Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

This is a post that I’ve had saved for ages now, but new material just keeps on coming, but I got to publish this now otherwise this becomes a book rather than a post.

Got this interesting piece from an old friend (no link, sorry) that details the current plight of the Republican party:

From the American Prospect, a quote from David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined “axis of evil”:

Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

This war is nothing if cultural. Conservative values have received a rather big gut check these past few years, and when the economy came down due to a lack of transparency (let’s just call it that, for simplicity’s sake) and when the White House was captured by Obama (who in many ways is really the antithesis to what Republicans stand for), that was the final knockout punch. Or at least then the crisis of conservatism became all too real for many of its followers.

You could sense a certain desperation from the conservative camp when John McCain pegged Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. It felt like a last-ditch effort for the road conservatives had been traveling for a while now (social conservatism, christian values, anti-elitism, free markets and tax cuts etc.) After the election, Bill Maher commented on Larry King Live that Sarah Palin was really a crossroads candidate for the Republican party. Now that the election is over, do they follow her, with what Bill called the “folksy, the candidate I’d rather have a beer with, know-nothing” rhetoric, or do they go back to their roots of being pro business, but not necessarily anti-intellectual?

Many who were “for” conservative values before the economic meltdown (or the Iraq war etc.) will and probably have jumped ship, rediscovering themselves as Keynesians (seems almost everybody swears by Keynes nowadays) and whatnot. And I’m not just talking about swing vote behavior, there might be more total transformations of identity for some, and given how easy people assume new identities nowadays through consumption and whatnot, many will not bat an eye over this.

These newly minted liberals are an interesting group to watch, but to me the “remaining” conservatives (both politicians and citizens) are even more interesting to watch. How do people react when much of their core beliefs are now being subject to such scrutiny, or even ridicule? After the election I saw quite a few calls from within the party to reinvent itself and appear more to the center – even make a more distinct break from the Christian right. So far the party has been pulled into opposite directions. The ones who want the party to stay where it is (or where it was going) are the ones who have used the most scathing rhetoric in attacking the centrists, and of course, liberals.

The selection of Michael Steele as the head of the RNC was widely seen as an outreach to minorities and possibly a first move towards the center, even though just putting a minority in such a position might not be that effective unless Steele shows some initiative on changing the party (there’s a black guy in the White House, remember?). By the way, in a rather candid interview with GQ, Steele himself said that the Republican party had trouble attracting minorities, because they give the impression that “we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them”. In the interview he also said some things about abortion and homosexuality that got the Christian right up in arms, and he was forced to apologize and retract those comments. As a side note, his critical comments on Limbaugh earlier resulted in an apology, too, showing the anxiety of the party trying to reinvent itself.

Paul Krugman has been hammering the GOP, saying that “I’m shocked by the total intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this economic crisis. [...] I suggested a little while ago that the GOP has become the party of Beavis and Butthead, reduced to snickering at line items in legislation that sound funny.” It’s kind of like the jocks at the back of the class who used to make jokes during math class, but are now seeing that nobody’s laughing with them anymore, and people are taking math seriously.

Anti-elitism that occasionally spills into outright anti-intellectualism has been a staple of the Republican party (justly or unjustly) pretty much from the times of Ronald Reagan, it appeals to much of their (christian) base. But the current level of anti-intellectualism and populism coming from the GOP does indeed seem almost excessive. My guess is that conservative values being challenged as they are might have this kind of polarizing effect, and I guess you could see some of that in how conservatives are attacking the left now. Like in a heated argument, if you are pushed or feel threatened, you will stick to your talking points even harder – even believing in them more. How long conservatives can keep going on like this, I don’t know. Perhaps at some point Obama’s political honeymoon will be over which will give conservatives a breather, but they have to address the major question of what they are going to stand for if they want to become relevant again.

From a popular culture perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see how conservative values are going to be treated in cultural products or in advertising. My guess is that there might be some imagery not unlike the anti-yuppie stereotypes of early 90s, but also some lighthearted stereotyping of conservatism. Maybe conservatism becomes sort of a guilty pleasure for mainstream America? Maybe self-irony is the way out for conservatism? But this is a topic for another post.

But, as a last note, I leave you with this post by Tyler Cowen where he plays with the idea of a truly marginalized republican party from different angles. The lack of true, formidable opposition could spell doom for Democrats as well.

Call it being on brand or just a refreshing break from the Bush years, but when Obama openly siad that he screwed up, it gave me a pause. To me it’s a small but very important gesture from the new administration that there’s a new way of doing business. It’s going to be interesting to see when Obama’s example will start to catch on in the business world, as Fast Company is predicting.

Of course, if you’re operating in the web 2.0 world you feel that this type of openness and new leadership is almost old news. But big business doesn’t work like that, and only a scant few business leaders (A.G. Lafley at P&G for one) have “gotten it” so far. As the president of the United States, Obama is a such a strong icon of leadership and example, that the rest of the management world might finally take note.

