I Pity The President - or Truth in Advertising

It's election night, and no matter who wins this election, I pity the fool. Why? Because each has made promises that they simply can't keep. I do promise this. Somewhere in the first months of their presidency will come the message "It's much worse that I had thought. That SOB George W. lied to us, and now I can't do everything I wanted to. Even worse, I'm going to need each of you to work even harder in order for us to get back on track."

Why do I say this? Well, let's just look at the larger picture - of what's going on with this country. And no, this isn't a bash on the country. I love it deeply and feel it is still the greatest country on this planet. However, our January 1st is coming up quickly and we are already waking up with one hell of a hangover.

The fact is simple, for the most part our lifestyle is based on a level of consumption we simply cannot continue to maintain. We have larger refridgerators that most of the world can even dream of. We drive larger vehicles than most of us can afford, and that far exceed our fuel resources. We are demanding greater benefits from employers, but we have fewer jobs available to us. The worst part is, none of this is a result of the credit meltdown. It is due to our maintaining a lifestyle that is far out of touch from the rest of the world - and none of us are changing our way of life to fit the resources at hand.

The sad part is, as a nation, we are rapidly finding our horizon point where we will be forced to fall closer in line with the rest of the world. The next President will be the first one that will not have much of a choice but to wake us up to a rather nasty hangover. And no, I don't think he will have a large enough aspirin to ease the sunrise...

What Happens When Mavericks Act, Well, Like Mavericks

The news is filled with breaks between Sarah Palin and John McCain. McCain's camp is calling Palin a "Diva." Palin's camp is blaming McCain for botching her coming out party. Both are probably right - although it probably is sexist to call her a diva - even though there were "diva" wars several years ago between celebs wanting to be known as the "only true diva," - but that's another blog entry all together.

Back to the question at heart - which is I'm not sure what the problem is. The RNC decided early on that they would brand McCain as a "Maverick." They then decided to bring in Sarah Palin as "Another Maverick." It's not a bad brand to assign. In fact, it ranks rather well in people's minds. Ms. Palin augmented Mr. McCain's maverick brand and as polls showed, gave a real shot to the campaign. The problem wasn't in the concept of the maverick brand, it was in how to keep the brand alive, without it turning into a flat, two dimensional moniker?

As it turns out, it's not an easy tightrope to walk. Just look at a brand like Sketchers. It was a great, counter-culture brand when it first launched. It was a maverick brand. However, once it became popular, the brand realized it had to give up some of its counter culture status in order to make more money. After all, how counter-culture can you be when you're sold in Kmart?

So it made a decision - stay true to its brand, or take a brand shift and make more money. Some brands stay true to themselves and never grow [just walk into any skateboarding store]. Others manage to stay true to the brand and grow to a certain extent [Clif Bars has done an amazing job at keeping a maverick brand alive, while growing well]. Still others, try to keep walking that line, only to realize to late that their market likes the idea of a maverick, but has trouble when that maverick keeps acting, well, like a maverick.

Bottom line, the concept of being a maverick is great on paper. But how do you keep a maverick in line so that they give a consistent message day in and day out? Even more important - how do you keep a maverick on message?

Once you do, they're no longer a maverick.

Again, great on paper - impossible to maintain over the long term...

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...