Hey! That was some GOOD cheese!
My qualm is not the process of “selling” a candidate to the american public. It is distasteful for candidates to lie about their true opinions but, right now, it can’t be helped.
My problem is that they dare use words like brand. It’s wrong. People should know enough about the two main parties and their positions on important issues not to be talked or marketed to at such a superficial level. This whole thing just smells of dumbing down Joe Schmoe’s understanding of politics. It’s not something I’m comfortable with. It’s as outraging as illiteracy if you ask me. And yet, here are the newspapers and tv networks jumping all over it as a good way to explain things. What the fuck? If people are unhappy with what the a political party accomplished (recently), then say so. It has nothing to do with brand! The word brand should not be used! Use the word “reputation” if you must. But it’s even better to say “track record”.
As far as edges go, I repeat that an edge cannot bleed. edges are sharp and hard and extremely unlikely to contain blood. They are, however, cutting which means that they can cut through your skin and make you bleed if you touch them. What is bleeding, in this scenario, is your finger. So it is “bleeding finger”, not “bleeding edge”.
I also do not understand what the point of having other stupid marketdroid-expressions like bleeding edge (what next? Infected edge? septicemic edge? amputated something edge? dead edge?) Seriously! Wake up people! The metaphore makes sense with cutting edge, it sinks into the absurd when you start using “bleeding”.
Republicans need to be younger and hotter before I look at any of their buttocks.
Well, I don’t like Republicans but I think branding them is bit too much.
You must have different cheese than what I tried. My grandmother made me go pick up “reagan cheese”…she made sandwiches out of it. It was the hardest cheese I’ve ever seen. Bland too. I got a job after school just so I could by stuff for my lunch as to avoid it. 
I do remember it as being quite good. I wonder if it’s a regional difference…maybe different parts of the country were supplied by different manufacturers.
I’m not. 
A wholly owned subsidiary known as CehNehDeh?
-Joe
The late, great Paddy Chayefsky put it best:
*There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no Third Worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate dominion of dollars! Petrodollars, electrodollars, multidollars, reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds, and sheckels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! that is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in there councils of state–Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.*[right]–Network[/right]
Yes, because a sport “metaphore”[sic] is far more appropriate than one that accurately depicts the packaging and marketing of a political candidate, a process that adopts far more from the theories of Neil McElroy and James O. McKinsey than John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In fact, the methods used to differentiate a candidate and market his or her message, be it one of substance or, like cola beverages, entirely bereft of valuable content, are essentially the same as used to market any product, and indeed, political promoters have often been on that blood-soaked cutting edge of marketing phenomena like viral marketing, brand orientation, and rebranding.
What I personally find curious is how little the promotional content has to do with the end product. People remember (or at least, are told often enough that it sticks) that the Reagan era was one of smaller, more efficient government, when even a superficial perusal of the facts finds that to be a wholly inaccurate perception. Meanwhile, the Clinton era depicted as being a big revolution in how the business of government is done is comical when juxtaposed with the reality of inertia, bumbling, and hype over substance, veiled by the economic successes of the mid-to-late 'Nineties dot-com and real estate boom. (The one major change, paradoxically, was dramatic reform of the social welfare system which was far more in line with the fiscal ideology of Reaganomics than the Roosevelt-Johnson influenced Democratic Party.) It’s not just that candidates don’t live up to specific campaign promises; like a party that doesn’t spontaneously erupt into a stripper volleyball match upon breaking out a case of Coors, elected officials rarely govern in the way their promoted, branded ideologies would suggest.
Most voters function on either one hot button and generally invariant issue, or on a vague-ish notion of what the candidate stands for (“W is for Freedom!”, “A vote for Gore is a vote for Green!”, et cetera) and thus marketing and branding are highly critical to capturing the flittering interest of the mass of the voting public. George W. Bush got where he did not because of hard toiling for decades in the party structure or brilliant executive leadership, but because of his name recognition and a “Gee wilikers!” public persona despite manifest inadequacies and mediocrity in whatever he’s done. Bill Clinton was “Good Times Willy”, a guy you have over for a party because he plays the sax and brings a bevy of groupies. McCain is Mister Campaign Finance, even though his conduct is less than in accordance with his avowed positions. Barack Obama is “Oprah Approved” (he might as well just put the sticker on his forehead) and has a sizable following by default despite an almost complete lack of executive experienece. And Hillary Clinton is whatever she needs to be at the moment to make sure that America doesn’t miss the privilege of having Hillary Clinton as President.
If this isn’t a triumph of marketing and brand management then I don’t know what is. If voters were supposed to decide based upon merit, we’d have a lot more debates and a lot fewer rallies, conventions, and advertisements.
Stranger
Would you rather they just did all this stuff in secret and pretended they weren’t doing it? That is, afteralll, the only other (realistic) alternative. Better we should just see what they’re doing, if you ask me. But then, I’m a sucker for bleeding edge marketing techniques anyway.
Squeaky Turtle Bicycle Horn
All the cool kids have em!
Interesting. There is hope yet, though.
The internet keeps making it easier to connect more people, the rate at which historic and current data of all kinds are being digitized and indexed on the web keeps rising fast and the processing power to crunch it keeps rising.
Assuming these trends continue, much greater transparency is coming to politics, to the dismay of king-makers and smoke-filled rooms everywhere*.
*To the detriment of privacy, perhaps, but it’s coming alright.
Reagan cheese? I assume you’re talking about government surplus, but what has that to do with Reagan?
Its like American cheese, only bland.
-er
…yet. The hostile takeover begins in 5 minutes.
Once again I find myself compelled to say that you sir, are an intelligent man. Seriously.
But Nixon won in 1968 by rebranding himself, though I don’t think that was what they called it. I haven’t read the book, but I lived through the campaign. Nixon was considered a loser, famous for blowing up at the press in 1962 when he lost the California governorship. He sold himself as the “New Nixon” , just like new improved Tide. I don’t think he lied too much more than average for a campaign.
It would be great if all consumers were educated about all their “buying” decisions, but it won’t happen. The Republicans mentioned branding, by the way, not the papers.
If you have marketers looking at the situation, why not use standard terms? Yeah, brand kind of means reputation, but is not so loaded. Sometimes you want to disassociate your brand from its track record. It’s kind of like what the marketers for the Pinto had to deal with. Their product is seen as a piece of crap, so how do we get people to view it differently? The Republicans don’t have the ability to kill the product and rename it, so they’re in worse trouble.
I kind of enjoyed reading those articles, since the papers exposed to light the big problems the Republicans have. In most circumstances your public view is that your product is great. Rebranding discussions getting out into the public means that even they know how Bush stunk up the place.
I heard “bleeding edge” before any marketdroids got hold of it. I’m in tech, and it is a pun on leading edge, obviously, and a point of pride, that the person on the bleeding edge is so far out there ahead of the rest that he has it particularly tough. It is similar to the saying that you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
I’m so old I remember when my party stood for principles. Like “one person, one vote”, “all men [and women] are created equal”, that our government is formed for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that Certs has two drops of Retzin. But then, I’m a Democrat, and not a member of any organized political party.