1. Pitch “change” as a top-level message.
2. Claim that being a pro-change outsider is more conducive to getting things done than being an experienced insider.
3. Adopt similar policy positions to his rivals, so as to reduce the chance for differentiation there.
4. Show that he’s not “too much” of an outsider, by collecting insiders’ endorsements.
5. Claim that primary electoral success demonstrates both that he’s likely to have general election success in the fall and also that he’s likely to lead effectively once elected.

So Clinton desperately needs to differentiate herself from Obama, beneficially, more than she already has. But how?

She’s already tapped out the domestic policy vein. Everybody knows Clinton has immense expertise on health care, and that’s an advantage for her. But otherwise, she and Obama express similar priorities, propose similar programs, and similarly hope that the Republicans won’t convince voters that the Democratic numbers don’t add up.

So Clinton needs to shift the discussion as far back towards foreign policy as she can, simply to create the chance for favorable differentiation versus Obama. But this strategy has further potential advantages as well. They include:

• Defense and foreign policy are the areas where voters historically value experience – certainly more than they do on domestic policy, where since Jimmy Carter they’ve favored outsiders who will try to end business-as-usual.
• Clinton’s experience advantage over Obama is largely in the area of foreign policy, specifically in her globe-trotting as First Lady and her Senate Armed Services Committee work.
• Obama has made a strong “electability” pitch around his consistent opposition to the Iraq War. If Clinton can reestablish perceived superiority in foreign policy, she could recover that aspect of the “electability” story as well. Since McCain will obviously make national defense the cornerstone of his campaign – and by extension foreign policy too – that’s a big deal.

I think there are three specific areas of foreign policy that offer Clinton particularly good chances for competitive advantage.

1. Health care, children’s rights, etc. — emphasizing her traditional advantages and commitments.

2. Women’s rights – she can get inspirational on women’s rights, but too rarely shows it during the campaign. What’s more, it’s an issue that obviously resonates with her core (very large!) constituency.

3. Free trade.

The third item on that list may be rather surprising. So let me explain. Clinton is unlikely to win the nomination unless she out-wonks Obama in a convincing way. And free trade is an issue where he happens to stumble. In Thursday’s debate alone, he twice showed himself to be confused on trade issues. First, he told a story about a steel plant losing out to Chinese competition, and blamed it on NAFTA. Second, even though he’s negative on NAFTA, he spoke favorably of helping the Mexican economy strengthen, create better jobs, and so forth.

Clinton’s calls for a “trade time-out” show that she doesn’t want to run as pure free-trader. Even so, if she aggressively delved into trade details, she could:

• Show command of economic issues.
• Show command of international negotiation issues.
• Remind voters of her and her husband’s accomplishments.
• Remind voters of an important pro-Hispanic position (i.e., pro-NAFTA).
• Co-opt a good point Obama made – she can say he’s right to want to strengthen the Mexican economy, and she’s been long working on that.
• Point up areas where Obama is confused or panders.

This strategy has obvious risks, but I can’t think of another one more likely to succeed.

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My major points were:

• Hillary Clinton should stress her status as a woman. Yep, that sure was right.
• Clinton should tell this story by emphasizing her unique advantages versus other women’s lots in life. Hmm, maybe that one isn’t so necessary. She seems to have told it just fine her way. And my suggested strategy has some risks.
• Clinton should play defense but not offense in trying to redefine “change.” That’s pretty much what she’s doing now, and it seems to be working. Nobody’s making fun of those “Ready for change” signs waved at her rally.
• Clinton should stress her track record of achievement. This one may not be needed, and it carries some risk of making her seem wooden or not-for-change again. Even so, I think it would be wise to have an aide get the more objective story ready, in case it turns out to be needed after all.
• Clinton should continue to hammer at Obama’s lack of experience. Yep. That seems to be working.
• Clinton should push likability. That was obvious. And she has done a beautiful job of it.
• In particular, Clinton should reach out emotionally to younger women. I absolutely still believe that.
• Hillary Clinton should use Bill Clinton as a surrogate. Actually, much of her New Hampshire win is ascribed to distancing herself from the Bill Clinton legacy, so I’m less sure of this opinion than I was a day ago. Even so, as Super-Duper Tuesday approaches, it will be necessary to fan out as many teams of powerful messengers as possible. And Bill Clinton can surely lead one of the strongest such teams. Maybe it should be a Bill-plus-Chelsea Clinton team, to reduce any back-to-the-past negative reactions.

