Wal-Mart uses political campaign tactics to win consumers. Or maybe not.

What’s the difference between a likely voter and a potential customer?

Not much, says Wal-Mart and its new “rapid-response public relations team.”

In response to increasingly successful, well-organized critics, the nation’s largest employer has created an outsourced war room lead by Michael K. Deaver -- the communications brains behind Ronald Regan’s “Teflon” image – and staffed by a dozen or so veteran Republican and Democratic campaigners.

The New York Times reports that Wal-Mart wants to make sure attacks regarding the company’s wages, health care and business practices don’t turn away “swing voters” – those middle-income consumers that are key to its expansion plans.  (Wal-Mart’s chief executive was quoted as referring to them as customers “who are not worried about their next paycheck.")

Wal-Mart’s team jumps into action whenever is heard a disparaging word – calling reporters, doing interviews, posting on the Internet, distributing press releases and video clips.

And in keeping with typical electioneering tactics, Wal-Mart’s response team attacks the attackers.  Hard.  To counter the Nov. 1 release of a low-budget anti-Wal-Mart documentary film, for example, the team issued a long list of rotten reviews the film-maker earned for his previous efforts.  Wal-Mart is also promoting a pro-company documentary, and has even challenged opposition to run the movies side-by-side.

These moves underscore Wal-Mart’s consistently innovative, assertive approach to issues management and crisis response.  Last summer, Wal-Mart took the unprecedented step of posting on its Web site hundreds of pages of unfiltered legal filings to discredit a self-described whistle-blower that the company said was blowing smoke. (Link below.)

But consumers aren’t voters.   And the aggressive, discredit-the-opposition political strategies being used by Wal-Mart’s new PR war room may in fact be contrary to what is still a consumer marketing agenda.

"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” was originally scheduled to be released in only 24 theaters around the country, with hopes it would also be screened in churches, coffee shops, student centers and union halls around the country.  Given the yawn generated by the guy’s previous offerings, there’s every chance his one-sided documentary would have faded quickly into the clutter of a real-time, interactive information glut that didn’t exist when 1989’s “Roger & Me” became a pre-Internet cult classic.

Even without Wal-Mart's response, it’s possible that the masses in the middle might have written this off as just more grist for the we-hate-Wal-Mart mill -- another Michael Moore wannabe selling another diatribe about evil corporations and exploited masses.  Say kids, who’s up for dinner at Olive Garden before catching Harry Potter at the Outlet Mall?

But by assigning this documentary Swift Boater status and urgency, Wal-Mart might be making matters worse by signaling to consumers that it is indeed relevant to their “why buy” decision.

Political campaigns try to move voters to an inevitable, single yes or no decision. If they vote, they do so with you or against you.  You win or you lose.  Then you start over again for the next election cycle, justifying the past, promising a better tomorrow and destroying the credibility of your competition.  Anything to get another yes or no vote in your favor. 

Winning over “swing” consumers is more complicated.  There’s no end game of an election-day result, and those recurring paychecks represent a endless range of choices about where to spend their money.  The consumer isn’t a victory defined by a single event, but a highly sensitive, two-way relationship in which both sides are constantly struggling to align a churning mass of logic, emotions, expectations, experiences and values. 

Wal-Mart is right to address the concerns of consumers who might be sensitive to criticisms about how it does business.  But these same people are also sensitive to the aggressiveness by which Wal-Mart tries to discredit and minimize the voices of its critics -- while simultaneously announcing bold initiatives to improve its reputation as a corporate citizen.

At the end of the day, middle-income “swing voters” might indeed decide that Wal-Mart was unfairly maligned by the little documentary that most of them never saw – and then still decide to shop at Target.

In corporate and marketing communications, that’s what we call making all the right kind of noise without making the right kind of difference.

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SCATTERBOX:  Wal-Mart opens can of disclosure whoop-ass against self-proclaimed whistle-blower
NEW YORK TIMES: A New Weapon for Wal-Mart
WASHINGTON POST: Wal-Mart Pushes to Soften Its Image
MOVIE SITE: Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price