Drill of History for SPMB Unsoed
>> Tuesday, February 15, 2011
In November 1989 I thought was living through one of history's defining moments. I was in Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down and memories of that night will be with me forever. Like the Berlin Wall coming down when JFK was assassinated, or when Princess Diana died, everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news.
Yesterday history was made again. It came at the end of what must be the most expensive marketing campaign the world has ever seen and resulted in the election of Barack Obama as the US President elect. The campaign lasted eighteen months and if we examine it we can learn a lot about marketing, not only of an election , but also how to market your product or service.
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Leading up to that event over $1500million was spent by those striving for, what is arguably, the most powerful job on the planet.
We ended with two 'products' with substantially different features and benefits... two potential Presidents and two potential Vice Presidents ..... and despite all the money spent we will remember just a few sound bites, photographs and quotes.
For me the photographs of Sarah Palin with a gun delivered a powerful message. If you are part of the gun lobby then the image was positive; but if you are anti-gun this is the image that lost the Republicans your vote.
Photographs are powerful and are a bit like a first impression - they create a powerful emotion that it takes a lot to dispel.
So what's the lesson here? Be very careful of the images you use in your literature, on your website and elsewhere. For part of my career I was attached to the Cabinet Office in London. Guess what; this is what politicians do all the time. They pose for photographs. Wise politicians however avoid certain photo "opportunities". No politician, not even an agricultural minister, wants to be photographed with a pig! Photos like this have a habit of appearing again years later when a scandal brews and headlines like "Snouts in the trough", "And pigs might fly" etc will surely follow.
Look not only at the content in their existing context but how unscrupulous people might twist them in future.
Over the years the Republican Party has built a reputation for clever direct mail tactics. They have used them to raise funds far more efficiently than the Democrats. This time the tables turned. The Democrats worked at building a permission based email list - exactly as I often suggest you do with autoresponders on your website. They tracked who opened their emails, when they did so and, more importantly, who responded with donations. And they milked the list for all it was worth.
Barack Obama had another challenge. He knew that the traditional Democratic voter wouldn't be sufficient to get him elected (it had failed John Kerry). So he too set out to find new voters (i.e. customers) and included not only black voters but also the young, those that had never registered before, war veterans and many more. Finding new customers always a time consuming, expensive and often risky exercise. But he had plenty of money rolling in from his email campaigns.
He also managed to engage Word of Mouth. For example, one local barber in North Carolina, kept telling his customers that the time for change has come and they should vote Obama. Every time they came in he badgered them to vote and he made sure those not registered got registered and voted for the first time in their life. Obama recognised his weakness as being his relative inexperience as a politician compared with McCain. So he called in Joe Biden of Delaware. Biden is one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. Senate and balanced Obama's weakness.
McCain on the other hand chose Sarah Palin. His rationale was to embrace the Bush supporter. He was hoping for a side effect, which was to attract Hillary Clinton's previous supporters and to build his voter base.
If it had worked, it would have been the masterstroke that landed the Presidency. In McCain's case, it failed dismally.
His decision cost him the economically minded middle voter who then went to Obama.
The lesson for the rest of us is that trying to win new customers is risky. It can work but your customers have to be sure of your product and the voters didn't like the McCain/Palin product.
McCain was acclaimed as delivering in the televised head to head meetings with Obama; but to my mind Obama is a great orator and McCain couldn't match him. People follow great orators.
And in Sarah Palin the voters didn't see a President in waiting; ready to step into the Presidents shoes if anything happened to him.
Of course in your business you don't need to be a great orator. But you do need to be a great communicator; able to communicate the benefits of your product or service through your website, adverts, signage, customer service etc. So ask yourself does your business run on autopilot when you are not there? Does your marketing keep working? Yours may not be that sort of business but the lesson is to communicate well and serve your customer seamlessly at all times.
There was one other feature of this election that plagues politicians. When their backs are against the wall they rubbish the opposition. Since political campaigns have been televised voter turnout has dropped across the globe. People have become disenchanted the verbal attacks. In the UK Prime Minister Questions have become an excuse for gutter tactics and the same happened in the US elections. It has to be said that voter turnout was better than previous recent elections but voters didn't like the Republican's attacks on Obama.
The lesson here is not to knock the opposition with your marketing. Show the benefits of your product or service and leave rubbishing your competitors to those with no benefits to sell.
