I’m Baaaack.

Greetings, Making the Branders; it’s been a while since I’ve been around ye olde MTB blog.

Apologies for my scarcity. I’ve been experiencing an unbloggable, long-term personal crisis which has pretty much resolved itself, so hopefully I’ll get into some regular brand blogging.

Before starting that, though, let me say that Beth is in recovery right now from a fairly serious illness, so if everyone reading this could send she and her familia some good vibes, they’d appreciate it.

So the big branding story I missed during my travails was probably the election (maybe you heard about it?).

All politics aside, I think that Obama’s victory was in many ways a triumph of good branding and brand management over awful brand management. The 8 years of the Bush presidency have been very hard on the Republican brand (small, pro-business government, run by socially conservative, competent managers), as the size of the government has ballooned, the economy has gutterred, and one Republican sex and corruption scandal after another have tarnished the GOP’s image.

So the party selected the one Republican who probably could have won in 2008, because McCain had a history of pushing back against the Republican brand. His own brand (the Maverick!, bi-partisanship, competence) was strong and well-known. And then he spent the next several months after his nomination systematically taking his own brand apart through a combination of what seemed like incompetence and a willingness to accept any and all aspects of the party line, even those aspects he had formerly dismissed. Every week seemed to bring a new message from the McCain campaign, often totally at odds with last week’s message (the fundamentals of the economy are strong! I’m suspending my campaign to deal with the economic crisis!).

The Obama campaign, on the other hand was a model of brand positioning and messaging consistency. He managed to position himself as the only true agent of change so effectively that both Clinton in the primaries, and McCain in the general election tried to piggyback on the message of hope and change he was promulgating. And there were very few messaging inconsistencies from the campaign, from the beautiful logo, to the nicely produced collateral, to the campaign’s response to possible controversies.

The operation was designed and executed to, with ruthless efficiency, put out a single overarching brand promise (change), and every interaction with the electorate had to reinforce that message. And it was remarkably successful. When the Reverend Wright situation almost blew up into a racially charged controversy, Obama crafted and delivered a speech that not only silenced his critics, but positioned him as a new, almost post-racial black candidate – a candidate of true change, totally divorced from the civil rights holdovers of the 60s who are largely discredited (rightly or wrongly) in the great American middle. A possible disaster was turned into an opportunity to reinforce Obama’s brand promise.

And that was largely the story of the election, I think. A flawlessly executed brand strategy has opened a new era in American electoral politics.

Next week: the auto bailout and the Branding of Detroit.

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