Why Politics is Not Like Marketing

I normally never make posts over a weekend, but I figured with Monday being Christmas Eve I might as well fire away.  One of my favorite political blogs www.eyeon08.com had a write up on a recent blogger conference call with my Presidential candidate John McCain and before you stop reading, don't worry this is about marketing.  According to Soren when asked about a brokered Republican Convention, Senator McCain said this "You get so much of a bounce out of the early primaries, I just don’t think it is true. … No matter how rich you are, no one can buy enough media. It is done with earned media."  Couple that quote with a leaked comment to Talking Points Memo that McCain's Online Fundraising is up 500% and that my friends got me thinking about this blog post.

After spending 15 years working in telecom, wireless, and financial services I joined Connell Donatelli 2 years ago and now work in political marketing.  When I first joined, I was pretty much like any marketer that thought - "well why don't we market in this manner", but unlike others that have tried to crack this industry from the outside I had some real players in this space like Mike and Becki that could explain how things work.  In the private sector I believed in a simple marketing formula for success which I derived from my direct mail and OTM days at AT&T.  While I still use this formula for arranging programs, it doesn't carry the same weight in the political industry.  The formula goes like this:

Marketing Success = Creatives+Offer+Targeting

What I believed is that you could have a successful program if you got 2 out of the 3 variables correct.  Good creatives and good targeting can save a lousy product or offer and the same goes for a great offer with great targeting.  If you only have one thing right, your campaign is guaranteed to fail.  Later on with online advertising I added in optimization as a secondary variable, but in politics it is much more complicated than that.  Let's take a look at why for you "why don't campaigns do it this way" marketers....

Why Political Marketing Is Not Like Selling Phone Service

1. Earned Media Is An Extremely Important Component - As Senator McCain said "no matter how rich you are, no one can buy enough media" which is definitely a switch from your private sector advertisers.  Marketing budgets are huge in the private sector, but at the end of the day it is advertising, not someone on your local news or national paper promoting your service.
2. Your Product Serves Numerous Purposes - Private Sector Marketers like to boil down an offer or product to maybe 1 or 2 secondary benefits; you know what I'm talking about if you've ever read a marketing brief.  Politicians mean many things to different people and while you hope your candidate plays well with the most important issues, they can never please everyone 100% of the time.
3. When The Elections Are Over, You Are Really Done - It is hard to live to another day. All marketers start fresh in the new year and can potentially make up for a bad one.  In politics once the election is over, your job is done.  Plus, you can't fudge the numbers because you need a certain percentage of votes or Electoral votes to win; there is no room for rounding up.
4. Word of Mouth Marketing Marketers Would Kill For - I read somewhere recently on a marketing blog (can't remember which one) where the writer predicted that blogs would be important in 2008.  The prediction is laughable because political blogs have been around for years and were critical back in 2004.  They are everywhere, good and bad, drumming up stories true or false and sometimes even anonymous.  Imagine 1000s of people waiting to see what you do, say, or when you make a mistake.  You can't hide.
5. You Can't Just Win with Marketing - As Marc Ambinder discovered when he interviewed Senator McCain's national political director Mike Dennehy you need a lot of face to face time with your voters or as they say, retail politics.  I personally discovered this when I gathered 100 signatures in NJ to get Senator McCain on the ballot (btw - #90 was former Governor Tom Kean before he endorsed Senator McCain).  When was the last time you got 100 of your friends together to listen to a pitch from AT&T?  If you can't extend your online support to additional voters outside the internet, you end up as Howard Dean (Ron Paul next?)
6. External Factors That You Can't Forecast - Even when you have everything correct in your marketing, your campaign can still fail.  A new issue may pop up that your candidate is on the wrong side, you just might not have enough buzz to make anything pop, or your opponents may just start hammering your candidate for something they said 10 years ago.
7. Polling Causes Up and Down Swings - Every summer in the financial services sector they get ready for Smart Money's Brokerage Rankings, but after a month or two nobody cares unless you market your rating.  Every day and multiple times per day polling companies publish how your candidate is doing.  While I personally believe polling data is slightly interesting there are so many different ways of polling people and getting results that you can get confused.  My favorite poll data to ignore now is National Presidential Polls; here's a flash Wall Street Journal, we don't elect Presidents in this manner so your poll is interesting but not relevant.

Marketing for a campaign is nothing like what you are doing today.  It never shuts off and you have so many factors that influence your results that it is difficult to apply the same old techniques.  If you think you are a hot shot marketer that wants to enter the space, tread carefully because as my old boss once said to me "we ain't selling phone service here, Eric".

PardonMyFrench,

Eric