales have been slipping since the start of the project. The numbers have risen a bit during the first week of April (the Holy Week break for most people) but the sales have generally declined. From a strong showing of 165 003 in the beginning, the sales for the week covering April 8 to 15 has gone down to just a little under 109 500 cups. It’s important to note that 7-11 has other products in its stores that could be in direct competition with the Gulp cups. Bottled soft drinks and canned drinks are also in their refreshment cabinets so other people may be going for those instead.

Combined with the cumulative nature of the vote counting, this makes the current results of the Gulp Elections very difficult to change at this point. The incremental increase is not picking up steam and is unlikely to change the bottom line for a lot of the candidates involved.

Interesting Results

While it is clear that one shouldn’t take the poll too seriously to the point that it would be seen as an alternative to say an SWS or Pulse Asia survey, it does have a lot of interesting tid bits of information. Here are a few that you could wrap your head around. These figures are inclusive of the numbers for the first six weeks of the Gulp Elections (March 10 to April 21).