The Branding of Our Candidates

As I watched the highlights of the Democratic National Convention, I can't help but focus on the brand called Barack Obama. This morning, after hearing about McCain's choice for vice president, I'm wondering about the brand called McCain as well.

Yes, Obama has a brand, McCain has a brand, and so do all of the other assorted candidates along the way. You and I have personal brands, too, though we likely put much less emphasis on understanding and promoting them.

In my Branding Strategies class at San Francisco State, we do an exercise where students are randomly divided up into groups and asked to evaluate the candidates brands: what are their brand promises, what do they stand for, and on a scale of 1 to 10, how well are they doing on delivering on those promises.

This was a much more interesting exercise when we had a full slate of potential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and others. This year, for the first time, we had a full range of choices when it came to gender, ethnicity, race, religion and marital status.

What's interesting is that over the last year or so, the class has consistently said that Obama stands for change and hope and doing things differently, and they've rated him fairly high on fulfilling his brand promise. They had a hard time, OTOH, getting their hands around what McCain's brand promise was, besides more of the same.

Brands are always evolving and adding features and benefits to supplement their current offerings. This week, Obama chose Joe Biden, who brings experience and foreign policy expertise to the Obama brand. McCain chose Sarah Palin, who brings youth, inexperience and a non-Washington perspective.

What do these choices mean for the 2 candidates' brands? It will be interesting to watch how the American public answers this question, but at this point, it looks like Obama has tried to supplement a known weakness in his brand (relative inexperience) by adding Biden. McCain has  addressed the weakness of age, by choosing someone very young and with virtually no experience. He's addressed diversity by including a woman, but I'm not quite sure yet what the McCain/Palin brand stands for?

By choosing Palin, it appears that McCain has done two things he may regret: He may have actually strengthened Obama's brand by making Barack look much more experienced than Palin, and he may have alienated many of Hillary's supporters who were on the fence, by choosing a running mate for her youth and gender and asking voters to accept her as an equal substitute for Hillary, who like her or not, brings a wealth of experience, maturity and seasoning to the table compared to Palin.

The jury's still out on this folks, but stay tuned. Things are just starting to get VERY interesting.