Links:

• How to market Hillary Clinton more effectively
• The women’s strategy I had thought up for Clinton
• The extent to which marketing “change” makes sense

]]> http://www.strategicmessaging.com/updating-my-marketing-prescriptions-for-the-clinton-campaign/2008/01/09/feed/ 2 http://www.strategicmessaging.com/how-hillary-clinton-regained-authenticity/2008/01/09/ http://www.strategicmessaging.com/how-hillary-clinton-regained-authenticity/2008/01/09/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:04:38 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.strategicmessaging.com/how-hillary-clinton-regained-authenticity/2008/01/09/ A huge fraction of what I do as a marketing consultant is advise on how to be credible. In consumer marketing – including politics – analysis often focuses on the closely related factor of authenticity instead. Hillary Clinton’s stunning New Hampshire win is in large part being attributed to a sudden recapture of authenticity.

I agree with that top-level analysis. Specifically, I think there were four main factors driving the sudden change in Clinton’s image. First, she started running and presenting herself as a woman. Second, she stopped overdoing it when co-opting Obama’s message of “change,” and scaled back to a level that was credible. Third, she told a very John-Edwards-like “It’s personal to me” story about why she’s campaigning, and didn’t take it to a false-sounding extreme. Fourth, she banished the Bill-Clinton-era human stage props, starting with the ex-President himself. It now seems evident that the presence of Bill Clinton and his advisors had been seen as evidence of her being both an old-school candidate and, even worse, her husband’s puppet.

Most interestingly, I’m not sure that political analysts have yet grasped how completely Clinton can play – and for now is playing — the female role. It’s not just the explicit mentions of the point, plus a few tears. It’s also the choice to show up for her big speech in idiosyncratic yet tasteful clothing, rather than yet another boring costume of suit-and-pearls. It’s the very feminine waves from the podium to individuals in the audience. Hillary Clinton’s staffers have said that she is warm and maternal to them in private. If she can tap into that streak in her public persona as well, I expect that she will indeed be the next President of the United States.

Implicit in this critique is the idea that one should test messages via polling. Now, up to a point I agree that’s a great idea. But political campaigns aren’t just about pitching to people’s preconceptions — they’re also about changing people’s minds. If Obama wins, it will only be because many people, cynical about change, started to believe it was possible. Ronald Reagan changed US politics for decades by convincing people to give up on the idea of government accomplishing much — and also by convincing them that the benefits of a vigorous-but-insecure entrepreneurial economy outweighed the drawbacks. If the Republicans upset the Democrats in November, it will probably be because they convinced many swing voters that various real or imagined threats (terrorists, immigrants, whatever) are dangerous enough to require more counter-aggression than those voters now think is called for.

The Clintons take a lot of grief for being highly poll-driven, and up to a point it’s served them well. So I imagine the critique has considerable validity. But I think it also misses a larger point — the best strategic marketing communicates what you can lead people to believe, not just what they already think.

Edit: Apparently weBranding has a capital B and also is named Tommy. This may be a more stable link to the same article.

The temptation will be to make a classic marketing error: Excessive focus. And if they fall into that trap, they will lose.

If Hillary Clinton is to win the Democratic nomination, her campaign now has to simultaneously follow all (or at least most) of the following strategies:

• Pitch her experience, positively (and in more detail than they have been).
• Attack Barack Obama’s lack of experience.
• Pitch her “change-through-accomplishment” story, even though that will accomplish little more than stemming defections from her existing base of supporters.
• Open a new conceptual front, by stressing Clinton’s role as a womens’ rights icon.
• Continue to advance on the likability front (she’s a wonderful, moving speaker, when she lets herself be).
• Unleash Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, with the dual assignment of highlighting policy differences with the opposition and – even more important – giving examples of specific Hillary Clinton accomplishments behind closed doors.

Classic women’s rights politics of the past 40 years have focused on two main issues – abortion, and blatant workplace discrimination. But Clinton avoids stressing those issues, and she’s wise to do so. Abortion is now a political issue that tends to favor conservatives, and the cruder forms of discrimination are now believed to be behind us.* Meanwhile, Clinton herself was one of the targets of a backlash against “women’s libbers,” including Rush Limbaugh’s memorable “feminazis” label.

*Nor is that belief absurd. #3 and #5 in the succession to the US Presidency are currently female, as are a much higher fraction of the senior executives I deal with in the software industry than 25 or even 10 years earlier.

