Progressives and Democrats: Assert Your Brand!
Politics is all about branding. And brands are not about issues or details - they're about identity. When progressives and Democrats think of how Bush voters understand the word "Republican," they assume these folks are thinking "pro-life"; "moral values"; privatization and deregulation; "free trade"; lower taxes; and stripping power from what Republicans call "special interests," like labor unions and groups advocating rights for women, gays, and other minorities. But that's not the picture average Americans think of when they hear the words "Republican" or "conservative." Instead, like any good brand, the words "Republican" and "conservative" evoke feelings as much as pictures. The main feeling is one of identity: "My tribe." The main picture is the brand's logo - the American flag. At a deeper level, they carry pictures, stories, and feelings of NASCAR, Budweiser, the American flag, "standing tough" and "standing tall" in the world, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Not only are most Republican voters largely unaware of the details of the issues facing our nation, studies show that most are badly misinformed. In some part this is the fault of the media, but the larger reason is that when a person has bonded to a brand, it becomes part of their identity. They then develop a psychologically sophisticated and largely unconscious internal system to filter out and reject contradictory information. Progressives, liberals, and Democrats have failed to apply this simple reality, and therefore have allowed conservatives to define our brands for us. The very sophisticated effort to do this has been led by Gingrich, Luntz, and Limbaugh, three men who understand the psychology of branding, and have used it to sell the Republican party and the word "conservative" to Americans with all the zeal - and all the cash - used by other famous brands like Coke, Levi's, and Wal-Mart. This is not rocket science, and it's not a secret. There's an entire industry devoted to teaching these concepts (in which I worked for two decades). So why haven't progressives and Democrats figured this out? We're still letting cons define our brand for us, and they're still doing it aggressively. [more] At this point it seems that all Reeps have is this Brand. After you get passed abortion and gay marriage these folks stand for nothing.