Sarah Palin/Barack Obama - Brand USA

Okay, so after seeing the Democratic National Convention [DNC] and the Republican National Convention [RNC], I guess it has all come to this. No matter who runs, we inevitably fall into the same thing - a popularity contest where the presidential candidates try their best to stay above the fray, while hiring Vice President's who, as Sarah Palin hinted at, act more like pitbulls than humans.

So much for the issues of the Iraq war, so much for drilling and oil consumption, so much for wiretapping becoming legal, abortion, alternative fuels, global warming, half truths and mis-truths. So much for presenting a sound foriegn policy and having the chops to back it up. So much for running a campaign about what each candidate can do or can't do.


How quickly has it dropped to the same politics I saw in highschool when elected the King and Queen of the prom. Only now it's about Sarah Palin in a bikini [yes, it's a photoshop job]. But hey, that's about as real as it's going to get for us from here on out. Or so it seems from the fallout I've been reading online. While all this goes on, so much for brand USA. Instead of being a beacon for how a free election is handled, we end up being no better off than the elections we laugh at from third world nations. Chads, election fraud, uncounted primaries - what must our founding fathers think.

So let's just cut to the chase and take a look at what really matters for voters of both candidates. To heck with politics and issues, let's talk about brand USA. Better yet, let's do what everyone else is doing and forget about trying to answer a higher calling and find a way to leverage the whole mess to our own benefit.

As my brother once said about politics "Now Jeff, why would you want to go wrestle with the pig? You're not going to win. You're only going to get dirty. And frankly, I think the pig kind of likes it."


So to heck with trying to respect our candidates. Instead, I'll post it to google, and see what it does for my ranking.

After all, this blog is about branding and marketing.

The Importance Of Research

From a brand perspective, there is nothing, absolutely nothing more important than research. Research to understand your customer, research to understand your client, and research to understand the market you're going into, and of course research to truly understand the product itself as well as the experience it promises to provide. Most important though, is the need to jump in and try out the product with hands on research the way the legendary ad-men and women of the 60s and 70s did.

There are stories about how account teams would spend weeks in Betty Crocker's kitchens, baking cakes and pies and cookies to get a real understanding for what the customer's experience. From weeks to baking, they were able to understand the beauty and the foibles of a particular product. They learned the ins and outs that their customers would learn sooner or later. Because of this, not only could they get inside the customer's head and write the kind of copy that people responded to. They could speak to their clients knowledgeably about what was good and what was bad about a particular product. The result from that research? The ability to turn consumers into customers and customers into brand enthusiasts like never before. They were no longer ad-men and women, they were knowledgeable customers. That is something that goes beyond pocket books, but lies deeply in the hearts, minds and souls of any successful product or campaign.

Political parties not withstanding, for any brand, be it political, consumer, or B2B to think they can skip over the time it takes to undertake research in order to understand their own product I sheer folly. If anyone thinks about rushing their product to market without doing the proper research, well, let's just watch how the cards deal out from the news that hit on September 1st, when it should have really been about a convention...