For those in the marketing game, the presidential election to date provides a window into the tools of our trade applied to politics. After all, whether in politics or business, as marketers we are all in the business of getting votes. Things are changing – text message used to inform supporters of the selection of a Vice Presidential candidate, attack ads released within hours of the events of the day and such. Most estimates predict well over one billion dollars will be spent on the 2008 Presidential campaign – the raw economic and marketing resources required to elect a President is sobering.

The election has a ways to go, but it is not too early to look at macro marketing trends.

Bottoms-up, Local Organizing Gains Momentum: First, in the Democratic primary Obama introduced a bottom-up, local organization that contrasted significantly from the Clinton campaign which was driven more centrally – top down. Barack Obama as quoted in Time Magazine (June 5, 2008) “As somebody who had been a community organize … I was convinced that if you invited people to get engaged, if you weren’t trying to campaign like you were selling soap but instead said, ‘This is your campaign, you own it, and you can run with it,’ that people would respond and we could build a new electoral map. Likewise in fund raising, he devoted more of his schedule to small-dollar events. Time described it: ‘the way organizations sprang up organically in almost every congressional district in the country meant that by the time Obama’s field organizers arrived in a state, all they had to do was fire up an engine that had already been designed and built locally. This bottoms-up, local approach seems more attuned to today’s marketplace skeptical of institutional organizations and entrenched leadership.

Money is a Necessity But Guarantees Nothing: Second, in the Republican primary John McCain early on ran out of money, lost key campaign leadership, and in spite of being in shambles – came back and won. Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee had very little money and yet in the delegate count exceeded Mitt Romney who spent over $100 million dollars. The irony is that while money is very much a requirement, it nonetheless is impotent to deliver results. Ask Mitt Romney, you cannot spend or market your way to greatness if the core offering does not grab the market.

Media Advertising Costs Are High, But Value is Declining: Karl Rove former guru for the Bush campaign commented in The Wall Street Journal: Television ads don’t matter as much as they used to … Voters are discounting advertising. They may be blocking out ads, relying more on personal exposure, information from social networks, alternative information sources like talk radio and the Internet, and local media coverage. This contrasts greatly to the conventional political wisdom just a decade ago. Advertising, while able to drive up the negatives of an opponent, continues to lose clout in shaping the opinions and promoting a candidate. More exposure for a bad candidate, like a bad product, actually does damage – a bad unknown candidate is preferable to a bad, exposed candidate.

Market Segmentation Divides, But Does not Conquer: In past elections segmentation has been used to lever wedge issues by targeting single issue voters with a very specific messages that received little or no emphasis to the broader campaign audience. Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: The business of marketing became the science of defining market segments, the art of division. When politicians began to apply one-to-one marketing methods to election, they abandoned the possibility of a common good. Breaking the country into tiny market segments resulted in the death of consensus – and the possibility that Americans could agree at times to split the differences. The fracturing that segmentation creates, longer-term can make it difficult to strengthen, unify and live the larger brand.

Credible ‘sales’ interactions exert greatest influence: The influence of relationships and word-of-mouth continues to grow.Gerber and Green [Yale University] … discovered that direct mail and, especially phone calls had had little effect. But face-to-face canvassing has raised turnout rates from 44 percent of registered voters to 53 percent … The more closely tied the person making the appeal was to the neighborhood, the more likely it was that the appeal would result in an additional vote. A friend worked best, but if the person coming to the door was clearly from the community that also worked well. “There was a four times higher likelihood that voters would respond if they were contacted by somebody they knew, or if it was somebody from the neighborhood.” (The Big Sort) … Nothing influences these days like someone you know or someone from your community.

Just as in business, the political marketplace is changing. The blunt instruments of traditional top-down, mass or even segmented marketing have resulted in ‘constituent’ message immunity. The shift to a more bottoms-up, viral approach that is more locally reliant on committed relationships has profound implications not only for politics, but for business. The voters have spoken – the marketing game has changed.

(Column appeared originally in ABA Bank Marketing magazine – October 2008)

By ROBERT E. HALL

Not to be reproduced without written permission. All rights reserved. © Copyright Robert E. Hall 2008