Rebranding thoughts from a #republican about #election2012.
There has been some talk of “rebranding” the Republican Party. It’s an interesting concept. Can you “rebrand” a political party? They tried that, didn’t they, at the Convention, trotting out a bunch of faces that looked different than the old, white Republican men. My old boss Sergio Zyman used to say that “The best way to build a big brand is to sell a bunch of stuff.” Stuff = Product, not Packaging. Rebranding the Republican Party might be a bigger job than the pundits think, but it’s likely a necessary one.
What Sergio meant was that consumers contact with the product is the primary experience that forms consumers’ concept of the brand. We often said this in response to clients that were asking for a new brand advertising campaign as a way to turn a company’s fortunes around. I always liked to start with the basics – the five P’s. Positioning. Product. Price. Place. Promotion. If the Republicans want to rebrand, they will have to go through the same process. I can think of two times in the recent past that Republicans have rebranded (sorry Reaganites, but the 1980s were not one of them). The first time the Republicans rebranded was when it was done to them, not by them, in the election of 1960 when the Kennedy’s embraced Martin Luther King and Civil Rights. The party of Lincoln became the party of Unequal Rights – a positioning it embraced with Nixon’s Southern Strategy and 52 years of votes since then. The party rebranded again in 1974 with Nixon’s impeachment trial when the moderate Eisenhower Republicans were driven out in an attempt to circle the wagons for a failed Presidency. The key message here is that rebranding can often be a traumatic event (or the result of a traumatic event), but most importantly it requires changes in the product (in this case policies and legal action). Rebranding the Republican Party, if it can be done, will require a lot more than putting some different hued and accented people in front of the camera.
Rebranding the Republican Party will mean holding true to the ideals of the party, but adjusting the policy platform to meet the current rational and emotional needs of voters (if we’re smart that will be Republican, Libertarian, Conservative, and Independent voters – everyone just slightly right of the liberal Democrat Party). For example, if Republicans want women to vote for them, they cannot have policy platforms or candidates who declare that women’s bodies have magical properties that can prevent pregnancy or that a woman must go through a dangerous medical procedure (pregnancy) because she was the victim of a crime. Obama’s negative advertising casting Romney Republicans as uncaring rich guys who fire workers, dislike contraception, and cut needed government programs to give money to the rich, worked in part because some Republicans were out in public looking like old white men and saying those exact things. Sometimes conservative media will ridicule a story in mass media that turns out not to be completely true in its detail, but emotional true to many people (think Tawana Brawley or Duke LaCrosse Team). Unfortunately, it is completely normal for people to be ruled by their emotions and to take rational facts and twist them, or disbelieve them, if it contradicts their deeply held beliefs. So long as there are fits and gasps of racism or sexism emerging from the party that embraced sexism and racism in the 60’s, for many people who haven’t shared a Republican life experience, those little fits and gasps make it much easier to emotionally believe false narratives like that used by the Obama campaign in 2012. Brands are a bundle of rational and emotional attributes. When seeking to rebrand, you have to consider both the intended meanings of a word, a color, or an action, as well as the unintended meaning that an off-target audience might feel. If you think that you can manage the reactions of that off-target group – that’s fine charge right ahead. But if you think you might have some sympathetic members in your own group to the off-target reaction, then you have a problem. Groupon found this out with their Superbowl add that angered Tibet’s supporters in the U.S. (a group that I think includes a lot of women – a prime target of Groupon’s coupons). The changes in policy that the Republican Party must consider should be vetted both against their deeply held beliefs, as well as the potential interpretations by Independents and specific demographic groups.
Can the Republicans rebrand? I don’t know. I do like the idea of a third party instead of rebranding. Maybe Republicans should be left alone to be Republicans. It seems like we already have a third party in the U.S. – its composed of Independents. All they need is an organization that can raise funds and set priorities. I think it would be great to have three parties in congress, then when committee seats are assigned no group would have a super-majority and there would have to be comprise (which I think would result in things getting done). However, let’s start with the assumption that Republicans (I am registered as a Republican) want to rebrand. The effort needs to start with the party getting people together to seriously think about how to translate the party’s principles into the modern era. That probably will require a combination shifting funding from advertising to thinking – more think tanks working on the right policy issues, with national and state-level idea sessions working from the reality on the ground (in demographics, in ideas, in economics, and in current law) to gain a new consensus of what it means to be a Republican. Once we get the product right, then we work on promoting it. One final Sergio story about that. We must always remember that promotion is intended to influence the masses; therefore it must speak to the masses (not to the elite few who fund it). Sergio used to tell a story about Roberto Goizueta (yes, he was a great leader) calling him in to review some advertising. After watching the TV ad, he said that his wife had seen it and didn’t like it. Sergio answered “that is good, because it’s not for her. There are very few of her, and many, many of the people it is intended to influence.”
If the Republicans want to make it easy for women, minorities, and youth to vote for their candidates, they will have to rebrand. The party must clearly break from its past in a way that rings true in the hearts of its members that fall into those demographics. That means news ideas (not new principals), new candidates (ones that can be trusted not to say stupid things about gender, race, or work ethic – they can still be white, but they must have true experience living as a non-white, non-male, non-wealthy member of American society), and most importantly new policies.
