obama's wining marketing strategies, strategy # 3 : down-home presence

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.


this is part 3 of a series and we have added point number 3 here. read parts 1 & 2 here : http://the-wawam-file.blogspot.com/search/label/Obama%20Winning%20Marketing%20Strategy

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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.
2. High-ground brand character that was strongly defended, upheld and consistently applied across all aspects of the campaign, again from the very start, during the primaries to the end till the presidential contest. The most telling application of this high-ground brand character is the stubborn refusal to do negative campaigning. Not only did the campaign refuse to do negative campaigning, it called out the Mccain campaign each time their opponent did negative campaigns.

3. Down-home presence - the Obama campaign probably has the most extensive organization and system at getting to very specific voters right in their homes. This also requires very sharp and specific targeting of the voters. If this was a consumer brand, we will call this superior down-scale distribution where the brand is made available and sold in the smallest types of retail outlets, retail stores right beside the homes of consumers. It's a grass-roots organization where many face-to-face interaction occurred and this was done not only once, but in many states, specially the battleground states, it occurred a few times during the election campaign period. Face-to-face selling, specially by a neighbor or a friend is much more compelling and and excellent follow up to the dominant media campaign the Obama campaign ran. For consumer brands, poor or weak distribution usually spells failure.

The Obama's down-home organization is to die for. Their organization was a magnet for large scale number of volunteers, many of them involved in such a campaign for the first time. And these army of volunteers reached not only the Democratic faithful but first time voters, young voters and previously uninvolved voters. The Obama campaign knew it was a strength that they have asked voters to vote early and it worked. Data from many states show that a much higher percentage of democrats voter early versus republicans, in many places 2 is to 1 in ratio.

Of course this kind of strategy is something you can do when you have a lot of funds to execute it. And the Obama campaign has no problems at all with funds. This campaign will most likely come down as one of the richest in US presidential election history.

memo to The Philippine Star : top things to do to take leadership away from the Philippine Daily Inquirer

the philippine daily inquirer (PDI) has been releasing print ads (above) of various sizes touting the latest ac nielsen media index results wher it placed PDI's readership at leadership position at 48%.

something shocked me when i first saw that ad of PDI - it's not that PDI is the readership leader, that was expected and common knowledge, what shocked me was the rating of The Philippine Star (PS) where it scored 41%, damn close to PDI's readership. PDI used to enjoy a wider margin, did not realize the ratings have come so close, a 7 pts spread is within spitting distance.

so given this spitting distance, i thought i would write a memo to PS the objective of which is to give them some ideas on how they can take leadership away from PDI. here are some points to consider:

• the very first thing i would do is to look at the DISTRIBUTION numbers and look for areas of improvements. this i think will yield the most incremental readership for PS. i would do a thorough study of the PS distribution system and benchmark it against PDI. and i would be very thorough about it. i would literally look at EVERY distribution point and discover where the weaknesses are and apply improvements. they should go beyond number of distribution points, more importantly they should look at distribution system and strategy. finally on this topic, i would be creative and add at least a superiority edge of +15% more distribution points versus PDI.
• i would conduct a nationwide research, a combination of quantitative and qualitative researches to find out what readers think of the both newspapers and figure out improvement areas.
• and from that research, i would implement improvements very quickly.
• PS should not hold back in improving or applying changes on the whole newpaper in as many parts necessary - from layout, to writers, to writing style, sections, photos, editorials, etc.
• there is a lot to do but i would be very smart about it and determine which ones to do, drop and what to do first, how much of it and when. these are all very critical as while they may find clear improvements, any one or all can backfire on them. a lot of strategic thinking needs to be applied here.

the above essentially is a consumer marketing approach to exploiting a marketing opportunity that has been laid on a silver platter to the philippine star. doing the above will see the philippine star taking away leadership from the philippine daily inquirer.

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