Please read my friend Greg's take on framing, issues vs. values, and branding the democratic party.
Excerpt:
Democrats and Democrat-friendly 527s spent a record $250 million (or more) on this election cycle. Does anyone have
any idea how much money that is??? That's more money than Sony U.S. spends marketing its products in a year.
. . . .
When a consumer buys a new car every four years or so and has a gleam in their eye for a Mercedes this time around, you can take it to the bank: they know exactly who he is and what he stands for. Every touch point between Mercedes and its customers has been reinforcing the same set of brand values for 40 years.
This is much more than just a "frame" of communication about a product that is the same old shit in a different can. This is a well-thought-out product development and branding strategy, delivered to a carefully observed target audience, through a finely calibrated and constantly re-tuned set of communication channels.
Now what party does that remind us of?
I have been reading Lakoff and related posts for over a week now, and I think the collective compass needle of blame is definitely pointing in the right direction: close readings of the Republican text show a much richer set of resonant values woven into their language, and that's what makes it so persuasive. Right: it's not reading comprehension; it's audience response. Black box theories aside, that's undoubtedly why we had our asses kicked, and of course we ought to be doing something similar--democratic insiders have been saying so for at least as long as outside progressive observers.
But I don't think the distinction between values and issues steps far enough back. Nor do I think we're ready to start articulating our own narratives.
While we're very lucky to have, in Lakoff, a linguist who is also such a close observer of party politics, he's out of his depth when it comes to turning those observations into recommendations on how to change the democrats' trajectory.
For that, we should be looking to the people with the most nuanced understanding of the way consumer perceptions are created, influenced, stoked, and attached to products. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus: the good people of Madison Avenue. The process is called branding, Democrats suck at it, and we're getting hosed because of it.
Democrats and Democrat-friendly 527s spent a record $250 million (or more) on this election cycle. Does anyone have any idea how much money that is??? That's more money than Sony U.S. spends marketing its products in a year. It's almost as much as Burger King spends in a year, and significantly more than Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway, Domino's, or any other fast-food brand (excepting McDonald's). For Chissakes, it's more than Budweiser (depending on how you measure).
I'm not even going to tell you how much Apple spent on its last iPod campaign. (Hint: it's closer to Swift Boat Veterans for Kerry than to Burger King.)
Considering that the Kerry spend was concentrated into 1/3 of the states in this country, a selection that eliminates several of the most expensive media markets in the country, it represents a truly astonishing amount of marketing muscle on a per-capita basis. Add on all of the "earned media" (a funny/sad term marketers use to describe coverage of their products in the news well), and the media exposure just keeps getting bigger.
Yet by all accounts the recall rates of all that advertising were abysmal. It was obviously unsuccessful in persuading enough people to vote for Kerry. After all the ads, the speeches, the talking-head spin-room appearances, the voters still didn't feel they knew who Kerry was and what he stood for. Whereas they do believe Saddam Hussein had WMD's and something to do with 9/11.
So, this time around anyway, it wasn't a horserace between Bush as Hertz ("We're #1") and Kerry as Avis ("We Try Harder"). It was Bush = Coke (no pun intended), and Kerry = some kinda bootleg wine cooler that focus groups showed tasted good, dressed in hunting garb designed to please other target constituents. And who drinks soda because of taste anyway???
Say what you will about advertising firms, the bigger ones know what the fuck they are doing. Any sophomore marketing major at a third-tier school could have come up with this.
People don't just buy products; they aspire to lifestyles, and give their faith to brands. And successful brands are not empty.
Auto manufacturers, some of the most sophisticated marketers going, do a lot of research--just like pollsters and politicians. But they don't simply determine that drivers want better brakes, stick slightly better brakes in their cars, and hang up a sign that says "New and Improved: Now with better brakes!!!". Unfortunately, I think is about the level we're at with Democrats today.
Their marketing comes off as produced by rank amateurs. Individually, many of the ads were fine, and I'm sure the spot buys were carefully targeted. But, viewed collectively, the mismanagement of such a war chest of advertising dollars ought by all rights to go down as one of the most spectacular failures in advertising history. Whoever was responsible for it deserves to be pilloried. (Any publicly traded company that spent that much money on such a colossal failure would have its CEO hung out to dry.) It's particularly galling given that it's your and my money they pissed away getting not-even-close. Ultimately, Kerry's can is the one of the ones to kick here--the fish stinks from the head.
An auto manufacturer, by contrast, starts by identifying safety as a critical touch point on the car-owning consumer's psyche, and uses that to back into features it can lead with as selling points. R&D spends real money making real improvements to the brakes, product managers create names like "anti-lock brakes", and then they roll them out with sophisticated, repetitive messaging that communicates whatever combination of fear, vulnerable children, family camaraderie, and classical music they think will nudge their target audience one point closer to buying the safe car with the important safety features they are now confident will keep their family safe.
