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Iowa View
Steffen Schmidt 11:09 p.m. CST February
23, 2015 Des Moines Register
Consumers like
to know their product.
If it’s Coke,
they want Coke not “New Coke.”
The latest
news is that former Sen. Hillary Clinton has hired a public relations firm to
help her define herself. That seems to be the main reason she hasn’t declared
her 2016 candidacy for president — she’s still trying to figure out who she is.
Some are shocked
at this. Actually, it’s not such an odd thing in politics.
Think of the
candidates running for president in 2016 as a product. After all, they are
offering their signature qualities and asking consumers of political leadership
and ideology to buy their product and not the “other” products available on the
market. I’m assuming there will be at least two or three alternatives to
Hillary Clinton on the Democratic Party side. We know Republicans will have a
bonanza of alternatives.
Selling the
product requires each candidate to first of all “brand” herself or himself. The
marketing field explains that, “Your brand is your promise to your customer. It
tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it
differentiates your offering from that of your competitors. Your brand is
derived from who you are, who you want to be and whom people perceive you to
be.” This is precisely what political candidates must do. Especially the part
about “whom you want people to perceive you to be.”
Second, candidates
then need to develop “brand loyalty.” That means assuring that people will come
back to the same candidate, i.e. the same brand.
Companies and
candidates who successfully cultivate loyal customers also develop brand
ambassadors. These are consumers who will buy into a certain brand and then
talk positively about it among their friends. “This is free word-of-mouth
marketing for the company and is often very effective,” according to
Entrepreneur.com. This is clearly also the optimal outcome for political
candidates. We call it “going viral,” which can be either digital or simply
analog by word of mouth.
According to
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, MIT Sloan School marketing professor Renée Richardson
Gosline has noted that to inspire loyalty you need to offer a unique feeling
not just a vague idea. A product, i.e. a candidate, must fit a specific brand
identity and send a signal of what that brand is and “… carry the same brand
identity signal across the entire product.” The brand label must not “dilute
its identity.” That means candidates need to drill down on their identity,
reinforce it, refine it but not swerve too far away from the brand the
consumers know.
My best
example of this is former Vice President Al Gore. When he ran for president in
2000, one of the observation by the media, pundits and even many voters was
that he “does a perfect imitation of a tree.” In other words he was stiff and
conventional.
I followed
that race for the White House very closely and it soon became evident that
someone was messing with Al Gore, trying to transform him. The first thing we
noticed was that he suddenly started wearing a Palm Pilot on his belt.
Palm Pilot was
a digital organizer launched in 1992 with which you could manage your calendar
and other information. Remember that Gore was said to have “invented the
Internet,” which he didn’t actually do. As a matter of fact, I remember stories
reporting that President Bill Clinton and Gore had to be taught how to use a
computer. So, Gore’s handlers decided to make him “cool” and “techie” by
slapping a Palm on his waist.
Then, a few
months later at a big rally in the Memorial Union at Iowa State University, I
had a front-row seat. Gore emerged on stage and I immediately noticed that he
was wearing “Earth tones.” That must have been part of his evolution to an
environmentalist which, of course, culminated in the publishing of his book,
“An Inconvenient Truth,” and the Nobel Prize shared with the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.
But, I also
noticed that he was wearing super-tight pants, which startlingly accentuated
his buttocks. That was unfamiliar and out of character.
When these
changes became clear to the media, and even to voters, the reaction was that
people liked the “old Gore” much better even if he was boring like a tree.
In other
words, they liked the existing brand, the “Old Coke” better than the
“rebranded” Gore, i.e. the “New Coke.”
I’ll be
watching the 2016 contenders closely to see how they brand themselves.
Especially Hillary Clinton.
