Usually, if a label sticks, it implies that the opposite of the label is not true for the person or entity that has been labeled. This is a way to create “us” versus “them” thinking. “You are this. I am that. We are different. You are to blame. I am not. I don’t like you.” While assigning labels is effective in repositioning opponents in a negative light, I find it operates from a lower level of consciousness. And it rarely leads to common understanding but rather divides and creates animosity. Having said that, politicians have been using labels for all of recorded history to reposition their opponents in a negative light. Following are some recent examples of this in the United States:

• Liberals calling conservatives reactionaries, Neanderthals, obstructionists neocons and hawks.
• Conservatives calling liberals doves, bleeding hearts, “flaming” liberals, “nanny-state” liberals, left-wing ideologues, libs, Kool-Aid drinkers, socialists, communists and Pinko commies.
• Conservatives have also tried to characterize liberals as people who do not believe in the Constitution, a claim that is largely unsubstantiated.
• Many politicians have used the term “flip flopper” against their opponents.
• Several politicians have called their opponents “extremists.”
• Conservatives use the “Obamacare” label to diminish the credibility of the Affordable Care Act.
• Its opponents have transformed “Tea Party,” coined as a positive label by its advocates, into a negative label. “Liberal,” historically possessing very positive connotations, has also been transformed into a negative label by its opponents. That is why many liberals now choose to use the term “progressive” instead.
• Interestingly, both conservatives and liberals have labeled the other as lacking in intelligence.  Conservatives also label liberals as naïve, while liberals label conservatives as lacking in compassion. In response, George W. Bush labeled himself a “compassionate conservative.”
• The term “activist judges” has been used to describe judges who seem to reinterpret laws to fit their own views of the world. People who disagree with the judges’ rulings most often use this label.
• “Politically correct” was a positive label that was redefined as a negative label by conservatives.

So, what does one make of all of this negative labeling? While it tends to work in that it diminishes perceptions of the labeled parties, it does not lead to mutual understanding, compromise or shared progress. Also, people are tiring of this name-calling, propaganda and mudslinging. Most importantly, assigning negative labels dysfunctionally assigns blame to the “other” allowing us to abdicate responsibility for developing a solution. In the end, it is not productive.

Interestingly, applying positive labels to negative things is a related phenomenon. Consider the following. The MX-Missile was renamed “The Peacekeeper.” But this is a topic for another blog post.

While I have used negative political labels as examples, labeling is generally applicable to marketing communications. While I am not a fan of labeling, I have to admit that it works, at least as a shorter-term tactic.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Of the many lessons the successful Obama campaign taught brand marketers, one has been largely overlooked. It is this: the current Big Data ramp-up in marketing database infrastructure needs to be focused on winning at the margins.

Stories about the campaign’s voter database continue to dominate post-election coverage of Obama’s victory. These stories are filled with fascinating details about the fusion of disparate databases, the profiles constructed of individual voters, the likelihood scores assigned to each individual, the targeted phone calls made and the frequency of making them, and the experiments conducted to optimize the framing of Obama’s message to voters. But few of these stories describe, or even recognize, the most valuable purpose of these efforts, which was to sway and motivate voters at the margins.

There were two such marginal effects the Obama campaign needed to accomplish. The first was to get the Obama constituency to the polls. Romney’s campaign made a huge bet that Obama would fail to get the vote out among his strongest constituencies, and thus the final distribution of actual voters would wind up in Romney’s favor. As it turns out, this was a very bad gamble. The Obama campaign was able to use its data infrastructure to turn out likely Obama voters at the margins who, otherwise, would probably have not gone to the polls.

The second effect was to persuade many of those on the fence to vote for the President. Again, this was a marginal effect, one of winning over the next voter, and then the one after that and the one after that, etc., with each successive voter a little harder to convince than the one before.

This election turned on these marginal results. If the Obama campaign had been unable to influence the distribution of voters or the votes of undecided voters, Romney would have prevailed. Only by winning at the margins did Obama wind up with the bigger share of votes cast.