Landor: "simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality."
Ogilvy: "Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image."
When a consumer buys a new car every four years or so and has a gleam in their eye for a Mercedes this time around, you can take it to the bank: they know exactly who he is and what he stands for. Every touch point between Mercedes and its customers has been reinforcing the same set of brand values for 40 years.
This is much more than just a "frame" of communication about a product that is the same old shit in a different can. This is a well-thought-out product development and branding strategy, delivered to a carefully observed target audience, through a finely calibrated and constantly re-tuned set of communication channels.
Now what party does that remind us of?
As devious and despicable as we might think auto marketers are, let's remember one thing before we whistle over our high horses and prepare to climb aboard: consumers actually want safer cars. And, as a result of those wants and people's willingness to pay for them, cars are actually getting safer.
Where, I ask you, is the "pledge of satisfaction and quality" in the Dem's messaging today? Love him or hate him, Ralph Nader had a point: Where, oh where, in this so-called party of the people, are the fucking anti-lock brakes and side-curtain air-bags?
In fairness, safety is probably a somewhat anomalous example, as the world is full of features that people "want" that aren't necessarily rational, like excessive speed at the cost of terrible gas mileage. But my point is that the consumer is not wholly irrational, issues are not wholly separable from values, and all that MBA-speak about creating a "dialogue" between your brand and your customer is not all bullshit.
Yes, it's sad that the word "consumer" has become interchangeable with (if not supplanted) the word "citizen" in today's discourse. But it's an empirical fact we've got to get used to that people are motivated to act by very complex sets of beliefs, desires, and fears that seem to be lost on the Bob Shrums of the world. Republicans have their finger on the pulse. Madison Avenue has its needle in the vein. We have our thumb up our ass.
The language of consumer marketing may be poison to us, with our high-minded civics-class ideals, but to drink of it is to taste truth.
Voters do vote the issues. Sort of. The fact is, a well-branded product's features are impossible to separate from its brand. MP3 players do have utility. Apple's products are usually among the best designed (feature-wise) in their class. Apple's products are almost always the best designed (qua design) in their class. Apple is a cool company that makes innovative products. Their marketing campaigns reinforce all of the above. So, buying an iPod, even though you can get most of the same features for 60% of the price from Dell, becomes shorthand for investing in innovation and taking comfort that you're buying the best.
Think Different.
Throw in a little "cool", and behold as the wallets of a nation unfold.
George W. Bush has been working on his rugged, god-fearing, straight-talkin' Texan act for years. And it works. He has merged his brand and his product. A good man is hard to find. We will not be bullied by terrorists. Do what I say, not what I do. And they do.
Progressive Democrats have such a rich set of cultural icons, positive histories, and meaningful values to mine. We are the original PowerToThePeople.com. We ought to be able to corner the market on blue chips like health care and jobs and civil rights, own the frame for miles around any of these issues, and run the table with them for years to come.
We ought to be able to start a permanent branding campaign today, and learn to communicate our values with the kind of elegant simplicity and resonant themes of an ad campaign like this one:
"Leonard Bernstein wore khakis."
Think of all the folk heroes and freedom fighters and crusaders for justice and poet laureates and punk rock stars and union warriors and martyrs for truth we've got to work with. The possibilities are tantalizing.
And, really, how hard is it to market "Good"? How difficult can it be to articulate "Making the World a Better Place Since Before We Freed the Slaves"? Why can't we plant a flag on "Willing to Die for Social Justice"?
It should be a no-brainer. Freedom: People are Dying for It.
But image--the framing of the values--is not the problem. It's the values in the first place.
And no ad campaign can make up for a product that is lousy to begin with (Ogilvy again).
It is no accident that, in most companies, product development lives in the marketing department. Because it starts and ends with the customer, not the features or the inventory you are trying to unload on them.
At the risk of being confused for some kind of free-market-defending outlier, let me press the point one step further by saying that the best practices in modern product development and marketing in fact bear a striking resemblance to the way representative democracy is supposed to work in the first place.
It goes something like this:
1. Start early. Fusing a product line to a well-articulated brand identity takes time and discipline and is an iterative process.
2. Remember that you are the trusted custodian of your voters, and it is your job to do the things they want--not the other way around.
3. Listen to them, learn everything you can about them, and find out what they want.
4. No, what they really want, not what you think they want or want them to want, and maybe not even what they say they want.
5. Design your product thoughtfully to address those wants meaningfully (as opposed to superficially).
6. Yes, Mr. Lakoff, by all means hire some copywriters. Package it, and market it effectively and consistently and robustly.
7. Respond with some reasonable semblance of sensitivity to what the market says, but:
8. Stay committed to the core values of your brand.
9. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Now. . . what's so damned hard about that?
by Greg Cohn, a consultant in internet publishing and product management, and a participant in Concerts for Change. [Greg at Concertsforchange dot org]