Republicans Need a Brand Makeover
0 Comments Published by Nisha Chittal on Sunday, November 30, 2008 at 8:50 PM.
The Republican Party is at a crossroads. The mainstream media is speculating that this year could be a historic, realigning election. That the Republican Party might have fallen.
So, they lost. And they lost pretty badly. McCain-Palin won a mere 173 electoral votes. And between the 2006 and 2008 elections, the Democrats won at least a dozen Senate seats and at least 50 house seats, took control of both Houses of Congress, and now have 4,090 members in state legislatures, compared to the Republicans' 3,221.
But now is when, if the Republicans know what's good for them, they can seize the moment to makeover their entire brand by 2012. There are many things they can do to achieve this, but these are three that I think they should pay attention to.
Stop letting everyone else brand you and brand yourself. An Associated Press-Yahoo News survey earlier this year found that the first word that came to people's minds when they thought of McCain was "old" and the first word that came to mind for Obama was "change." These were the responses of one in five people -- the most popular responses. Obama picked the "change" message early on and stuck with it, and branded himself before anyone else did. McCain's campaign slogan, country first, didn't appear till much later. And by then, it was too late-- other people had already branded him as the "old guy."
In the age of personal branding, branding yourself before someone else does is no longer just smart, but necessary to beat out the competition. Instead of letting everyone else brand the Republican party as tired, damaged and out-of-touch, reinvent and rebrand yourselves. Now.
Get social-media savvy and reach beyond your base. To win the support of the people, you have to reach them where they are. Obama's campaign got Barack Obama on nearly every social networking website on the web. Now, his weekly radio address is also being video taped and archived on YouTube -- a first for an American President or president-elect. But when you consider the millions of hits a day that YouTube gets, it seems like a smart way to reach an audience that may not typically listen to the weekly radio address, and encourage civic engagement.
President Bush, however, has no plans to turn his weekly radio addresses into a video. When asked about it by reporters, a Bush spokeswoman said: "It's called a radio address for a reason." McCain's social media presence, too, was always lagging behind Obama's. He should have gone for a social media strategy of both deep and wide, and used it in new and innovative ways to connect with the audience whose votes he was seeking. This slowness to change with the times and reach out to voters using the technology they use is holding back Republicans.
You need the young people. Last summer I was writing a piece on both the campaigns' college outreach plans, and called each campaign's press office to find out what their college outreach strategy was. The Obama press office told me all about Students For Barack Obama and what they were doing. When I called the McCain office, I was told that they didn't have any information for me. Some quick research online told me that McCain's campaign did, in fact, have some Students For McCain chapters, but information about them was hard to track down.
College voters should have been a major part of their efforts. They should have been throwing more resources into appealing to young voters and talking directly to them about the issues that matter to them. Then they should have broadcasted to the world, and to little writers like me calling their office, that they had a strategy to reach out to the millennials. Yes, young people may lean left-- Obama won 18-29-year-olds 66 to 32 percent --but maybe all the Republicans need to do to narrow that gap is make them more of a priority.
So, they lost. And they lost pretty badly. McCain-Palin won a mere 173 electoral votes. And between the 2006 and 2008 elections, the Democrats won at least a dozen Senate seats and at least 50 house seats, took control of both Houses of Congress, and now have 4,090 members in state legislatures, compared to the Republicans' 3,221.
But now is when, if the Republicans know what's good for them, they can seize the moment to makeover their entire brand by 2012. There are many things they can do to achieve this, but these are three that I think they should pay attention to.
Stop letting everyone else brand you and brand yourself. An Associated Press-Yahoo News survey earlier this year found that the first word that came to people's minds when they thought of McCain was "old" and the first word that came to mind for Obama was "change." These were the responses of one in five people -- the most popular responses. Obama picked the "change" message early on and stuck with it, and branded himself before anyone else did. McCain's campaign slogan, country first, didn't appear till much later. And by then, it was too late-- other people had already branded him as the "old guy."
In the age of personal branding, branding yourself before someone else does is no longer just smart, but necessary to beat out the competition. Instead of letting everyone else brand the Republican party as tired, damaged and out-of-touch, reinvent and rebrand yourselves. Now.
Get social-media savvy and reach beyond your base. To win the support of the people, you have to reach them where they are. Obama's campaign got Barack Obama on nearly every social networking website on the web. Now, his weekly radio address is also being video taped and archived on YouTube -- a first for an American President or president-elect. But when you consider the millions of hits a day that YouTube gets, it seems like a smart way to reach an audience that may not typically listen to the weekly radio address, and encourage civic engagement.
President Bush, however, has no plans to turn his weekly radio addresses into a video. When asked about it by reporters, a Bush spokeswoman said: "It's called a radio address for a reason." McCain's social media presence, too, was always lagging behind Obama's. He should have gone for a social media strategy of both deep and wide, and used it in new and innovative ways to connect with the audience whose votes he was seeking. This slowness to change with the times and reach out to voters using the technology they use is holding back Republicans.
You need the young people. Last summer I was writing a piece on both the campaigns' college outreach plans, and called each campaign's press office to find out what their college outreach strategy was. The Obama press office told me all about Students For Barack Obama and what they were doing. When I called the McCain office, I was told that they didn't have any information for me. Some quick research online told me that McCain's campaign did, in fact, have some Students For McCain chapters, but information about them was hard to track down.
College voters should have been a major part of their efforts. They should have been throwing more resources into appealing to young voters and talking directly to them about the issues that matter to them. Then they should have broadcasted to the world, and to little writers like me calling their office, that they had a strategy to reach out to the millennials. Yes, young people may lean left-- Obama won 18-29-year-olds 66 to 32 percent --but maybe all the Republicans need to do to narrow that gap is make them more of a priority.
Labels: barack obama, branding, gender politics, john mccain, republicans
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