I know, I know, we're all sick and tired of "Obama should do X/Y/Z" diaries. But the Stimulist has a really, really great piece up called "How Don Draper would sell health care reform".
Let me know if this has been previously diaried. Surprisingly, I didn't find anybody else bringing this up.
Normally, I don't like to write diaries that are nothing but shameless plugs for information found elsewhere. My usual sensibilities are a bit off kilter at the moment, due to the state of the HCR debate and my increasing anxiety that we're losing it.
Here's how we can win it.
But what Don Draper realizes is that people don’t want to be sold a product. They want to be sold a vision of themselves that they like. Larry Ribstein, law professor at the University of Illinois, summed up this sentiment for The Business Insider quite nicely:
Draper’s artistic crew tend to have a pedestrian approach to selling – figure out what the consumer wants, and promote that. What makes Draper seem brilliant is that he’s always a step ahead: figure out what people want to want – that is, their dreams about themselves – and sell that. For example, to sell an airline, Draper’s guys figure that men fly, men like sex in the sky, so show them stewardesses’ short skirts. Draper says men want to think of themselves as family guys. So show the little girl asking, "what did you bring me daddy." Draper sells Kodak’s Carousel the same way — as a device for showing a gauzy version of the lives men would like to think they’re living with their families.
And I think they really hit it on the head with this paragraph.
Americans feel good when they snicker at government services. We love making fun of the DMV. We relish contrasting our hard-working selves with the fat cats on the government dole. So selling us shiny new toys from the government won’t work, even if we actually want those toys.
And they quote Amanda Marcotte when discussing branding:
The ad men at Sterling Cooper had a tough time teaching this lesson to their clients. Amanda Marcotte, writing in the American Prospect, explains this aspect of modern advertising:
[In one scene] the young copywriters pitch a campaign for Martinson coffee that involves calypso music, breaking from the heavy-handed pitches of the past. The campaign confuses the coffee executives, who don’t understand that an ad can merely evoke a sense of "cool" rather than make a hard sell. One of the copywriters announces to the Martinson executives that the younger generation "doesn’t want to be told what to do" and that they just want to "feel."
Whether it’s right or not (it’s not), Americans need to feel like supporting health care reform is cool. To do that, Obama can’t focus on the reform itself. There’s nothing cool about health care connectors, sliding-scale subsidies or electronic health records. Like the coffee company, he’s gotta stop focusing on the particulars.
Instead, he should make the status quo seem ridiculous. He needs to make people feel like they are out-of-touch if they want to keep things the same. Like Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads (which Draper would have loved), health care can seem with-it even if the particulars aren’t mentioned. It can seem cool just by making its nemesis seem ridiculous.
This piece is right on the money. I remember reading in 2002 or 2003 that the W administration employed what, at the time, seemed like an incredible number of advertising people. In retrospect, this is the one thing I think that administration did right. They could have sold ice to Eskimos.
Read the piece. It gave me a great deal of hope. We can win this thing, but we're gonna have to sell it. Fortunately, American's are GREAT at selling things!