By Tom Polanski, EVP, eBrand Media and eBrand Interactive

I apologize in advance for the brevity of this post but with the Holidays approaching we’re busy as can be.  I do want to, at least, begin to probe the merits of the Obama campaign and attempt to link what the campaign managers did with your marketing endeavors if only to spark the prevailing “hunker down” thinking in a different direction.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I may be stretching for a metaphor but I think that what the Obama campaign did in red and swing states is worth examining. If you can imagine Obama, for the sake of this argument, as a beginning business and accept that he and his campaign (marketing) managers were faced with the challenge of creating and establishing a brand in an environment where a fair share of the market was hostile to not only the appearance of but the name and history of the product, then I believe you’ll see the through-line running from your business to his. 

To briefly recap, at the start of his push for the Presidency, in 2007, Obama was a little known African-American Senator from Illinois with limited experience. Although, there were people who loved him and what he stood for, his most of the marketplace knew next to nothing about the product and many were prejudiced against it. That’s not to say, though, that the product wasn’t superior or that there weren’t market events beneficial to the brand. Certainly, there were. Among them were the credit crisis and a very badly run Republican campaign.

The Obama campaign expanded its market share by outspending his competition on advertising and by delivering a consistent, value driven message. But the marketing money wasn’t spent willy-nilly. The campaign managers were smart; they identified young people as between the ages of 18-29 as an audience that could be won over. Furthermore, they knew that audience would infect their friends and peers with their passion through, not only, word of mouth, but through new technologies too. Indeed the Obama campaign managers used old media but they synergized it with new media to quickly build brand equity in the Obama name. In addition to TV ads, they used the web brilliantly; texting, e-mailing and leveraging social media as part of a cogent marketing plan. 

The Obama campaign regularly sent out e-mail with embedded widgets. Many of the e-mail were so cleverly done one couldn’t help but want to forward them even if only for the sake and wonder of the creativity expressed in the e-mail. In addition the message was transparent and conversational. It was not “salesy”.  The Obama people understood that in today’s cynical, savvy world; transparency will always trump fear mongering and loud advertising that fails to silence the whisper in the audience that it’s probably just another manipulative lie. 

That’s not to say though that didn’t burn through money here and there or that everything they did was actualized an immediate ROI. Their marketing occasionally missed the mark. However, the money they burned through testing different channels served to help them optimize their strategy. I saw the results of their work Election Night as “swing” states and “red” states turned “blue”. So did you. 

In 2005, the economic forecasters at eBrand Media informed me that global economy was in for a doozey of a downturn. As a result, I’ve spent the past two years trying to convince company decision makers to invest in upgrading their sites and optimizing their marketing so that when the crisis hit, they would not only have a top-flight, friction-free place for people to shop, they’d know where to put their advertising dollars in order to attract the best of those people in the most cost efficient manner. 

However, the response wasn’t overwhelmingly positive. Too often the marketing people at these companies took credit for the 25-29% lift that occurred year after year on the internet as it continued to grow and convinced their bosses that those revenue lifts were a result of their expertise. Understand this; every viable (and a few not so viable) business realized revenue gains as an increasing number of people signed up for broadband and began to shop online.

These marketers, many of whom worked for traditional management which had only a beginner’s grasp on new media marketing, mislead their managers into thinking they had marketing geniuses on their payroll. In the case where management had a better grasp of the internet, they, like GM with its fat margin SUV’s, decided to let the good time roll rather than invest in the future. Now, many of these companies find themselves in dire circumstances, scrambling stupidly for a solution. Many will go belly up now that the low-hanging fruit has all been picked.

And, as we saw in the mortgage and real estate businesses, many “so-called” marketers will be out of a job, waiting out there for the next big thing.

The good news is that advertising is cheap and plentiful. Smart companies will expand their budgets for the purpose of refining their marketing and taking market share that their competitors are willingly giving up. Companies that are aggressive today will own their respective markets when times get better. And they will get better.