Most American women today, unless they’re older and/or unusually successful, have never run into serious glass ceilings or overt discrimination. Rather, women’s continued disadvantages versus men are focused in two areas:

1. Women –- married and single alike — are expected and often want to do a disproportionate share of the work in homemaking and child-rearing. But the resulting lack of experience or extra workplace effort puts them at a career disadvantage, with all the financial and status shortfalls such disadvantages produce.
2. In a variety of subtle ways, men are often still “taken more seriously” or viewed as more “authoritative” than women. Classic anecdotal examples of this are differing reactions at a meeting when a woman or a man makes a suggestion, interrupts somebody, and/or shows a flash of temper.

Some people think these problems, to the extent they exist, are minor. But many others think they’re substantial. Indeed, many believe — or could be easily persuaded — that these (especially the first one) are the largest factors still disadvantaging women versus men in the United States today.

Hillary Clinton has spent her life experiencing and overcoming these disadvantages.* Of course, she was holding some aces. Not every woman gets to have a Yale Law Degree and a husband who is President of the United States. But using her own life story as a point of departure, Clinton should be explaining how she’s going to help other women overcome the same challenges she knows so well.

*Yes, I know she had a major legal career – certainly by Arkansas standards. And she was on the board of Wal-Mart, whose CEO told my father that she was their smartest board member. Even so, when her husband’s and her own career objectives conflicted, it’s pretty clear whose took priority. And while I doubt either parent spent a lot of time baking cookies for Chelsea in the governor’s mansion or White House, it’s a safe bet that one did more parenting than the other, and it wasn’t the male one who did more.

I’m not sure exactly what Clinton should be proposing: Child care as good as she enjoyed? A bit of assertiveness training? Beefed-up mid-career education, perhaps delivered online? Maybe she can’t propose much, and should just be giving vague, Obama-like pep talks on the subject. She’s good at those, when she lets herself be – I had a mid-20s employee who was inspired to tears by a Clinton speech in the 1990s.

But speaking as an expert on marketing and positioning, I’m convinced that this is the most powerful arrow Clinton can add to her marketing quiver — in the primaries and probably in the general election as well.

• 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? There are three main approaches that come to mind.

1. As President Bill Clinton’s wife and closest partner, Hillary Clinton is the heir to his experience, his track record, his friends, and his donors. The Clinton campaign has pursued this strategy very effectively.

2. As a woman, Hillary Clinton represents progress, opportunity, and respect for other women. Women should naturally support one of their own, and so should men to whom women’s rights are important. Although Clinton clearly started with significant benefit from this view, she seems to have taken it for granted, rather than working to strengthen it. Oprah-powered Obama is making major inroads into Clinton’s female support base.

3. As a woman, Hillary Clinton just naturally embodies virtues desirable in a leader, such as motherliness, ability to create consensus, or disinclination to use violence. Yeah, right. Clinton has about as much hope of selling that message as Margaret Thatcher did. Clinton has to look elsewhere for marketing success. The prevailing views on Clinton’s personality may be unfair, but they’re marketing reality even so.

As I just noted, Approach #1 is already in the bag, while Approach #3 is hopeless. Thus, the key to Hillary Clinton’s campaign is reinvigorating her position as an icon of women’s rights.

Fortunately for her, that’s eminently doable – and without undermining the “just as tough and authoritative as a man” image she obviously is concerned to project. The key is to focus on the women’s rights issues that are agreed to have persisted into the 21st Century, which happen to be ones that her life story makes her ideally qualified to address.  By way of contrast, her campaign shouldn’t ignore women’s issues altogether (a mistake they are pretty much making, Emily’s List fund-raising aside) — but neither should they swing all the way back to fighting the classic women’s liberation battles of the 1960s-80s.

I think so, for each of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, albeit for different reasons. From his 2004 presidential race through at least 2006, Edwards’ highest-level messaging talked about “Two Americas” (bad – a problem that needs solving) versus “One America” (good – a goal that should be accomplished). But “change” has long been a top secondary message for Edwards. As far back as February, 2006, Edwards’ main slogan was “We want to change America and together we will.”

And so Edwards is now engaging in a classic marketing technique, seen in areas as diverse as politics and information technology. He’s saying “You know that ‘change’ my rival is getting so much attention for? I’ve offered that too, all along.” And because he’s laid the groundwork, he can do that credibly.

Saying “Edwards is like Obama” does create a need to show how “Edwards is like Obama, but better.” But there’s little downside there; to succeed, Edwards had to show how he was better than Obama in any case. Presumably, Edwards thinks the “better” will come from his policy focus or, in some cases, his persona (Southern, a little older, drug-free, etc.).

