Marketers View on Why Obama Won

The Bottom Line: Are you communicating in a way to reach your priority audience, or to make yourself feel better, to "let your freak flag fly?"

Three Methods of Persuasion You Can Copy From Obama and Romney (and one from Joe Biden that you should not copy) - Forbes

The Underdog Edge | Amy Showalter

Smoking hot,


Mark Andrews

It's amazing to see how blue this country is becoming.

Everything has to do with demographics. More women, more minorities. It's not just about Ohio and Florida anymore.

Could we please stop trying to learn lessons from the last election?

There was around a 3% difference in the popular vote. It wasn't a landslide by any terms. The incumbent always has an advantage.

A lot of money was wasted on bad advertising.

The current president had a lot fewer votes then he did in 2008.

There were several other factors besides marketing that led to the outcome.

I'm not getting political...but goodness gracious people...chill out.

Wonder when some guru will put out a book on some crazy crap about this whole election.

Obama won for two reasons:

1) Changing demographics - specifically, higher population of those who tend to vote democrat. Hispanics. One study showed that if this was 20 years ago, Romney would have won.

2) Negative advertising. People make decisions emotionally, and justify with logic. Obama used two of the most powerful emotions known to man. Fear and anger. In the last few weeks he blasted the airwaves with ads focusing on two subjects.

a) Abortion. Mitt Romney is against women, i.e. "the war on women". (fear)
b) Bain Capital. Mitt Romney is an unscrupulous business man who takes advantage of people. (anger)

If you live in a swing state then you are probably very familiar with these ads. They were remarkably effective.

Thanks for that posting, I found it fascinating to say the least. One quote on the link page put a new spin on a hungry market with respect to anything requiring a majority vote:

"The Obama campaign out-maneuvered, out-segmented and flat out did a superior job of applying 80/20 to a minute percentage of critical swing voters."

(emphasis mine.)

That struck a chord with me as I've seen the same type of tactics used in some of the organizations I belong/belonged to, but didn't recognize them as such.

Marvin

I think the real question is... was Obama's marketing that good, or was Romney's marketing really that bad?

Initially, I wanted to vote for Romney... untill I realized that he was positioning himself like an idiot. And you also can't deny the role that random chance plays in these elections.

For example. Romney laughed off global warming like it was a joke. Then the densely populated east coast got pumbled by the largest hurricane they've ever seen. How do you expect a copywriter to fix that problem? You people just get a little too absorbed in psychographics and lists. And you seem to forget all the people who had no idea who they were voting for till the last minute... and probably didn't care either way.

Then people see images of Obama and Christie hugging, when weeks prior to that Christie was all over the internet insulting Obama. So this gave Obama a bipartisan endorsement. When Romney was busy talking about how partisan Obama was.

I don't know, but I honestly question, if that hurricane didn't come a week before the election... if marketers would still be trying to figure out why Obamas marketing was so good. Presidential elections are not sequential things. You can say that psychographics were seperated and matched better.. but can you say THAT is the reason why Obama won? That type of sequential reasoning seems fatal to me. You need to consider widespread systemic interactions and variables. Variables that have little relation to marketing. Like history. Or a persons core competencies. When you link these sequential cause & effect type scenarios, to such a complex interacting system, it seems impossible to derive anything of real value.

Maybe... just maybe, people weren't ready for another war wongering republican?
Maybe people are still that traumatized by Bush regime?
Maybe just maybe, nobody really knows why Obama won the election?

I'm not denying the immense value in a well executed marketing plan, but trying to predict a presidential election, or explain one, is similar to trying to predict weather... or explain it. I know our race is getting to the point where we feel like we can now explain everything, but only time will tell how primitive our paradigms really are. Whatever that means.

*Leaving personal beliefs at the door as much as possible*

I think the real marketing lesson here is how you get a group of people to be so insanely passionate over the "red" or "blue" team when the reality is they essentially have the same agenda.

People respond to talking points.

They don't ask questions like...

- Why do they pass a new law almost every month that further erodes our individual freedoms?

- Why does the "land of the free" have, by far, the world's largest per-capita population of non-violent offenders?

- How can anyone who's spent a day studying economics believe that the current system isn't going to inevitably lead to financial collapse of the dollar?

- Why is no one talking about the fact that the Government has assumed the authority to imprison or kill US citizens without the right to a trial?

- Why are we constantly expanding the initiation of pre-emptive wars of aggression? Who profits from it? How can we stop it?

- Why is it that if I steal from my neighbor it is theft - If I kill him it is murder - But if it's done by the state it's patriotic?

I'll stop there. And just for the record I'm a military vet. And I'm not a republican or democrat.

The fact that either side can get the fans cheering boggles my mind. Helluva marketing lesson though.

*hides*

-Scott

I think he had a better ground game. Fear could also be another factor.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who governs the US. It will become a whipping boy to the whims of awakened giant, known to all as the People's Republic of China. No doubt the US will resist, but the writing is on the wall... so get your *Beijing* Style on.