The Obama campaign was fully cognizant of this. A combination of sophisticated targeting models and detailed media profiles enabled the Obama campaign to place ads in media more likely to be viewed by key voters. This resulted in far greater efficiency, or more ad exposure per dollar spent to reach a particular voter, which enabled Obama to offset Romney’s fundraising advantage. Obama’s fewer dollars bought more impact than Romney’s dollars. As noted by Larry Grisolano, who helped develop the system driving media buying, the campaign was willing to forego big audiences in order to reach the “right ones.” This is a focus on efficiency, and efficiency like this is yet another marginal effect. Ken Goldstein, the president of Kantar Media/CMAG, a media monitoring and analytics consultancy that worked with both campaigns, was blunt about this when interviewed following the election:

“All of this stuff [done by the Obama campaign] only matters in the margins.”

In politics, though, voters at the margins matter only in close elections. In a landslide, the winning candidate can afford to lose voters at the margins without threatening his or her victory. In brand marketing, though, margins always matter. The key metric for brand marketers is profit per buyer not total number of buyers, and consumers at the margins are usually the most profitable.

There are many ways of calculating the profit contributed by individual consumers, but the most common way allocates overhead and other operating costs in such a manner that consumers at the margins yield a higher contribution. This is not just bookkeeping; it reflects the actual way in which a company’s revenue scales. The first consumers to buy pay the bills; after the bills are paid, subsequent buying is all profit.

Impact at the margins is what brand marketers must get from huge databases for these investments to be worth it. Certainly, there are other uses to which these databases can be put, but these databases pay for themselves by identifying incremental consumers at the margins who would otherwise go unnoticed, untargeted and unconvinced. As the Obama campaign made clear, the enormous investment of money, time and talent it takes to establish and operate Big Data databases pays off at the margins.

Brand marketers have lots of interest these days in building massive customer files to support sophisticated microtargeting. But the biggest payoff from these investments comes from consumers at the margins. This, then, is the way in which to think about building, managing and, especially, evaluating these databases. If Big Data infrastructure is not working at the margins, in all likelihood, it is not worth the investment. But when it does work at the margins, its value is clear. It is the difference between winning and losing in a highly sophisticated marketplace that is far more competitive than ever before.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate B2C and B2B Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

There is one thing in particular about the recent election results that Baby Boomers should take care not to overlook. The world Boomers live in nowadays is no longer their own.

This is to say that, as a group, Boomers voted one way; young people voted another. Exit polling data from Pew found that 60 percent of voters under 30 voted for President Obama while only 48 percent of voters 30 and older voted that way. Contrast this with 1980. Reagan captured 56 percent of the under-30 vote, along with 62 percent of the 30-and-over vote. In other words, in 1980, young Boomers, as a group, voted the same way as their parents. Not so in 2012.

This generational divergence was first seen in the 2004 race between Kerry and Bush. In that year, 54 percent of under-30 voters voted for Kerry versus 47 percent of over-30 voters. But it has only been in the last two elections with Obama that the political preferences of young people have overwhelmed those of older voters.

As far back as McGovern versus Nixon in 1972, young people and older people have swung the same way politically (with the one exception of Clinton versus Dole in 1996), barely differing in proportions in most elections. No longer. In the last three Presidential elections, young voters have marched to a completely different drummer, and now older voters must make do in a world at odds with their overall preference.

The sort of ascendance of Millennials is an unprecedented generational phenomenon. Boomers came of age with new values but the same politics as older people; so, too, GenX. Millennials are the first generation since the end of WW2 to start off with a completely different politics than their elders, and they are doing so in such numbers that their preferences are dictating terms for everyone else. What is true of politics is true of brand marketing as well.

Boomers have been the dominant force on the scene for decades, but Millennials are now leading the way. This is most apparent in technology, the key thing driving innovation and business models in every category. Boomers are fast followers of every technological innovation, but Millennials and Millennial tastes are channeling the flow of technology in directions they prefer. Boomers live in a world built for Millennials.