What Clinton is doing, by way of contrast, is saying “You know that ‘change’ my rival is getting so much attention for? I’ve all along offered a version of ‘change’ that’s actually better than his.” A classic sign of this technique is when somebody literally disputes the definition of a marketing term, as Clinton did in Saturday’s New Hampshire debate, and is doing ever more. This isn’t like Edwards’ strategy of saying “I’m offering the same thing that you like about him; decide among us on other grounds.” Rather, Clinton is saying “I’m offering something different than he is, and it’s actually more likely to do what you want than his version is.” Clinton is asserting that her experienced nuts-and-bolts approach to getting things done will actually produce concrete change results – and that’s what voters should focus on – while she portrays Obama as a great-talking idealist who hasn’t actually accomplished very much tangible, and also may not do so in the future.

Will this wholly blunt Obama’s message of change? Of course not. It won’t even come close to siphoning off most Obama supporters. But will it help Clinton supporters stay with her, rather than defecting to rival candidates whose main selling point is the promise of “change”? Absolutely.

So co-opting Obama’s change message is a good strategy for Clinton just as it is for Edwards, albeit in different ways and for different reasons.

Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1:  Different approaches to marketing “change”
• Part 2:  Competing definitions of “change”
• Part 3:  Implicit messaging in support of “change” positioning

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. He’s probably the only candidate from either party whose most visible endorser is someone other than a white male. He has a young (under 50), Tiger Woodsian post-racial appeal. And he’s at least partially successful in differentiating himself from politics-as-usual via a “high road” of not very negative campaigning.

When it comes to positive implicit messaging in the area of change, John Edwards focuses mainly on “walking the walk” of his anti-corporate, poverty-fighting populism. He declines lobbyist and PAC money. He launched his campaign in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. He works visibly on poverty-related issues. Once again, his marketing is really about benefiting the poorer classes, and “change” is mainly a means of getting to those objectives.

Of the three leading Democratic candidates, Clinton does the least to market “change.” Her official online biography indeed emphasizes concrete accomplishment, and advocacy for change. But her website could – and should – go further. For example, some kind of chart or graph consolidating her accomplishments could convey the message much more convincingly.

Obviously, Clinton is trying hard to avoid the dread “liberal” label. Even so, the Clinton campaign could do a better job of combining messages of “change” and “prudent moderation.” Most of the Obama tactics mentioned above could and should have been copied; some would even work at this late date. And while there’s no time for this now, last year would have been a great time to sponsor some visible policy conferences, brimming with practical ideas about how to effect change. That would have been a great way to – well, to build a bridge to 21^st Century politics, but to do so in a classic Clinton policy wonkish style.

Clinton also gives a consistent messaging contradicting the change story by identifying herself with the Bill Clinton Administration. That is, after all, in the past. And it has been demonized by right- and left-wing commentators alike. Unless Hillary Clinton succeeds in establishing the Bill Clinton legacy as one of change rather than one of non-change, little else she tries in marketing the “change” concept is likely to succeed.

Perhaps most important, Hillary Clinton has a “change” trump card she is not playing at all well: Clinton is a woman, which automatically makes her one of the most unusual and differentiated front-running candidates in the history of American politics. As I’ll discuss in an upcoming post, Clinton is squandering that advantage, and missing a major opportunity to position herself as a change agent in the area of women’s rights.

When I visited BarackObama.com on Sunday, the first three slogans I saw were

• “Change we can believe in” (his overall campaign tagline)

• “New Hampshire – Our time for change has come”

• “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.” While Edwards says he and Obama offer a joint message of change, what he’s talking about can be pretty well encapsulated in three simple concepts:

• “Defeat greedy and irresponsible corporations” (which unites his trial lawyer successes with his political life)

• “Kick the bums out” (which he extends from Republicans and lobbyists to include the Clintons)

• “End the Iraq war.”

If all these things happen, the working class and poor will (Edwards implies or says) benefit. A classic example of this approach is one of the oldest and most elaborate ones I found on a web search for Edwards’ “change” messaging, namely a “Change Wal-Mart, Change America” tour in 2006.

Hillary Clinton takes a very different approach to “change.” She certainly wants to change which party occupies the White House, along with many things about US public policy. But as she couches it, change happens one successful step at a time, and she takes credit for a number of such steps over her 35 year career (including the ones that happened on her husband’s watch as governor and President). While John Edwards says what’s most important is a passionate commitment to change, Clinton wants to focus voters’ attention on the actual process of making change happen, through legislation, implementation and — when necessary – compromise. And in many ways, she would be content with change that starts by bringing the United States back to the conditions it enjoyed during the Bill Clinton Administration – healthy economy, balanced budget, relative peace, and all the rest.