The Marketing of the President 2008
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 13th, 2008 10:57 pm 
Which one of these logos is not like the other? Even with the telltale red, white, and blue of the Obama logomark, the answer is none of them.
Watching Obamamania unfold over the last few days, I have gradually come to the realization that we are living through the first Presidential campaign that is being marketed like a high-end consumer brand.
The logo itself is a good jumping off point. The typical Presidential campaign logo usually features some variant of the stars and stripes. Beyond patriotism, they have no message. They are pretty much interchangeable between Republicans and Democrats.
Obama’s logo rearranges these patriotic elements into an emblem that distills his message to the core: the hope of the sun rising [or, Republicans, is it setting?] over amber waves of grain, with the novelty of the candidate’s unusual last name reinforced in an “O”. Unlike virtually every political logo in history, this one doesn’t shy away from the glows and gradients meant to give modern corporate logos realism and depth. And like good corporate logos, this logomark can be disaggregated from the candidate’s name, in the same way that the swoosh instantly screams “Nike” or the circular logos of BMW and Mercedes spark instant associations with affluence and prestige.
This is not only the theory. It’s the gameplan. Lately, most of Obama’s signage doesn’t say Obama.
The Obama campaign is not selling Obama. It is not selling a public figure with progressive political beliefs. It is selling Hope — and Change. This is why distant historical references aside, it is deliberately difficult to find the politics in the Will.i.am video:
Most campaigns never get beyond talking issues. The sophisticated ones run on attributes in the foreground (cares about people like me) tied to issues in the background (a health care plan). The Obama effort seems to be something wholly different. The campaign and its marketing seems designed to evoke aspirational feelings that have virtually no political meaning whatsoever. This is what great brands do. They evoke feelings that have virtually zero connection to product attributes and specifications. As Alan M. Webber recently wrote in Fast Company:
Some categories may lend themselves to branding better than others, but anything is brandable. Nike, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people’s lives, and that’s our opportunity for emotional leverage. Almost any product offers an opportunity to create a frame of mind that’s unique. Almost any product can transcend the boundaries of its narrow category.
Intel is a case study in branding. I doubt that most people who own a computer know what Intel processors do, how they work, or why they are superior to their competition in any substantive way. All they know is that they want to own a computer with “Intel inside.” As a result, Andy Grove and his team sit today with a great product and a powerful brand.
And:
The common ground among companies that have built great brands is not just performance. They recognize that consumers live in an emotional world. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. Not many people sit around and discuss the benefits of encapsulated gas in the mid-sole of a basketball shoe or the advantages of the dynamic-fit system. They will talk about Michael Jordan’s winning shot against Utah the other night — and they’ll experience the dreams and the aspirations and the awe that go with that last-second, game-winning shot.
A brand reaches out with that kind of powerful connecting experience. It’s an emotional connection point that transcends the product. And transcending the product is the brand.
The end result is that great brands are fungible. They can be all things to all people. The branding approach liberates Obama to be the candidate of the MoveOn wing and of national unity. That’s not a criticism. It is a compliment. Now we’ll see if it stands up in the land beyond the energized core, in the land of 50% plus one nationally, where evangelism alone is not enough.
Obama literalists may read back chapter and verse on his policy initiatives, but let’s be real here. Those aren’t the reasons for his success. Morover, they were never intended to be the underpinnings of the Obama candidacy. Millions of “HOPE” and “CHANGE” placards later, I think that’s fairly clear.
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Obama is a black first term Senator, taking on an experienced candidate who has the entire establishment behind her and a formiddable campaign strategist & publicist (the 42nd President).
The fact that he is winning shows just how brilliant the campaign has been. Campaign strategists will be analysing it for years to come.
However I would add that if the candidate hadn’t been up to it, no amount of branding would have saved him. He has been amazing on the stump, and on TV, and he will represent quite a challenge in November. If he gets that far…
If Joe McGinniss from 1968 is still alive he ought to be reached for comment. This is way beyond the Madison Avenue imagery that created the “New Nixon”. I fear after the inaugural Obama’s folks will be forced to roll out the
“New Barack” once version 1.0 proves unable to the task.
Very good post, but one nit-pick from this Econ prof- “The end result is that great brands are fungible. They can be all things to all people.”
You seem to be misusing the word fungible-”being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.”
I just got done covering perfect competition in my Managerial Econ class, so that was fresh in the memory. A fungible product is one that is un-differentiated, like milk or gasoline; you can’t charge extra for something that is the same as other products.
Great brands might be flexible, but by definition, they aren’t fungible, for a fungible product resists branding.
A presidential campaign is being run like a marketing campaign? I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you. Where exactly have you been the last 50 years?
Oh, this marketing is different from previous campaigns? Maybe. Marketing as a whole evolves. Presidential marketing campaigns use the current state of the art.
I just hope Obama is better than the Blair Witch Project.
