The Marketing of a President - Bill Lee - Harvard Business Review

After Tuesday night's bar fight of a presidential debate, I have a few questions for the major American political parties:

• How referable are your candidates for president? By which I mean, how likely are their followers to passionately advocate for them to their family, friends, neighbors, and peers? (And "advocate for" doesn't mean railing against the other guy.)
• How inspiring are their ideas? How much do they move their followers? Can their followers even really say what their core ideas are?

While the punditocracy may give the candidates passing grades on pugilistic debating skills, the truth is that neither candidate really connected with voters or truly inspired them, and that's a problem for both parties.

Let me put the issue in a different frame. The way in which we market presidents is broken, much like the way that we traditionally market businesses is broken. I say "market" presidents rather than "select" them because the way in which an organization commits to market its products and services can substantially determine the quality of the product it produces and sells.

There is a better way. First, full disclosure, I'm a Republican and have worked in a presidential campaign as well as an Administration (for George H.W. Bush). In the spirit of nonpartisanship, I will offer suggestions (and critiques) only to my own party ? but much of what follows could be applied equally to my Democratic Party friends, as well.

Republicans are following the wrong business model

The Republican model for selecting a president and other political leaders is now heavily weighted towards a relatively small number of huge donors ? who don't come from the same world as ordinary voters and don't share their interests. These donors contribute (make that "invest") vast sums to fund campaigns run by professional managers, and they control the ideas the party generates.

And what has this model delivered? After hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and interminable months campaigning against a clearly vulnerable incumbent president presiding over a persistently weak economy, the best we can say is that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are in a dead heat. We can't say that Romney has cultivated a growing number of passionate and inspired citizen advocates for his candidacy and its ideas. And in the final three weeks, his success will depend on some dispiriting, high-risk combination of the final debate performance, the hopes of exploiting some possible "October surprise" (and avoiding one of his own), and most of all, negative ads.

What a way to pick the nation's leader.

There's a more effective way to market a president, and smart business executives (and we Republicans pride ourselves on our business skills) are finding it. They're increasingly abandoning the same, tired marketing model which relies on hired professionals ? who don't come from their customers' world and don't share their interests ? to market and sell to them. Instead, they're building organizations that depend on customer advocates for their growth and success. Republicans could stand to learn a thing or two from them.

Create citizen advocates

Progressive businesses like Salesforce.com and SAS Canada are moving toward a new marketing model in which customers sell, market and participate heavily in helping develop innovative solutions for them.

Contrast that approach to the Republican Convention in Tampa. Where were the Republican citizen advocates who could appeal to the voters the party hope to attract? What we saw was a parade of entrepreneur after entrepreneur trying to inspire voters with their stories of how they took a risk, built their business and accepted responsibility. What the vast majority of voters ? who have no desire to start a business ? got was a lecture from people they don't relate to.

Where was an average worker Republican who is thriving in the new job he got as a result of first-rate training from a community college, built with the help of Republican-led initiatives? Where was a Republican soccer mom whose kids are thriving after moving from a hopelessly broken, politically fractured school system to a vibrant charter school, made possible by Republican reforms?

And in today's modern growth business, engaging your advocates in such ways is just a start. Forming them into communities takes growth to the next step ? and to get there, you must inspire.

Inspire: Hundreds of moon landings

It's a sad day when the party of Reagan trots out a Power Point-toting Paul Ryan to inspire voters, with his message of small government and individual responsibility straight from the pages of Ayn Rand. How inspiring is that to, say, Jeremy, the college student at Tuesday night's debate? Not very, I suspect.

To create passionate customer advocates, today's forward-thinking businesses understand the need to inspire them. Apple builds inspiring products. Salesforce.com donates one percent of all top line revenues to charity, and makes even its business software seem inspiring by showing how it can make its users more successful in their jobs and careers.

However, in politics, pundits bemoan the cynicism and absence of inspiring goals from our politicians. Where will we find another Big Goal that a president can rally all Americans behind ? such as John F. Kennedy's goal to land a man on the moon?

There are hundreds of possible Big Goals we as a people, and as a Party, can pursue. Exciting new approaches are addressing major domestic and world problems today ? from health care, education, protecting natural resources and the environment, poverty and hunger, and more. Micro lending, for example, is helping millions of poor people fund and start small businesses. Florida and other states successfully addressed a serious public health problem that experts thought had no solution: getting teenagers to quit (or not start) smoking.

Tackle big goals: Yes we can

The model that's emerging for these exciting initiatives is well suited to Republican principles: a combination of social entrepreneurism, business, NGOs and government facilitation (not control), along with heavy participation in creating the solution by the audience you're trying to serve. That's as opposed to the old paternalism of bringing in basketfuls of money and technology, along with outside "experts" to tell people how to take their medicines, dig their wells or grow their crops. Call today's social entrepreneurism the new Peace Corps on steroids.

And we can adapt these approaches to address Big Goals here, such as helping American workers excel in a competitive world, preparing American children for the 21st century, restoring economic vibrancy, combating poverty and improving health care at home, and engaging the world in more mutually beneficial ways.

Ayn Rand notwithstanding, government has an important role to play in such initiatives. (Like any other financial industry, for example, micro lending is subject to abuse and must be regulated.) And, much more exciting, government itself is innovating to support such Big Goal efforts. For example, Michael Porter describes new approaches to regulation that stipulate measurable social improvements from initiatives.

The pieces of a great opportunity are all in place for the Republican party to stop playing small ball, presenting the government ? and by implication, the presidency ? as something to be gotten out of the way. Instead it can start to inspire voters with exciting solutions that achieve Big Goals, and that would pull excited voters back into the party and its campaigns.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_marketing_of_a_president.html

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