In fact, this unseating of traditional power brokers in both politics and the marketplace goes beyond generations. As the recent election made clear, the demographics of diversity are now in control. Exit polls conducted by CNN found that Obama won 93 percent of the African-American vote and 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, but only 39 percent of the white vote. This is noteworthy because the 2010 census found that 92percent of the population growth in the U.S. during the prior decade was accounted for by minorities, Hispanics in particular.

Generation and diversity intersect. Young people are much more racially and ethnically diverse than older people, a difference that is only going to become more pronounced.

In 2011, for the first time in U.S. history, non-white newborns outnumbered white newborns.

The fact that diversity is ascendant as a correlate of the rise of the next generation of consumers means that Boomers now find themselves at a perilous crossroads. At the very moment Boomers need to bear down and stay engaged with work and the marketplace, the marketplace is veering away from them. With contours unlike any seen before, older people must come to terms with a world not of their making. Brand marketers, too.

Numbers are the reason cited most often as the biggest reason that diversity matters, but while enormously important, that is actually the smaller part of the story. The real significance of diversity becoming the mainstream marketplace is that it adds momentum to the on-going shift to a marketplace utterly dominated by microtargeting. The absence of a shared experience of big culture deprives brand marketers of the commonality of connection needed to build a master brand. In effect, this will make all branding, even in the home U.S. market, a form of multi-country global branding.

As outlined in a Future Perspectives white paper from The Futures Company called The Future of Global Brands, the first generation of global brand marketing was an export model in which master brands were taken unchanged to other countries and mostly managed from the home country. This gave way to a second-generation in-country model with local managers handling local affairs. The third-generation standardization model was centered on the idea of cosmopolitan consumers with cross-country similarities. The fourth-generation glocalization model involved local customization of a global master brand.

The current fifth-generation co-creation model involves an explicit collaboration between brand owners and local markets. Rather than customizing a global concept for a local market, co-creation means an iterative, interactive process whereby the very concept of the brand itself arises bottom-up and, by virtue of this conception, is specific to individual market situations.

The model of co-creation fits today’s global economy in which a brand must be different everywhere because individual cultures, not a shared big culture, predominate. Globalization has not globalized tastes; instead, it has had the paradoxical effect of unleashing localism. This reality of the global marketplace is now being replicated in the U.S. marketplace by the demographic force of diversity. No less than separate cultures, separate sub-cultures require that a brand be different everywhere. Even in the home U.S. market, diversity will require that brands co-create multiple versions to fit cultural groups with distinctive tastes and preferences. What’s true for the global economy is now true for the U.S. economy. The next generation of both marketing and consumers is now in control.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

President Obama’s successful reelection campaign is a reminder that whatever you’re selling or how, it starts with the most basic thing of all – a great brand positioning.

The stories hot off the presses about Obama’s success have focused on the nifty new stuff. The data and digital angle has emphasized the campaign’s high-tech use of BigData and the predictive models developed to classify and prioritize voters for fund raising, ad targeting and get-out-the-vote efforts. The diversity angle has focused on Obama’s disproportionate margins among the nation’s fastest growing demographic groups, particularly Hispanics (and the challenges this presents going forward for the Republican party). The nudges angle has highlighted the campaign’s utilization of insights from behavioral economists and social psychologists about the best ways to persuade and motivate people. But these stories, while true, overlook the most important element of Obama’s campaign.

In a New York Times op-ed the day after the election, Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, took exception to these narrowly focused accounts of the campaign’s success. As he put it, “the president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics.” Or to put it in brand marketing terms, a great brand positioning.

Benenson isn’t arguing that demographics – or data or digital or nudges – didn’t matter, just that it mattered only because there was something compelling for these key demographic groups to vote for.  Absent something meaningful to say to voters, there would have been no point in building the database, developing the models and honing the approach.

As Benenson put it, the president “won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in.” Brand marketers call this a big idea, which is to say, a clear and compelling brand positioning.

Of course, many pundits would take issue with Benenson (though the bulk of Benenson’s piece summarized research supporting his assertion). But no one would argue with the broader point he’s making – positioning has to be taken care of first.

