« Adele | Home | A good oldie from Malcolm… »
Marketing and Sales 101: Why Obama Will Win – Obama as a product
By Charles Martin | November 3, 2008
Obama will win the election for President of the United States tomorrow. Make sure you vote for your favorite candidate. There is a cool twitter report to tell you how the polling places are doing wait-wise.
After watching every debate, being a member of both party’s email campaign, and looking over poll data as well as doing my own raw pre-polls among a varied cross-section of the American electorate, I believe Obama is going to win by more than 50 electoral votes and also carry CO, MO, and FL as swing states. This post is not about any narrow emotionally driven issues. This post examines how expert selling wins the day regardless of the product or service.
USE SIMPLE MARKETING
[first you must agree that we are being "sold" and "marketed" to by two people running for POTUS. if you don't clearly understand what this means, check this link.]
To win in 2008, it comes down to simple marketing. It comes down to using every good sales and marketing tactic and eschewing all the rest. Obama’s team understands this clearly. The other does not.
One candidate – McCain – had us at hello (in 2000 especially) but lost us on the way to the alter. Mike Murphy said it again tonight [click on assessing the electorate] – The McCain brand is missing. McCain used to attract a lot of mid-line moderates like me. I remember wishing I was voting for him in 2000, not Bush. I didn’t predict anything that has happened in eight years except a war, but none the less, I really attracted to McCain’s “maverick-ness”. Eight years have passed and he began with the old line Republican way of selling. That would work moderately fine if Bush hadn’t muddied those waters for good. They never imagined that the other brand (Obama) would be so sleek, so direct, or so razor efficient.
McCain isn’t capitalizing on what people want to see in a candidate today, especially now with the economic crises of 2008. The timing couldn’t have been worse for an old-line candidate and people think it is fresh and exciting to see the workings of our technological worldspace effecting the election. There is nothing wrong about fresh and exciting in a political election. If your product is the new thing, then it has to have substance. People find substance in Obama. It may be liberal substance (perception), but it’s there none-the-less. I remember dog fights over the lifespan of Google back in the day. People have been let down by McCain’s product which is related to Bush’s product no matter what one believes.
That said, when I saw Obama speak at the 2004 convention [via television], I was intrigued by the newness of it all. I, like a lot of Americans, checked my list to go back to him later. He wasn’t running at the time, and I was too busy worrying about throwing my vote away to Kerry or someone else. The equivalent of Obama showing up in 2004 at a convention is the equivalent of a concept car at the Detroit Auto Show. So many drivers and enthusiasts dream that the new concept will be on the road and in their driveway. It was a great marketing bit to show a few Flash-bits of who he is: an Outlier with a different appeal from most of our candidates.
MORE GOOD TACTICS — STAYING WITH A WIN
McCain has depended on what worked in the past. Differentiation is the call of today. McCain says to himself that if he were to be more like Obama to capture conservative moderates, he wouldn’t be true to his ideals. When he does this he works from a very stale playbook. These playbooks probably worked for Reagan and they surely worked for Nixon. Those two presidents, I believe, wouldn’t be electable today (having no pre-idea how they would govern of course). Yes, it’s an MTV world, but truly today we call it a Flash-Bit society.
The information bits are getting tinier and smaller. Since 2000 this has been true. Clinton playing sax on Arsenio was the old version of this (“I’m like you!”) and today’s version of this how you can read Obama’s intent in the first two seconds of meeting him. Those that “want to know more” (all voters of all parties) are actually trying to talk themselves out of something they already wanted and decided to do. My belief is that there are really no “undecideds”. I know this from selling for 20 years.
DON’T HIDE YOUR PRODUCT’S SUCCESS AND VALUE
This I know to be true: When a person, country, small business, university, among a lot of other entities, are in real trouble, we fall back on our most treasured base thoughts of what’s comfortable and then work from there. I see why most of rural America will vote for McCain. As slick (and I’ve heard some say that Obama is “too calm”) as Obama is, it’s all we learn in law school, B-school and Kindergarten. I have met a billionaire or two and at least a hundred millionaires. Most of them remind me of Obama (remember… McCain inherited his money through his wife for the most part). Even the southern good-ol-boys I know act and behave more like Obama and are ready to hit me with their law school editorial prowess over their ah-shucks CEO leadership principals. Obama has done what most of American kids aspire to do — almost verbatim — but the rural and suburban crowd will ignore that. These same people won’t text their wives on their way home from work tonight either. There is a sea-change and America is catching the bug of “blink-ing” their way to the polling place. In other words, as many say they are undecided, it’s proven that they knew who they were voting for probably months, but maybe (like me) years ago. The folks that don’t believe their blink (most of humans) go about waffling and worrying until election day and wind up doing what their brains micro-sliced eons before. KNOW THIS — your buyers already chose to buy with you long before you hit the middle of your pitch.
FOLLOW THE STRATEGY OF A WINNING SPORTS TEAM
Lots of good sports strategy was put into Obama’s campaign. The second debate between O and Mc showed us how Obama said nothing new, kept it steady, and relied on not changing the game at all. Any team about to win their division and go to the Superbowl as favorite, will play their junior guys and just keep it steady. Keep it steady when you know you have the sale and don’t bring up anything new to be re-computed in your prospects findings. If the competition re-jiggers a bid you are countering, re-affirm why your product or service is still the best. WHATEVER you do, don’t go about reacting and matching. You ultimately let your prospect down because you reveal that your deal is not solid. Prospects and voters hate reactionary measures.
Without going on and on about Palin, I’d just say that was the last nail in Mc’s coffin and every Republican pundit has said so. It was a direct ploy to get Hillary-like and it backfired after they let her out of the pen and onto CBS News. If this was 1940, she wouldn’t even have been on radio OR tv after the party elders assessed her rough edges. Repeating his bad strategies of lore, McCain took out his old fashioned notions of women and pandered. I know women 70 and women 20 and they are angered by his choice and they are not liberals. When selling, never assume that it’s one size fits all. American voters shop at WalMart and these voters know that there are lots of different socks to choose from. Generalization – how this move equates to most women — kills the deal. Think about how your ex-wife instantly comes up with 10 reasons your new wife isn’t like her or as good as her.
DON’T HIDE FROM YOUR PRODUCT’S SHORTCOMINGS
Sure, what candidate hasn’t had a beer with a bad guy? Some go to church with them. Some bank with them. Some negatives about what you sell are huge, some are small. Obama did the thing most marketers don’t do — Sell through the negatives and positives as they are one in the same.
Most sellers are fearful and blatantly avoid the negatives and shortcomings. It’s easy for them to sense your fear. They find it harder to count on you if you leave your negatives on the side of the road. No product fits all. No candidate fits all. Obama, as a smart marketer, illustrated this strategy.
BE STRATEGIC, NOT TACTICAL
In most political campaigns as big as a POTUS campaign, the leader usually stays on a strategic course. But Obama defined this as his way early on. Tactical campaigns are negative and usually try to expose the negative (as above). This time, and thanks to the added benefit of a bad economy and a failed incumbent party, Obama stayed more with positive messages about his plan vs. talking about his opponent’s negatives. Sure, he conjured them up, but it’s been proven not as much.
A seller that bad-mouth’s his competitor will fail. Often, your propsect has bought the competitor’s product before or may be a current customer. Obama said to moderate Republicans that it is ok to swing his way, and you see them doing it all over the country. The data is not out yet, but I doubt you’ll see many Kerry or Gore voters going the other way.
Topics: politics | No Comments »