Everyone should study their trade of choice. I am a marketer. Therefore, I am prone to follow the latest trends and triumphs in the world of marketing. There are tons of brands and companies to learn from. But marketing reaches well beyond the business world.
Regardless of your political stripe, the current presidential election cycle (all 20 months of it) has taught us much about marketing.
First off, we saw an unknown product with a strange name become an industry leader in four short years. The Presidential Industry is known for heavily entrenched brands (Clinton, Bush, Kennedy, Roosevelt) making this feat all the more monumental.
President-elect Barack Obama's rise from DNC keynote speaker to President closely resembles Apple's entrance and lighting quick domination of the smartphone market.
Obama's Campaign and Apple's iPhone both offered positions of differentiation that competition attempted to copy. For iPhone it was the touchscreen and App Store. For Obama it was his promise of change and hope. In the end, the first to market won in both cases.
Secondly, Obama's geek squad intimately understood the emerging power of social media. They were able to outshine McCain on every social media platform known to man.
But any marketer will tell you that millions of Facebook fans, YouTube views, and Diggs are useless if you aren't able to turn those clicks into real world actions.
For the first time in politics, we saw the perfect marriage of social marketing and community organizing. Obamaniacs could log into my.barackobama.com and pull up lists of registered Democrats and Independents to call, neighborhood doors to knock on, and offices to volunteer at.
Brilliant. Consumer to consumer marketing at it's finest. These supporters were marketing Brand Obama on their own dime and out of their own accord.
There's no denying that Obama had the better organized, more mobilized, energetic tribe of supporters. But a large tribe of passionate people need a powerful idea to unite around.
Enter branding 101. Every great brand needs a great story. "Change We Can Believe In." It was more than just a campaign slogan, it was a mission statement.
Barack Obama's biography (brand identity) provided the classic narrative of victory over adversity. A movement of Change and Hope was born and "Yes We Can" became their rallying cry.
To further solidify this position of Change, President-elect Obama just launched Change.gov. It's become abundantly clear to me, we have not only elected our first black president. This nation just elected our first President 2.0.
Future presidential hopefuls, I'm putting you all on alert. The game has changed. The bar has been more than raised, it's been reinvented. Why not sit out 2012, and start planning for 2016?
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