But not just any positioning. It must be motivating, credible and unique, the three things essential to a great positioning. Brands run into trouble when their positioning could be plausibly claimed by a competitor, or when they move too far from the core of their appeal to consumers, or when they differentiate on dimensions unclaimed by other brands but un-motivating.

The proof of a great positioning is in the pudding, so to speak. It is unifying and it is fireproof – both of which were enjoyed by the Obama campaign. For example, Obama’s middle-class vision afforded him a platform for attacking Mitt Romney without alienating voters as being capricious, vindictive or spiteful. Against the background of Obama’s positioning, it all fit together.

Alot has been written about a crucial moment in the Obama campaign when the team decided to frontload its advertising spending rather than hold it in reserve for the final sprint to election day. The idea was to define Romney as anti-middle class at a time, immediately after the primaries, when his coffers were temporarily depleted and his image still colored by the necessity to veer right to protect his flank from primary challengers.

Spending early to cast your opponent in a negative light is a tried-and-true tactic, but circumstances made it chancier for Obama. His record was shadowed by high unemployment and low approval, something no incumbent had been able to overcome before, and once the general election kicked off, the Romney campaign was going to be flush with money again, supplemented by well-financed Super PACs. But Obama’s positioning overcame these deficits by fitting Romney into the campaign’s middle-class narrative. It wasn’t about spending early to get the jump on insults; it was about telling a coherent story during a lull in the chatter in order to make Romney part of Obama’s story rather than a story unto himself. Like a dominant brand, Obama, in effect, defined the category, thus making it nearly impossible for Romney to recast the context of choice in terms more to his liking. With his positioning, Obama gave voters a cogent, straightforward way to make sense of everything else.

This was especially true when the 47 percent video broke. Romney immediately tried to distance himself from it but had difficulty doing so because his comments fit the character Obama had made him out to be in his middle-class narrative. Admittedly, this incident was unplanned, but serendipity is a part of every election, as well as every marketplace situation for brands. A good positioning is robust with respect to the unexpected. What Romney lacked was a positioning that could rescue his image by dialing down the significance of those remarks in defining his image.

A large part of the Republican attack on Obama centered on the economy, jobs in particular. But this left Romney vulnerable to events beyond his control. It was a bet that the economy would show no positive movement for well over a year, something unlikely even with the weakness at hand and something that a sitting President is actively working to reverse anyway. Unsurprisingly, this gamble failed when, late in the campaign, the unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent.

But by the time the unemployment rate improved, the jobs issue had already devolved into a broader referendum on Obama – the riskiest, emptiest sort of negative marketing of all. Basically, this is no positioning. It is standing against rather than standing for. You can ask if you’re better off than four years ago as a contrast to a new way forward, but it’s a wooly contrast versus nothing. Even when voting against something, people want to vote for an alternative, just as people prefer brands that deliver something not merely avoid something.

As a last gambit, with a little over a week to go, the Romney campaign dialed up the referendum strategy with an ad in Ohio claiming the President had bailed out Chrysler only for the company to relocate U.S. Jeep jobs to China. This set off a fact-checking frenzy, with a vehement denial from Chrysler, that ultimately turned into a backpedaling distraction that kept Romney from single-mindedly buttressing a positive message going into election day.

But worse for Romney, the Jeep ad rejuvenated Obama’s positioning. It raised the jobs issue in a way that brought back to mind Obama’s middle-class narrative about how he and Romney compared on outsourcing, saving auto industry jobs and economic priorities. Serendipitous timing made this an extremely valuable bonus for Obama. Hurricane Sandy was swirling ashore at this very moment, making the election seem small and pushing Romney off the front page. But the Jeep ad kept key Obama issues from disappearing completely from the news.

In summing up the ten lessons about politics he learned from managing Obama’s campaign, Jim Messina echoed Benenson about the utter importance of a great positioning. As Messina put it, “You can build a whole suite of analytics… but it all comes back to the campaign, it all comes back to having a message that matters.”

No less is true for brands. Brand marketing is changing rapidly, with innovations galore on the horizon. Yet, one fundamental, old-timey thing matters no less than ever – a great brand positioning.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers