Marketing Memos

To avoid partisan potshots, I disclose in advance that I am neither a Republican nor Democrat, nor could I be classified as a liberal or conservative. Thus my following analysis is one purely aimed at examining how brands work in presidential politics.

In other words, don’t bother commenting if the analysis annoys your personal partisan political peccadilloes. This is about marketing and not the mayhem of presidential elections.

Much has been written in the last year about the destruction of the Republican “brand”. A brand — be it for a PC, politician, or even a PC politician — is what the market (voters) think and feel about the product. Yes, politicians and parties are products that can be bought though the price is too high for the average consumer/voter.

Many Republicans felt their party no longer had a brand. Many core Republican/conservative policies appear to have been abandoned by the Bush administration. Translate this into a technology product that had for many years delivered on the core features and functions it promised to provide. Then say that the new release of the product had massive bugs that the vendor did not fix that diminished or eliminated the usefulness of those features. Some GOP members viewed their party as Windows XP users view Vista - failing to faithfully deliver fundamental value.

This is where belief systems enter into marketing. People often believe things about a brand that are not true. But when faced with continuing failure to deliver on a branded value proposition, people quit believing in the brand. In this election cycle we see two brand battles raging. The GOP had lost its brand and is now actively redefining/reclaiming it.

Let’s look at each starting with the Democrats. Obama — like any candidate — needs to keep the trust of all classes of people. He set forth a brand which spoke broadly and elicited an amazing amount of response for a candidate with relatively little history. Bowling badly or making three-point buckets spoke well to the working classes who hold the keys to certain battleground states. But Obama’s “guns and religion” statement while raising funds in a San Francisco “Billionaire Row” mansion shattered that believability and damaged his brand value in those markets. Blue collar and Blue Dog Democrats indicate they may sit out this election based on brand misalignment. His selection of Biden did nothing to help regain those voters.

McCain’s team managed to something that any marketing strategist would love to achieve. They managed to find a brand and value proposition that was broadly popular, that matched the existing brand essence of the candidate, and located a running mate who brought additional authenticity (real or imagined) to the new brand. In other words, GOP marketing strategists scored a trifecta on brand management.

Let’s circle back to the Silicon Strategies Marketing copyrighted definition of a brand: a brand is what the market thinks and feels about your product. McCain had for years developed a reputation as both a maverick and a reformer. In fact the media made so much of this McCain value proposition that it became “knowledge” instead of “belief” among most Americans. The market of voters thus “thought” McCain to be a reformer. Adding Palin to the ticket — exploiting her highly personal “small town, common sense” brand — emotionally reinforced the ticket’s reformer brand. GOP strategist realigned the original “small government” GOP brand to the existing McCain/Palin brands. Then they used this to co-opt Obama’s “change” brand, simultaneously strengthening the GOP brand and weakening the Obama brand.

Polls indicate the plan worked very well.

Obama can only counter this in two ways:

• Try to destroy the McCain brand, which can only be done through negative attacks. This is a bad move because Obama based much of his brand on being a nice guy, rising above “politics as usual”. Going negative would be to destroy his own brand.
• Create a more authentic Obama brand: This is tough because many of the mistakes his campaign made (hijacking the presidential seal, mass rallies in Berlin, the “guns and religion” sound bite) has reduced the public perception that Obama is “authentic”. Even San Francisco’s eccentric former Mayor Willie Brown — a Democrat to the end — thinks “Obama still appears overscripted. Too perfect.“

Here are the basic branding lessons to learn from this year’s election cycle:

1. Be faithful to your brand: The Republican’s learned the hard way that the moment you stop “walking the walk” buyers/voters vanish. The GOP got lucky in finding a new brand that worked in the 11th hour.
2. Do not invent a brand that is not authentic: Obama learned that you cannot talk “small town” in Scranton then disrespect “small town” in San Francisco.
3. Represent your brand at every touch point: You receptionist should reinforce your brand. McCain picked a running mate that reinforced his.

Bookmark to:

I recently read an interview with Chunka Mui, a fellow with the interesting job of studying business failure. Mui’s book Billion Dollar Lessons may become the next management “must read”.

His basic premise is that execution is irrelevant if your strategy is not good. Indeed he notes quite accurately:

If you have a plan that’s fatally flawed, perfect execution can get you into more trouble because you dig yourself in deeper and faster.

This explains 99% of the dot-com bust.

My analogy to Mui’s point would be that of driving. If you do not know where you are going, stomping on the accelerator peddle just sends you spiraling off a cliff quickly. This is one of the many reasons we focus on marketing strategy at Silicon Strategies. Marketing is hard work and during execution it can be very expensive. It is worth every company’s time (even start-ups) to invest in marketing up-front and avoid the cliffs.

All that having been said, any smart CEO must accept the fact that sometimes the best thought-out strategy is wrong. Some things are overlooked, some seemingly innocuous assumptions end up being world-class dumb and even market measurements (surveys, et al) can be misleading.

