For a Change, An Election Taught Us Something!

I didn’t want to leave the high of the US Elec­tions with­out even dis­cussing the lessons we can learn from it. I read sev­eral arti­cles on the just con­cluded US Elec­tions and one of the com­mon threads is that President-elect Bar­rack Obama ran one of the best elec­tion cam­paigns in history.

Here are sev­eral lessons from the elec­tions which we can use in our own life and in our own busi­nesses. Most of the ideas I got from BNET.

Adjust­ing Your Mes­sage on the Fly. Elec­tion ’08 had some mem­o­rable mes­sage misses. Mike Huckabee’s evan­gel­i­cal bent and cru­sade for a “Sanc­tity of Life Peti­tion” didn’t quite jibe with his “Chuck Nor­ris Approved” tough-guy ads, for one. But the biggest shift in mes­sag­ing, notes a study released by the Project for Excel­lence in Jour­nal­ism (PEJ), was McCain’s choice to use the “change” theme after Alaska Gov­er­nor Sarah Palin joined the GOP ticket. The pair was cast as “mav­er­icks” out to change Wash­ing­ton, and the new tagline set the stage for McCain to be the anti-Bush as the cam­paign wore on.

Change — most notably hyped with the slo­gan “Change You Can Believe In” — had been Obama’s core theme all along. His cam­paign was caught by sur­prise by the McCain repack­ag­ing. As John Dick­er­son wrote on Slate in Sep­tem­ber: “Hav­ing McCain talk about change makes Barack Obama happy. Change is his turf. He’s been talk­ing about change for two years. This also makes Barack Obama incred­u­lous. Change is his turf. He’s been talk­ing about it for two years.”

McCain’s sud­den switch trig­gered some fur­ther fine-tuning of Obama’s “change” mes­sage. The PEJ noted that the word “change” quickly became less obvi­ous on the Obama Web site, while on McCain’s site, it is among the 20 most fre­quently used words. And “Change You Can Believe In” in the Obama camp mor­phed into “Change We Need.”

The abil­ity to adjust the mes­sage with­out los­ing its core mean­ing and with­out sound­ing and look­ing schiz­o­phrenic is cru­cial. We do not want the change to lead to con­fu­sion. There was a core brand con­sis­tency that Obama stuck with, and that McCain lost in the process of try­ing to look like he was the anti-Bush.

Iphone and Twit­ter Helps. But you know that already. One of the campaign’s most effec­tive efforts, launched in 2007, was Camp Obama, a four-day pro­gram to train young vol­un­teers, state by state, on the fun­da­men­tals of cam­paign­ing. “We go through every­thing from can­vass­ing, phone bank­ing, vol­un­teer recruit­ment, our cam­paign mes­sage, how to develop an orga­ni­za­tion locally,” Camp Obama direc­tor Joce­lyn Woodards told National Pub­lic Radio.

Another youth mar­ket­ing coup for Obama: mar­ket­ing through tech-based chan­nels that Mil­len­ni­als can’t live with­out. The Obama ‘08 iPhone appli­ca­tion, for instance, orga­nizes the phone num­bers in the user’s address book into a call list, sorted by Obama bat­tle­ground states, and taps the iPhone’s GPS to pin­point the near­est cam­paign office from wher­ever you are.

His cam­paign also under­stood the power of social net­work­ing tools — such as Face­book, MySpace, and microblog ser­vice Twit­ter — early on. By the end of Feb­ru­ary 2007, Obama had signed more than 6,700 fol­low­ers on his Twit­ter account. The num­bers steadily climbed; less than one week before the elec­tion, he now has roughly 115,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and fol­lows 110,000.

By con­trast, Sen­a­tor Hillary Clin­ton had 1,200 Twit­ter fol­low­ers at the end of Feb­ru­ary but didn’t fol­low any of them — an obvi­ous and costly blun­der. Said one user last April: “I thought it was bad PR on Hillary’s part. Like Obama, she should prob­a­bly pre­tend she’s lis­ten­ing to all those people.”

The trick to reach­ing Mil­len­ni­als is to make mar­ket­ing feel like more of a gen­uine ser­vice than an ad mes­sage, says Tammy Erick­son, author of the Har­vard Busi­ness School Pub­lish­ing blog, Across the Ages. “Mil­len­ni­als want to hear, ‘Tell me about your run­ning prob­lems so I can design a bet­ter run­ning shoe,’” she says. They will tune out tra­di­tional pitches, for exam­ple, news about a new run­ning shoe design. “Many of them want to do some­thing more inde­pen­dent and entre­pre­neur­ial, they want to be involved, and Obama’s done a good job get­ting that,” she says.

Get your most influ­en­tial peo­ple to work for you. Obama has cap­i­tal­ized on the influ­encer model, adds Tammy Erick­son. “He’s done a great job of allow­ing peo­ple at low lev­els of his orga­ni­za­tion to spread the word. He also really tried to lever­age word of mouth. At the end of the cam­paign, his empha­sis is on, ‘Would you call a cou­ple of peo­ple and talk to them?’ The old model was that the guy at the top tells peo­ple what’s hap­pen­ing. Now, peo­ple at the bot­tom tell every­one else.”

Your Logo is Power. The 2008 Obama campaign’s iconic “O” logo is not just the most suc­cess­ful logo in mod­ern polit­i­cal mar­ket­ing, it’s also become a pow­er­ful and mem­o­rable logo that stands up against more famil­iar cor­po­rate brands.

The Obama logo was cre­ated early in 2007, through a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Chicago firms Sender LLC and MO/DE. Chief Obama strate­gist David Axel­rod gave the agen­cies a man­date: design a logo that would evoke “a new sense of hope,” as he told the Chicago Busi­ness Jour­nal. The agen­cies worked quickly, and on Feb­ru­ary 10, 2007, when Obama offi­cially announced his can­di­dacy, the newly minted logo was already embla­zoned on his podium, along with thou­sands of signs wav­ing in the arms of devotees.

“Logos should be sim­ple. They should not require a great deal of inter­pre­ta­tion,” says design critic Steven Heller. An abstract logo can be a sym­bol of a brand’s nar­ra­tive, he adds. Obama’s nar­ra­tive shows in the red stripes (rolling farm­land as heart­land val­ues or flag stripes as patri­o­tism) and the semi-circle (sun­rise as hope), framed by the ini­tial “O.”

But the real suc­cess isn’t the logo’s visual power. “How it’s used makes the dif­fer­ence,” says Michael Bierut, a part­ner with lead­ing design firm Pen­ta­gram, “and how it’s used is the big les­son for busi­nesses.” The Obama team has blan­keted every offi­cial cam­paign space with the famil­iar “O,” bor­row­ing a trick from the Nike play­book. The shoe company’s famous swoosh means noth­ing, Bierut says, but “you think it means some­thing because Nike has made it ubiquitous.”

And even if just for that, the US elec­tions is impor­tant for the rest of the world–to improve our pol­i­tics, our lives and our businesses.