How Hillary Clinton could be more effectively marketed
The essence of strategic marketing and positioning is:
- Explain what’s unique about your product.
- Explain why people should care.
Let’s apply that framework to Hillary Clinton.
The three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination are all smart, fairly liberal lawyers, each with 3-7 years of experience serving in the US Senate. Not a lot of difference there. Clearly, then, the most unique aspects to Hillary Clinton as a candidate are:
- She’s female.
- She’s Bill Clinton’s wife.
How could those traits be marketed to best advantage? Read more
| Categories: Campaign 2008, Companies, products, and candidates, Hillary Clinton, Political marketing | 1 Comment |
Marketing change in the Democratic primaries, Part 4 – is it a wise strategy?
As I’ve discussed in three prior posts, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign truly revolves around a message of “change.” This has obviously been a successful strategy for him. So does that mean his rivals are right to try to blur his message or steal his thunder?
I think so, for each of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, albeit for different reasons. Read more
| Categories: "Change", Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Political marketing | 1 Comment |
Marketing change in the Democratic Primaries, Part 3 – implicit messaging
When discussing strategic messaging, it is often useful to draw a distinction between explicit messaging (essentially, what’s said outright, in words) and implicit messaging (everything else). I outlined the explicit change messages of Senators Clinton, Obama, and Edwards in a previous post. Now I’d like to highlight some of their (presumably conscious) implicit messaging that supports – or contradicts – their explicit claims.
Again, Obama leads the way. He at least creates the appearance of using a variety of modern internet technologies to communicate with his supporters, and ties this into a pledge to use technology to make government more transparent and responsive to its citizens. The photo section of BarackObama.com focuses on showing him with a broad range of “ordinary” people. Read more
| Categories: "Change", Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Political marketing | 2 Comments |
Marketing change in the Democratic Primaries, Part 2 – competing definitions
Barack Obama is running almost purely as the candidate of change, and has been for his whole political career. Accordingly, he has the most complex, multi-faceted, and well-developed change message of any major candidate in either party, even ahead of libertarian/survivalist Republican Ron Paul.
When I visited BarackObama.com on Sunday, the first three slogans I saw were
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“Change we can believe in” (his overall campaign tagline)
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“New Hampshire – Our time for change has come”
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“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
And it continues from there. Obama has been active in various return-the-government-to-the-people kinds of issues – campaign finance reform, a search engine of government information (which he presented on the debate as a big deal), and so on. His “Let’s be united, not divided” message is couched in terms of change. His recent book title “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” is full of words with connotations of change. He calls himself a “progressive.” He even compares himself to Martin Luther King. And his campaign hardly shies away from the suggestion that Obama’s very skin color would, if he were elected, represent dramatic change.
John Edwards’ message is similar, but at its core he’s pushing a narrower, classically populist concept of “change.” Read more
| Categories: "Change", Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Political marketing | 1 Comment |
Marketing change in the Democratic Primaries, Part 1 — different approaches
At Saturday’s New Hampshire debate among four Democratic contenders – Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, and John Edwards – the central theme was change. All the Democratic candidates agreed on four basic concepts:
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Change from the Bush Administration is paramount.
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Change has something to do with helping the poor, the working class, and children.
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Change in Iraq policy – specifically, bringing US troops home from Iraq – is mandatory.
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Change in health care insurance is important.
No surprises so far – the first three are obvious Democratic positions, and the fourth has been a major Democratic theme since early in the Bill Clinton Administration.
But the debate also highlighted considerable disagreement and competition to further define what “change” entails. Read more
| Categories: "Change", Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Political marketing | 1 Comment |
The look and feel of this blog will change rapidly
We’re having a major blog redesign soon, which will be reflected in this new one as well the others. In the mean time, we may use this one to experiment a bit.
| Categories: About this blog | Leave a Comment |
What I hope to do in this blog
I make my living in a number of ways, all related to technology or to the technology business. I write. I give speeches. And I consult, to technology vendors, users, and investors alike. What this all boils down to is two areas of expertise:
- I know a lot about technology, especially software used by large enterprises.
- I have a lot of insight about business strategy, especially the marketing and positioning of complex products.
I already write several blogs about technology, such as DBMS2 (database and analytic technology, mainly), Text Technologies (text mining, search, and some general internet stuff), and the Monash Report (everything else). This, however, is going to be the primary blog in which I write about strategic marketing.
I will start by focusing on two specific subjects for marketing — software products and political candidates. That may seem like an odd juxtaposition, but they actually have a great deal in common. Never mind the new cliches about marketing being a “conversation” — in politics and enterprise technology alike, marketing is a debate. Read more
| Categories: About this blog | 2 Comments |