This election was a great lesson in marketing and we can all learn a lot from it.
Yesterday history was made again. It came at the end of what must be the most expensive marketing campaign the world has ever seen and resulted in the election of Barack Obama as the US President elect. The campaign lasted eighteen months and if we examine it we can learn a lot about marketing, not only of an election , but also how to market your product or service.
Download Drill of History University Exam - SPMB Unsoed
Download Questions
Download Solutions
Leading up to that event over $1500million was spent by those striving for, what is arguably, the most powerful job on the planet.
We ended with two 'products' with substantially different features and benefits... two potential Presidents and two potential Vice Presidents ..... and despite all the money spent we will remember just a few sound bites, photographs and quotes.
For me the photographs of Sarah Palin with a gun delivered a powerful message. If you are part of the gun lobby then the image was positive; but if you are anti-gun this is the image that lost the Republicans your vote.
Photographs are powerful and are a bit like a first impression - they create a powerful emotion that it takes a lot to dispel.
So what's the lesson here? Be very careful of the images you use in your literature, on your website and elsewhere. For part of my career I was attached to the Cabinet Office in London. Guess what; this is what politicians do all the time. They pose for photographs. Wise politicians however avoid certain photo "opportunities". No politician, not even an agricultural minister, wants to be photographed with a pig! Photos like this have a habit of appearing again years later when a scandal brews and headlines like "Snouts in the trough", "And pigs might fly" etc will surely follow.
Look not only at the content in their existing context but how unscrupulous people might twist them in future.
Over the years the Republican Party has built a reputation for clever direct mail tactics. They have used them to raise funds far more efficiently than the Democrats. This time the tables turned. The Democrats worked at building a permission based email list - exactly as I often suggest you do with autoresponders on your website. They tracked who opened their emails, when they did so and, more importantly, who responded with donations. And they milked the list for all it was worth.
Barack Obama had another challenge. He knew that the traditional Democratic voter wouldn't be sufficient to get him elected (it had failed John Kerry). So he too set out to find new voters (i.e. customers) and included not only black voters but also the young, those that had never registered before, war veterans and many more. Finding new customers always a time consuming, expensive and often risky exercise. But he had plenty of money rolling in from his email campaigns.
He also managed to engage Word of Mouth. For example, one local barber in North Carolina, kept telling his customers that the time for change has come and they should vote Obama. Every time they came in he badgered them to vote and he made sure those not registered got registered and voted for the first time in their life. Obama recognised his weakness as being his relative inexperience as a politician compared with McCain. So he called in Joe Biden of Delaware. Biden is one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. Senate and balanced Obama's weakness.
McCain on the other hand chose Sarah Palin. His rationale was to embrace the Bush supporter. He was hoping for a side effect, which was to attract Hillary Clinton's previous supporters and to build his voter base.
If it had worked, it would have been the masterstroke that landed the Presidency. In McCain's case, it failed dismally.
His decision cost him the economically minded middle voter who then went to Obama.
The lesson for the rest of us is that trying to win new customers is risky. It can work but your customers have to be sure of your product and the voters didn't like the McCain/Palin product.
McCain was acclaimed as delivering in the televised head to head meetings with Obama; but to my mind Obama is a great orator and McCain couldn't match him. People follow great orators.
And in Sarah Palin the voters didn't see a President in waiting; ready to step into the Presidents shoes if anything happened to him.
Of course in your business you don't need to be a great orator. But you do need to be a great communicator; able to communicate the benefits of your product or service through your website, adverts, signage, customer service etc. So ask yourself does your business run on autopilot when you are not there? Does your marketing keep working? Yours may not be that sort of business but the lesson is to communicate well and serve your customer seamlessly at all times.
There was one other feature of this election that plagues politicians. When their backs are against the wall they rubbish the opposition. Since political campaigns have been televised voter turnout has dropped across the globe. People have become disenchanted the verbal attacks. In the UK Prime Minister Questions have become an excuse for gutter tactics and the same happened in the US elections. It has to be said that voter turnout was better than previous recent elections but voters didn't like the Republican's attacks on Obama.
The lesson here is not to knock the opposition with your marketing. Show the benefits of your product or service and leave rubbishing your competitors to those with no benefits to sell.
This election was a great lesson in marketing and we can all learn a lot from it.
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