Marketing is one of the key factors on which businesses run today. The success of a product is highly attributed to the advertising and the marketing of it. The presidential elections are no less and all the presidential candidates are trying to sell themselves as a product to the masses. Every term the presidential election has been more and more hard fought, but now with the passing of time there have been new and improved marketing techniques that have been used in elections.
The very first marketing gimmick is having catchy slogans to attract customers or in this case voters. Hillary Clinton made a marketing mistake of changing too many slogans for the voter to catch on and Barack Obama though didn’t have very catchy slogans, he hooked on to the principle of having minimum slogans for his entire campaign. McCain on the other hand also followed the principle of fewer slogans but fell into the trap of bad advertising with an unintelligent slogan, ‘Change is coming’, as it said less about his candidature and more about the inevitable as George Bush was anyways going to be replaced or ‘changed’ by either of the two.
The presidential candidates heavily relied on the concept of branding, as all these candidates were newer faces to public and they had to create their stature in short time. Democratic nominee Barack Obama went steps ahead in applying the concept of ‘research & education’ on himself and his policies by using social networking sites and text messaging as a prime medium for fund raising and enlightening people on his brand wagon. The following will explain Obama’s marketing prowess by using the internet as a medium to project himself:
‘In January, Obama set a record for donations in one month by raising a total of $32 million dollars, $28 million of which was raised online’ (Ryan Peddycord , 2008).
Work cited
- Ryan Peddycord , “How Obama Raised 87% of his Funds through Social Networking” October 15th 2008. http://www.resourcenation.com/blog/how-obama-used-social-networking-to-set-fundraising-records
