{"id":628,"date":"2010-08-30T04:25:26","date_gmt":"2010-08-30T11:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=628"},"modified":"2010-08-30T11:46:50","modified_gmt":"2010-08-30T18:46:50","slug":"brand-personality-and-brand-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=628","title":{"rendered":"Brand personality and brand Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s see.\u00a0 Eighteen months ago President Obama’s public approval ratings are through the roof.\u00a0 Today, not so much.<\/p>\n

What happened?<\/p>\n

Others have written about policy, the economy, and the politics of it all.\u00a0 I wonder about how all that can be viewed from the perspective of brand.\u00a0 So I combed through the files and pulled up a structure from our friends at Leo Burnette<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Burnette’s brand structure is simple.\u00a0 There are three components:\u00a0 brand personality, brand promise, and brand essence.\u00a0 The brand personality is the part that helps a person ‘relate’ to the brand.\u00a0 That is, it is what led to those hideous questions in focus groups like, “if Dove soap were a famous person, what type of famous person would that be?”<\/p>\n

Then there’s the brand promise.\u00a0 The brand promise is the value statement.\u00a0 Ir addresses the specific thing that the brand will do for you.\u00a0 It is the ‘what is in it for me’\u00a0 part of the brand.\u00a0 Most often this is captured in the tagline.\u00a0 I buy a BMW and I get the ultimate driving machine.\u00a0 I buy Panasonic and I am one a step ahead.\u00a0 I drink a Coke and get the real thing.<\/p>\n

And yes.\u00a0 Most brands don’t actually keep their promises.<\/p>\n

Finally there is brand essence.\u00a0 That is the emotional thing.\u00a0 It is the Disney magic.\u00a0 It is the Nieman Marcus return policy.\u00a0 The service at a Ritz Carlton.\u00a0 The reliability of a Honda.\u00a0 This is the hardest one to pull off because it is supposed what people ‘feel’ when they interact with the brand.<\/p>\n

Let’s apply them to brand Obama.\u00a0 First, the brand promise.\u00a0 It is a good place to start because, by definition, a political figure’s brand promise is not going to appeal to everyone.\u00a0 It is the reason we have Republicans and Democrats.\u00a0 Delivering on his brand promise — which President Obama reminds people that he is doing — is not just something people won’t relate to (a common problem among package and service brands) but is something that Republicans will hate.<\/p>\n

Now let’s go to the brand personality.\u00a0 Seems that the Obama brand personality seems to be rubbing Democrats the wrong way<\/a>.\u00a0 What once was the everyman presidency is now being seen by many liberal Democratic activists as effete, elitist, and arrogant.<\/p>\n

Which leave us with the brand essence.\u00a0 The emotional element.\u00a0 And there the brand Obama has serious competitive and circumstantial challenges.\u00a0 It is hard to keep excitement about “hope” when employment flirts with double digits and every morning you click on the Dow Jones to see if your retirement fund is still there.\u00a0 (Not that any President can do much about it …)<\/p>\n

My read is that it is the brand personality that has suffered most and is the key to brand Obama’s revival.\u00a0 The President can’t change who he is – a Democrat – and therefore the promise is set.\u00a0 Nor can the President do much to change the macro picture of two wars and an economy that daily veers drunkenly on the knife’s edge of a cataclysmic abyss.<\/p>\n

But by most people’s read, there is work to be done on how people relate to him as a person.\u00a0 The personality of his brand that was built on a certain populism.\u00a0 An appeal to a ‘higher calling’.\u00a0 It wasn’t divisive or bitter.\u00a0 It was both reasonable and aspirational.<\/p>\n

Not an easy thing to do when folks are calling into question just about everything in your life — from where you were born to your faith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s see.\u00a0 Eighteen months ago President Obama’s public approval ratings are through the roof.\u00a0 Today, not so much. What happened? Others have written about policy, the economy, and the politics of it all.\u00a0 I wonder about how all that can be viewed from the perspective of brand.\u00a0 So I combed through the files and pulled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,55],"tags":[153,158,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":633,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}