Yep I’m talking the bottled water (bad tasting at that IMO).
Some Kossacks may recall my MBA has a concentration in marketing. One of the best compliments I’ve ever received was from a professor who said he wouldn’t call on me in his marketing class because I had a tendency to warp up in a minute and a half answer the core of his hour and twenty minute lecture.
It was in his class I read the case study about Perrier, and how the marketer that developed the brand took its sales from $600,000 to $1,000,000,000 – in one year.
How?
He discovered the biggest untapped segment out there (at the time) – The Yuppies. There was no particular value to Perrier as a product. The successful strategy was all about how Perrier MADE THE YUPPIES FEEL – especially when they held it.
That’s it! That’s all! It’s all about marketing.
Products are positioned on segments. It is one of the fundamental marketing mantras.
The strategists behind Obama’s campaign are very clever in how they’ve analyzed the electorate and positioned their ‘product’ on the segment that is the 70% of the people that think the country is on the wrong track.
Obama may or may not be a change agent. The important fact is he has been positioned as THE change agent on that segment of the disaffected. He has a series of ‘product attributes’ that make him FEEL like an agent of change, and that is what people are buying into – for now.
He’s new! He’s fresh! He’s young! He’s handsome! He’s a great speaker! And he has a cute family!
All of these attributes tap into the sentiment of how these voters FEEL about the need for change. It’s positioning. Wiki writes about positioning:
In marketing, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization. It is the 'relative competitive comparison' their product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.......What most will agree on is that Positioning is something (perception) that happens in the minds of the target market. It is the aggregate perception the market has of a particular company, product or service in relation to their perceptions of the competitors in the same category.
With this strategic marketing framing one can get Obamamania.
As I said the strategists behind Obama’s campaign are very clever. They may also be very cynical as Obama may have been created as the change brand, but he may not really be a change agent.
I personally don’t know if he’s a change agent. If he’s elected it may take a year or two into his presidency before I’ll know if he’s a change agent. It hinges on what he does, not what he emotes.
Obama may be the slickest of what I call the DC Don’ts – talk a good game, but don’t really do the things necessary to bring about change. DC Don’ts represent many of the DC Democrats presently in power.
I don’t know if Obama is really a DC Don’t. If he is a DC Don't this I know for sure - Issue oriented Kossacks will be pissed and millions of the Obamamaniacs will become even more disillusioned and cynical about the political process. They will lose ‘the audacity of hope’ concerning the possibility for change. They will have been played for fools and not realized it – easier for them to blame change.
If Obama is the nominee I hope I don’t see in the fall a variation of the ‘It’s morning again in America,’ ads, but I probably will.
In the back of my head I keep hearing, ‘Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!’