Digby raised a point yesterday about a subject I haven’t considered in nearly enough detail.
The Republicans have been better than Democrats for years at branding and marketing…. But it looks like the Dems have finally caught up. They are taking a different tack, as they should have been doing all along, and appealing to more modern images and styles.
Marketing rules our culture, politics included. I don’t know if it will work to win over enough of the public to get “market share” — advertisers and marketers never do until they put it to the test. But the Democrats are finally playing in the same arena, and combined with a charismatic candidate, this could go a long way.
It’s a really interesting subject that I know practically nothing about. The impetus for all of this is a fascinating item in Newsweek from Andrew Romano, who chatted with leading graphic designer and critic Michael Bieruit, who dissected Obama’s “unprecedented branding campaign” in some detail, highlighting how and why it’s helping Obama’s candidacy.
Obama’s success owes a lot, of course, to his message — the promise to pass Democratic policies by rallying a “coalition for change.” But watching Obamamania over the past few weeks, I’ve become convinced that there’s something more subtle at work, too. It’s not just the message and the man and the speeches that are swaying Democratic voters–though they are. It’s the way the campaign has folded the man and the message and the speeches into a systemic branding effort. Reinforced with a coherent, comprehensive program of fonts, logos, slogans and web design, Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand.
This is neither a positive nor a negative, so much as it’s a clever strategy, creating a candidate “brand” in a way that’s never really been done before.
From Roman’s conversation with Bieruit.
How else is Obama’s design different than what has come before–or what rival campaigns are doing?
He’s the first candidate, actually, who’s had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it’s more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.
The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they’re all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I’ve done graphics for events –and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, “Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in Arial.” It just doesn’t seem to happen. There’s an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.
Then if you go to the Web site, it’s all reflected there too — all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system.
Is Obama’s stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?
I think it’s just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect. Graphic designers like me don’t understand how it’s happening. It’s unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.
What does that say about his campaign?
My feeling, in my own narrow sphere as a professional graphic designer, echoes a little bit what Frank Rich wrote in his column on Sunday, where he was talking about Hillary Clinton’s argument that Obama doesn’t have the experience to run the country properly, and how you only needed to look at how her own campaign has been managed to see the flaw in that argument. I sort of see the same thing. I’m not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I’m very impressed.
I don’t have anything especially insightful to add to this; I just thought it was interesting.
I would just say this — for months now, in various degrees of formality, I’ve heard Obama people tell me, “Trust us; we know what we’re doing.” More and more, I think they may very well be right.
