Obama the Brand

Brand Obama is “in”. To believe the pundits the brand of Barack Obama is the new Gillette or Tide or Google of electoral politics. As is often the case, the meaning of the term “brand” has not been clearly defined. In many cases, it seems to be used with a mildly pejorative inference. Another way to say “lack of substance” or “beginner’s luck.”

But to us, in the branding business, a brand has no pejorative implications. To the contrary: A brand is an expectation of predictable future behavior based on past behavior. Creating that expectation is difficult and time consuming. It is also very rewarding because predictability usually engenders understanding, and understanding is the foundation for trust. In business, trust means higher profits.

In the case of Mr. Obama, however, there is little past behavior on which one can base expectations of predictability. The man was basically unknown outside Chicago’s south side until a speech he gave at the Democratic Convention four years ago. And then he became better known for his eloquence than for his deeds. So our question is: Did he really build a brand—an expectation of future behavior-- and if so, what are those expectations and how strong is that brand really?

To answer the questions, we used one of our tools of brand analysis, the HBCQ , a questionnaire of over 90 questions, to measure the components of a brand’s “character.” Two identical questionnaires were posted online, one for Obama, the other for McCain. Respondents were randomly assigned to one survey. Field ran from January 13 to February 5, 2009.

Then we also wanted to better understand if voters made their choice on the basis of the brand or if they also were influenced by politics in general. So, in addition to the HBCQ questions, we presented nine political statements and asked respondents to attribute them to one politician or the other or to both if both had taken the same position.

Let’s get that last issue out of the way first: Respondents were able to correctly identify the correct origin of the nine position statements only 56% of the time. Both the Obama and the McCain voters were equally confused about who had said what… We can thus assume that the candidate’s political positions, at least those we selected for our quiz, had little influence over the selection of a candidate.

That leaves the brands as a reason for choice.

We had expected that we’d find the Obama brand clearly stronger than McCain’s in the sense that there would be a strong agreement among the respondents as to what constitutes Obama’s brand character, and that, in comparison, the McCain brand would be less well defined.

That was not the case. Both candidates showed strong, well-defined but different character profiles.

The strongest characteristics of Brand Obama relative to its competitor are its high “cooperativeness” and high “self-transcendence”. The first measures how well Brand Obama is expected to work with its environment. He is expected to reach across the aisle. If for any reason he were to stop reaching, the perception of his character would be changed, which might be very unsettling to his voters.




The high self-transcendence of Brand Obama indicates that he is seen as willing and able to overlook his own interests in the pursuit of the greater good. This could be an indication that respondents view Obama’s goals positively and expect him to pursue them even at a personal cost (I can’t help but think of Health Care reform...).

Both Brand Obama and Brand McCain are very self-directed. The surprise here is not McCain’s score, as he has cultivated his Maverick image for many years. We find it surprising that Obama seems even more his ”own man”. Neither candidate was perceived as a man of his own party. After many years of partisan politics, it is reassuring that the political system did give us a choice of two independent thinking leaders.

We should note Brand McCain’s marginally higher score in harm avoidance (a little more cautious), and the fact that neither brand is in the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake. Both are serious, “tried and true” solutions brands.

The same HBCQ measures computed only among those who voted for the candidate confirms the differences in brand profiles and seems to point to the importance of those differences in explaining the selection of their candidate.

Obama voters gave the Obama Brand even higher scores of cooperativeness, self-transcendence, and self-directedness, whereas McCain voters rated the McCain Brand highly on its more cautious approach.





This initial analysis of the two political brands of the moment offers a few surprises.

• One is that Brand Obama indeed established itself as a strong brand in a relatively short period of time (two to four years) and compares favorably to the brand of its rival, which was a decade in the making.
• Another is that the argument often advanced during the campaign that Mr. McCain was the safer choice for the country did indeed have impact, at least on his voters.
• The last surprise is the amount of insight that the HBCQ, a brand-measuring tool, can shed on political brands and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Having a strong brand can help, but it also can hurt: A brand is a double-edged sword because it contains the inherent commitment to continuing the behavior on which it is based in the first place. When a brand competes on the supermarket shelves, the brand commitment can get in the way of profit margins, line extensions and alliances. Political brands are, we are sure, equally attractive and burdensome. We’ll find out.

Jacques Chevron

Jacques Chevron is a Chicago-based consultant in innovation and brand strategy. He can be reached at Jacques@jpgroupusa.com

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Phil Glowatz, partner at JP Group, for helping to fund the online questionnaire and for his tireless editing of my ever-imperfect prose. I also want to thank Ilan Geva, who teaches “Brand” at De Paul University, for helping to find participants for the survey.

