Involved
Patrick Ruffini has a fascinating post that compares the Obama campaign to marketing a luxury brand as follows:
Most campaigns never get beyond talking issues. The sophisticated ones run on attributes in the foreground (cares about people like me) tied to issues in the background (a health care plan). The Obama effort seems to be something wholly different. The campaign and its marketing seem designed to evoke aspirational feelings that have virtually no political meaning whatsoever. This is what great brands do. They evoke feelings that have virtually zero connection to product attributes and specifications… The branding approach liberates Obama to be the candidate of the MoveOn wing and of national unity.
What’s so interesting about this from a business marketing point of view is that brands that “evoke feelings that have virtually zero connection to product attributes and specifications” are almost always brands for low-involvement products (Coke, Budweiser, Tide, etc.) rather than high-involvement products (automobiles, consumer electronics, certain kinds of apparel, etc.). High-involvement products command our attention, and powerful high-involvement brands typically do incorporate product attributes, and extend from rational to emotional consideration. This is certainly true for the three example brands that Patrick provides in his post: BMW, Apple and Nike.
In fact, by this analogy one of the problems that the Obama “brand” is likely to encounter is the one that David Brooks described as “how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona” to support its emotional content.
You write that like selling hope and high expectations is a bad thing! But I wonder sometimes if Thomas Frank has his dapper zoot-suited shoulders hunched over right this second preparing something very insightful on that POV:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/02/reading-obama-with-thomas-fran.php
Commodify your assent?
— Maureen · Mar 7, 10:52 PM · #
Maureen:
I didn’t mean that hope and high expectations are a bad thing. I just meant that, when it comes to a purchase that matters a lot to consumers, trying to divorce the feelings that purchasing and using a product creates from tangible characteristics inherent to the product usually doesn’t work well over time.
By example, if you had tried to buld the BMW brand around the AMC Pacer, it probably wouldn’t have worked out very well.
— Jim Manzi · Mar 7, 11:23 PM · #
This is a really interesting point of view you present, but I believe you, like so many others commenting on the Obama campaign you are missing the depth of it.
The Audacity of Hope presents a subtle political philosophy which integrates, 1. the humility which comes with recognizing multiple viewpoints and the great possibility that most of us will fail to grasp them all, with 2. a rather mundane liberalism, which is respectful of the points of view that do not contradict iots conclusions. It is the integration which is interesting. What Obama continually does in the book and in his speeches is to present the views which liberals find appealling and then recognize the good intentions and reasonability of the views of his opponents. The reason it works is because this appears to be the way he actually thinks. He is constantly struggling to prioritize the claims of his own team with that of the others.
His perspective on the constitution is interesting. He suggests that the constitution lays down the conditions for a conversation to be had across the generations in a deliberative democracy. As it has provided incredible stability, potential for participation, and shape to our culture, he expresses his deep regard for it. The contradictions in it as related to slavery are treated as something which the structure of the constitution pushed us to work through. His love for the country appears philosophical and well considered after great doubts.
So, when the campaign is treated as a branded product, this seems to miss the point. People who inspire so much in others, when those people are not unleashing the sublimated hate of ther followers, tend to be bringing their full selves to what they do. Their faces match their words. Their arguments account for our doubts. And their way of being and the philosophy which animates it, suggest to us some new ways of being.
Of course, there are some aspects of high involvement branding in his campaign. But high involvement products are often the result of the deep love and enthusiasm put into those products by their founders. My sense is that like those sorts of founders, Obama would fail completely if he tried to wage any other sort of campaign than the one he has.
Theo Horesh
— Theo Horesh · Mar 12, 09:23 PM · #