The logo is interesting and seems like a new wrinkle, along with the signs that say “hope” and “change” but not the candidate’s name– Obama has even joked about those, saying, “people don’t even know who they’re voting for, but it makes them feel good,” which is about as pure a distillation of your argument as I can imagine.
That said, this is not exactly new: campaigns, as the previous responder noted, have been using marketing techniques for ages, and presidential races are frequently (usually?) about things other than policy.
Two other points:
1) the will.i.am video was not made by the campaign. I’m not sure how significant that is, but it should be noted when referring to a “gameplan.”
2) one could argue that Obama would be unable to run the campaign he’s running if he hadn’t opposed the Iraq War– which was, of course, a policy position.
From PJ
“2) one could argue that Obama would be unable to run the campaign he’s running if he hadn’t opposed the Iraq War– which was, of course, a policy position.”
I’ll see you and raise. Obama would not be running unless he opposed the Iraq war AND the leading candidates (Clinton and Edwards) supported the invasion. Change either of these three conditions and he would not have entered the 2008 race. Iraq was the initial wedge that allowed him to get into the race this cycle.
Or, perhaps, he didn’t want to emphasize his Muslim name? I’m not saying that’s the sole reason for the “O”, “Hope,” and “Change” signs, but I think it’s a fairly important one, don’t you think?
It seems to me that Obama, the brand, gains much of its power from Obama, the man. As an experiment, imagine any other candidate running Obama’s campaign, using the same messages, pushing the same narratives. Many politicians are simply too partisan, or not intellectually honest enough, to make such a campaign seem authentic.
It is true that the message of the Obama campaign has no real connection to his stance on the issues. But issues are rarely connected to the fortunes of any campaign. People vote for images, not position statements, and the chief value of an issue debate is to imply that a candidate has values in common with voters on the same side of the debate. Obama has positions that are worthy of both support and criticism, and his campaign advances those positions to avoid charges that Obama is an empty suit… but ultimately, voters need confidence in the candidate, and if the Obama campaign thinks this is more efficiently done by emphasizing the man rather than the issues, it’s probably because Obama is a good candidate and his campaign is very smart.
I disagree that “the answer is none of them.” On purely graphic design grounds, stripped of all cultural knowledge they are pretty similar. But to most viewers part of the power of the first three symbols is that they are associated with decades of high-quality products. The last is not.
The common ground among companies that have built great brands is not just performance….
Notice the “not just.” Performance is not sufficient, but it is necessary.
In the most politically prescient (and reviled) book of the 20th Century, in 1968 Edward Banfield wrote in “The Unheavenly City”:
“Looking toward the future, it is impossible not to be apprehensive. The frightening fact is that large numbers of persons are being rapidly assimilated to the upper classes and are coming to have incomes–time as well as money–that permit them to indulge their taste for “service” and doing good in political action. Television [and I suppose today, the Internet as well], even more than the newspapers, tends to turn the discussion of public policy issues into a branch of the mass entertainment industry. Doing good is become–has already become–a growth industry, like the other forms of mass entertainment, while righteous indignation and uncompromising allegiance to principle are become THE motives of political commitment. This is the way it is in the affluent, middle-class society. How will it be in the super-affluent, upper-middle-class one?”
We now know the answer: Patrick has provided it for us.
[…] “Obama literalists may read back chapter and verse on his policy initiatives, but let’s be real here. Those aren’t the reasons for his success. Morover, they were never intended to be the underpinnings of the Obama candidacy. Millions of ‘HOPE’ and ‘CHANGE’ placards later, I think that’s fairly clear.” Share this post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
[…] Finally, about those specifics: it may upset Sen. McCain that Obama talks in vagaries, but he needs to realize that he’s not running against a politician so much as a brand name. As Patrick Ruffini observed in an excellent post: Most campaigns never get beyond talking issues. The sophisticated ones run on attributes in the foreground (cares about people like me) tied to issues in the background (a health care plan). The Obama effort seems to be something wholly different. The campaign and its marketing seems designed to evoke aspirational feelings that have virtually no political meaning whatsoever. This is what great brands do. They evoke feelings that have virtually zero connection to product attributes and specifications. … [italics in original] […]
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[…] Yesterday, Barack Obama’s audacious brand continues to triumph. Marketed with dazzling skill to the high end consumer and the conformist college-age Millennial, it enables Obama to make a much broader appeal as a unifying force, in spite of his narrow policy views. He’s the iPhone of politics, sleek, sexy, and pop culture, and even as only 2.5 percent of the market, last year, everyone – even the nonpolitical – know the brand instantly. As Patrick Ruffini noted in his own analysis of Obama: The Brand – “The end result is that great brands are fungible. They can be all things to all people. The branding approach liberates Obama to be the candidate of the MoveOn wing and of national unity. That’s not a criticism. It is a compliment.” […]
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[…] “I have gradually come to the realization that we are living through the first Presidential campaign that is being marketed like a high-end consumer brand.” […]