© 2009 Jacques Chevron

Long Tail. Or Short Tail.

The Internet: Promoter of diversity or instrument of uniformity?

Have you heard of the “Long Tail Theory”? First published in Wired magazine in 2004, the theory says that, because the Internet places an almost infinite amount of data at our fingertips, we are bound to expand the range of information we use. The 80/20 rule, which, in this case, means that 20% of the data is used 80% of the time (and that the “tail,” 80% of the data, is rarely used at all), would lose some of its meaning. Why limit yourself to the same small portion of data everyone else uses when you have all of it at your disposal?

The theory has something comforting in that it balances the cold blandness of computers and the information age: It posits that computers can help uncover hidden nuggets and thus make the world more diverse. It also promises higher quality: Rather than having to shoehorn an oft-used fact into an argument, one can search for the most appropriate fact, no matter how small or apparently trivial.

The problem is that the nice theory is not supported by the facts.

Most recently, a University of Chicago researcher[1] demonstrated that the sources of citations in recent academic journal articles, rather than coming from a broader range of authors than in pre-Internet days, actually come from a smaller number of sources than before. They even seem to, in confirmation of a trend that is contrary to that of the Long Tail theory, use the same references more frequently. In other words, the tail is getting shorter, not longer. The question is, why?

To date, the most satisfying answer is the loss of “serendipity;” i.e., what occurs when you find something other than what you were looking for. As Pek van Andel[2] defines it, "Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter." Old research tools, whether gathering up information from books or by talking to other human beings, made room for serendipity. The only reason, for instance, that I know of the existence of the “ocarina” is the illustration of that odd musical instrument on the same dictionary page as “occlusion,” the word I was probably looking up. That knowledge of ocarina did enrich me ever so slightly even if I have never had an opportunity to use it until this day. Research done the traditional way offers many serendipitous events, small opportunities to learn something new, or to make an association that leads to an unexpected and therefore more creative conclusion.

In a way, the Internet makes our research process too efficient because it returns only the precise answers to the questions we pose. And the more adept one is at searching, the narrower the range of tends to be. What results is akin to creating intellectually closed communities in which we are next to other people who think like we do, and isolated from those who think otherwise. A kind of gerrymandering based on intellectual curiosity. Within those communities all questions are answered using the same research tools leading to the same conclusion. One can imagine consumers all using the same toothpaste, or bar-soap, just because a search engine told them to.

Which brings us to how all of this applies to marketing: We think it more fruitful for a marketer of consumer products to find ways to preserve and nurture serendipity to avoid the trap of “me-too-ism” in product innovation and positioning.

How can one nurture serendipity, the “accidental” discovery of a new product or idea?

A method we practice for our clients is a) to create an environment where the unexpected can happen, and b) to ensure that people with high sagacity are there to observe and draw insightful “learnings” from the event. This means that your consumer research must include a dash of creativity so as to elicit answers you have not heard before. For instance, if working on new shampoo concepts, throw one in the mix that promises to leave some of the natural skin oils on the hair. If working on a pasta sauce, propose one that is bland and contains absolutely no herbs, spices, vegetables or meats. If working on a desktop organizer, offer one that lets your desk look disorganized, and so on. Good or bad, those ideas will force the consumers reacting to them to think along new, different lines – and perhaps to suggest refinements to these ideas that are the first step in leading you to a truly new and different product.

Then make sure that your research is observed and analyzed by individuals capable of recognizing a good idea when they see it, i.e., who are well versed in the science or in the marketing of your product category and who think conceptually. Those are rare birds, but they exist. For instance, you can even supplement your team by doing what we call “hiring the target.” So, if you are working on positioning a product to teens, retain a couple of 15-year olds to attend to your meetings, your ideation session and your research as well. Their ideas may spark some in you; they’re almost guaranteed to see things in ways you can’t.

In a way, the internet’s effect on reducing the diversity of the ideas we come across, the shortening of the tail if you will, creates excellent opportunities for those who can think out of the box, for the intellectually-accident-prone who are naturally exposed to serendipity.

1] James Evans, Ph.D., as cited in The Economist, July 17, 2008. His research is reported in the current issue of Science magazine.

[2] Ig Nobel Laureate

By Jacques Chevron & Phil Glowatz
Consultants in New Product Development, Positioning and Brand Strategy