If you live in Helsinki and have NOT been hiding under a rock the past few months or so, you most likely have heard of Carrotmob finding its way here. In short: Carrotmob is basically a group of people negotiating a deal with any kind of business to pledge to allocate a certain amount of money to green initiatives from the extra sales generated by Carrotmobbers “rushing” the store. The rationale is that firms will do anything for money, so let’s use this as a positive force to make business more green. Hence the term Carrotmob; it’s more carrot than stick. Here in Helsinki Carrotmob was initiated by Roope Mokka of Demos Helsinki fame.

The first Finnish Carrotmobbing event was held successfully in a bar called Juttutupa (“Chatter Lodge”, freely translated) this weekend. The event grossed over 6000€ in extra profits for the participating bar, and half of that will go to investments to make the bar more energy friendly. All in all, the first Carrotmob was a resounding success.

What I think has been missing from all the articles on Carrotmob is the WHY, as in why this kinds of things appeal to people. In a very short time, Carrotmob Helsinki’s Facebook group has attracted nearly 5000 members, a remarkable feat. But what drives people to initiatives like this?

Every now and then you will read politicians cry out that young people are no longer interested in politics (as it’s defined) in Finland and that this is a “crisis” of epic proportions. Just today Finland’s main newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that “in 2030 under 50% of people will vote in county elections”. Not only is that an asinine prediction to make 12 years in advance (what did they do, draw a regression line from the current voting numbers? did these people also predict the rise of 1960s radicalism in the mellow 1950s?), but also so missing the point. What most politicians and other pundits fail to realize, that it’s the definition of politics that’s in crisis, not the youth.

Being politically active means more than just getting of the couch every two years to drop a piece paper into a ballot box. I think it’s astounding that the Baby Boomers, who themselves were so rebellious and active in shaping their way of doing politics (especially in universities), fail to see that younger generations want to find their own way of political activism – just like the Baby Boomers back in their time. Why should they get to be rebellious and daring in politics, where as “we” have to follow the path they laid out for us? Today’s youth engage in politics via graffiti, squatting abandoned houses, buying ethical products and donating to organizations like Amnesty International or Greenpeace, and spreading “causes” on Facebook. Members of Generation Y, the Internet generation, see the world’s problems as global, and the three major Finnish parties can’t provide credible answers in this regard. Also, special interests and consensus politics don’t really appeal to young people, who obsess over authenticity and idealism.

Of course, the powers that be are also doing a great job of alienating young people on issues they DO care about in modern politics. Tommi Uschanov had a great accord in his provocative book “What’s wrong with the Left?” (In Finnish) how a total lack of understanding and involvement in copyright and proposed internet censorship legislation (I won’t go into details here but let’s just say that it has been rather awful) left many young people feeling even more disconnected and outright disregarded in preparation of the laws. Also, keep in mind that Baby Boomers are by far the biggest generational segment in Finland and they are grossly over-represented in parliament, so it’s no wonder topics that concern young people don’t pop up too often.

All of this of course leads to a fair amount of tension and cultural fodder for counterculture. The youth have always rebelled against the establishment, but the way the establishment has failed to understand how young people are reshaping the way politics are made and disregarded the young in issues important to them has only made this tension stronger. This is where initiatives like Carrotmob strike a major nerve: they don’t have ANYTHING to do with party politics, they are authentic and accessible.

Of course, pretty much immediately after the first even was over the murmurs started that the it wasn’t “done right” (the participating restaurant used the money on new coolers, does that count as green?) or that the event got too much hype. Like I said, it’s damn hard to do politics with a group of people that are obsessed with authenticity.

I must admit, I’m not personally a fan of the idea of saving the world through consuming MORE, which in many ways this is. But I guess Carrotmob does a lot more good than harm.

On one hand, McCain’s decision to pick Sarah Palin as his vice president candidate was a genius marketing move. The Obama camp was telling a story about political change, and how John McCain would bring more of the same tried politics. People – especially in the Obama camp – were expecting McCain to pick a Mitt Romney or a Mike Huckabee for VP, and that would have fit the story of “more of the same”.

But McCain took that punchline away with one swift stroke. He changed the story.

For the next few days, people will concentrate less on “more of the same” but more on “bold choice”. If the story you’re telling isn’t working, tell a new story. And this is what makes this choice of VP a great marketing move. Kinda like running a great AD that gets a lot of buzz.

But the question is, where does the story go from here? Meaning what happens when the ad has run its course and people get to actually see the product. This is where this story turns into a potential marketing disaster. As some pundits have already noted, she’s unknown, woefully unqualified and a total mismatch for liberal Hillary voters, the voters she was presumably going to fetch. She also puts a damper on any accusations about Obama’s inexperience, the “other” story the republicans had going.

She’s a bold and very risky choice, but then again, a safe choice would have been playing right to the hands of the Obama camp.

We’ll see how the story goes from here.