This is where agility during execution is important especially in fast moving technology markets. If measures show that goals are not being met, either the execution is poor or the strategy was wrong. When this happens have a good look at execution and seek obvious failings.

If none are found, take everyone who is emotionally wed to the strategy and lock them in a closet.

Then have everyone else and review all the assumptions and measurements that lead to the strategy and see if anything is (now) obviously incorrect. Absent that, examine the basic demand assumptions and business model. You will have found something wrong with the marketing strategy and can fix it … if you are brave.

Bookmark to:

Ever since I saw the first cell phone with built-in GPS, I knew this would be a hot market for applications.

It is nice to have confirmation.

In their efforts to make Android/G-Phone an instant market hit, Google ran a contest awarding a quarter of a million dollars to people who wrote cool applications for their mobile platform. Ten teams earned $275,000 each for the software they developed … and each application used GPS in some way.

Rephrased: Google gave $2.8 million dollars only to people who developed GPS-aware apps.

I can’t comment on any of the winners having not seen their products first hand, but the market validation at play here is extraordinary. GPS combined with wireless data networks and cheep server hosting has created an entirely new and viable market. The ability to tie people on the move with anything that enhances their ability to be on the move is a natural fit. It eases life away from home (have a cab sent to wherever the hell I’m standing), makes life at the moment more spontaneous and thus enjoyable (I’m jonesing for some Thai food — were is the nearest restaurant) and can make socializing more effective (Google says there is a club with a lot of 20-30 year old women right around the corner).

Like the Internet before it and the mobile handset market today, the location-based market is wide open. The cost to develop and support such applications is cheaper than nearly any point in history, aside from the perpetual problem caused by supporting a huge variety of different handsets (a worry that Silicon Strategies Marketing client DeviceAnywhere handles quite nicely). It is a market primed for the next new reality.

I wish I had the gumption to launch another start-up. This is the market and now is the time.

Bookmark to:

If you never had the chance to see Mojo Nixon perform before he retired, then you missed a spectacle. Some claim Mojo was unsavory. Others derided him as the psychobilly messiah. More than a few left his shows laughing in disgust. But he was cool. And one thing he knew was that you can’t buy cool.

Which is exactly what Microsoft is attempting to do, which is pretty uncool.

I’ll wait to see what disaster the unholy union of Steve Balmer, Jerry Seinfeld and $300,000,000 creates. The stated intent of Microsoft’s next advertising campaign is to blunt the market mind-share created by Apple’s highly viral Mac vs. PC advertising and provide Vista with more any positive brand image.

$300,000,000 may not be enough.

A central tenet of branding is authenticity. When a company creates a brand it must have some close resemblance to reality or at very least not utterly violate the markets perception. Customers can detect pure hype and will create a maelstrom of negative buzz when they do.

Let’s be blunt - Windows may be dominant, but it ain’t cool, hip or groovy. Vista, doubly so. Any attempt to out cool Apple is doomed to failure.

Press reports indicate that Microsoft will instead attempt to extend their “Windows, Not Walls” branding. Cutesy slogans aside, they will attempt to convince buyers that Vista opens users to more uses and activities.

Which goes against what is happening in the market.

Desktop operating systems are becoming increasing irrelevant to consumers who now use their computers (Macs, PCs, Linux-netbooks, cell phones, etc.) primarily to access the net. Operating systems are the support layer and not the source of usefulness and consumer joy. Making Vista cool when more and more of consumer time is spent with YouTube and JibJab misses customer focus and thus creates a false brand.

In an earlier memo I suggested that instead of investing in Vista, Microsoft should have focused on integrating the net as part of the desktop experience — intimately wedding desktop functionality to cloud content. I know of nothing in Vista that expands that horizon. If such features are hidden in Vista, then having Seinfeld out them would be a good first step - though they could have had me do a better job for a good deal less than Seinfeld’s $10M fee.

Years ago Silicon Strategies Marketing codified the definition of branding:

Branding is making the market think and feel what you want them to think and feel about your products

But there are limits to what you can make people think or feel. Try making a mother hate her baby or force people to believe that pizza tastes bad. Making people feel that Windows is cool or think that Vista isn’t a resource hog is pushing far beyond the market’s experience and mindset. Microsoft needs baby steps in resurrecting Vista’s image. They need to lead the trend for using the net. They need to make the operating system a relevant partner to the electronically integrated world.

That would be cool.

Bookmark to:

I will be speaking at the Software Business 2008 conference at the end of October.

My talk is on software marketing during difficult economic times and I am scheduled to speak on October 30th at 1:30. I will discuss the current economic trends, what we learned from recession marketing after the tech bubble burst in 2000, and the one key psychological factor in enterprises that you must know in order to sell during recessions.

The link and banner below will take you to the conference web site. I hope to see you there.

http://www.softwarebusinessonline.com/sb_conf08_index.php

Bookmark to: