president barack obama : the winning marketing strategies. Strategy No. 1 : Change

last october 15, 2008, we posted in WAWAM! our prediction that barack obama will win the US presidential election on the strength of a brilliant marketing effort and a marketing blunder of the mccain campaign.

(read in full here : http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/2008/10/barack-obama-wins-us-presidential.html)

we also said that the point of no return will most likely occur right after the 3rd debate. our analysis of the 3rd debate was that mccain was unable to rock our world. mccain's task was to not only to do well in that debate but to do so well that he needs to reverse the trend to his favor. while he did well than the first 2 debates, mccain unfortunately did not do well enough to reverse the trend that was not in his favor.

we also posted on WAWAM! a few factors that has the power to reverse the trend of an obama win. since that time, none of the factors listed occurred, thus we concluded, also posted in WAWAM! that obama is on track to win in this election.

(read in full all posts on barack obama here : http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/search/label/barack%20obama)

just about 8 days before the election, we are posting here what we think were the core marketing strategies that both campaigns employed that resulted to obama winning the presidency and mccain losing it.

WAWAM! will be looking at exactly the same things that a political analyst or strategist will be looking at in analyzing the campaigns. but WAWAM! will look it at from the eyes of a marketing and advertising man. these strategies and analysis can be written into marketing plans of brands and it will make sense and most likely work.

we will be posting this in a series.

1. Consistent, consumer-meaningful message from start to finish : Change. the obama campaign is on the "time to change" theme from the very beginning, on day 1, as early as the democratic primaries. the core message was, enough of the 8 years of the bush-led republican years of managing the country be that the iraq war across other issues, specially on the US economy. consistency in message across time allows the audience to focus and the candidate to build consensus. marketing tells us a brand needs to stand for something and the obama campaign has done a most admirable job at standing for "change". it is not only consistency that is important ans where the obama campaign has succeeded, it is also in relevance or in WAWAM! marketing term - "consumer-meaningful". being consumer-meaningful and consistency are both required to be there to succeed, they are like twins where having only one in the end will not amount to anything. while both are critical, finding the right message that is consumer-meaningful is a much more difficult task. it is here where most campaigns and brands fail at. you can be consistent but if you do not have the right message, the effort will not amount to anything. consistently delivering the weak message is very much like garbage in-garbage out, repeated many times over.

at the start of the primaries, bush ratings were on all time lows and on a continuous decline. the key issue at the time was the iraq war and most specifically on the solutions that america was supposed to apply to it. more and more americans were increasingly withdrawing their support on the iraq war and they felt the end game solutions were unclear at best to wrong at worst.

then as of late the failing US economy has been the key focus. and that while largely unpredicted by the obama campaign (no one else was able to predict it), it fell quite nicely, very snugly into the "change" theme and core strategy.

we can argue that the obama campaign was very lucky that the US economy failed towards the last months of the presidential campaign and towards the very last part when nothing can be done to reverse the trend given the short period of time.

with american voters disappointed with bush on the iraq war at the beginning of the primaries the US economy failing became a double whammy to mccain. add to that the fact that obama stands to be the first black president in the history of the US, the meaning of "change" takes on a very different, almost cosmic meaning. when obama wins, it will be a real "change" in the US in very many ways, in very many aspects of american life and most specially the american psyche.