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The President as a Food ProductAlex Gofman

If a presidential candidate were a food, what would (s)he be, and what kind of shoppers would be putting him/her in their carts? Would it be a pizza or a pickle?

This phrase might sound a bit politically incorrect, but it is actually a modified quote from an article in The New York Times written by the well-known columnist John Tierney (in the context of 2004 Presidential Election in the USA) after he learned about the authors, of the future Selling Blue Elephants book, experiments in politics. Tierney named these political experiments “supermarket,” to underscore the surprising similarity between product optimization and political messaging. The original quote was meant for George W. Bush, but the approach applies well regardless of one’s political affiliation.

Voters don’t usually think of political candidates as consumer products. The democratic heritage instills within citizenry a sense of civic pride and responsibility. But reality must intrude, of course. At some level, we recognize that, for an official to get elected, it is important to know what the citizens want, how to express these wishes, and how to create the appropriate political machinery to drive the vote. When you think of it that way, politics is not much different from product and service marketing.

Certainly, the president is promoted as a product in the media. Today’s presidential candidates hold focus groups, try to understand public opinion, and, in general, do all the things that we might expect from the astute marketer. The candidate is searching for volume—not volume of purchases, but volume of votes. The U.S. president is more or less similar to a big-ticket item purchased once every four years.

Then why not treat the president as a product to be sold to do a job? The ‘seller’ just needs to find the right marketing strategy with targeted messages for each ‘consumer group’ (constituency). If you read my previous articles in DNA, you might already be familiar with a very powerful yet simple to use business process called Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) introduced in the book Selling Blue Elephants: How to Make Great Products That People Want Before They Even Know They Want Them. RDE is widely used for reading the mindsets of the consumers and creating messages targeted to their ‘hot buttons’. In the case of political elections, RDE pinpoints messages that the candidate ought to broadcast to the public—that is, the advertising appropriate for this “president as a product.” If, in fact, we treat the candidate as a product, the job of electing a president becomes a bit easier. Simply monitor the environment, identify what issues come to the fore, let RDE discover hot buttons that drive the consumer (voter interest), and present those new ideas to candidates. Why not? And why not do so on a micro scale— say, in neighborhood after neighborhood? The Internet makes it easy, rapid, and affordable. Maybe even fun.

Let’s look at the 2004 US presidential campaign and focus on messages chosen by John Kerry and George Bush. What did they say? More important, what they should have emphasized and whether the candidates’ messages hit the best hot buttons throughout the campaign?

Let’s begin by deconstructing the candidates’ messaging at the start of his campaign: collecting the speeches at a certain time and identifying the themes and simple quotes. Content analysis works here, as long as we make every effort to keep the candidate’s words and, of course, the tonality of the message. Let’s see the results from executing the exact same RDE project once a month, on the third Wednesday, for the eight months prior to the 2004 election.

The advantage of the RDE way of thinking is that people do not have to and cannot be politically correct in their responses, which they do in direct polls or focus groups. Participants in the RDE exercise cannot figure out exactly which issue they are supposed to be responding to because each vignette comprises a combination of messages. RDE’s computerized interview tool throws a lot of information at voter participants and does so quickly, forcing participants to respond at a gut level. Then RDE picks up the pieces simply by sorting through the data to figure out which issues sway them.

For George W. Bush, we find three mind-sets of voters who would be swayed to vote for him if given the appropriate messaging. The Self- Centereds, as we called the first group, mainly wanted tax relief. The Safety Seekers cared primarily about protection from terrorism. The Better Living Standard Seekers liked hearing promises to revitalize cities, create jobs, and reduce dependence on foreign oil. What is nice about these segments is that at the same time the segments emerge, the candidate knows exactly what messages resonate with the segment. That is, by using actual messaging, RDE guides the candidate, first providing knowledge and then suggesting the specific messages. Not bad for business thinking applied to the social sector.

A few issues were tricky, even for Bush voters:
· Promises to hang tough in Iraq appealed to the Safety Seekers but turned off the other groups.
· Talk of environmental protection won over the Better Living Standard Seekers but yet made the rest less likely to vote for Mr.Bush.
· The Self-Centereds did not like hearing about health care benefits, but the other two groups did.

On the whole, though, the three groups agreed more than they disagreed. The Bush voters were generally middle-class, upwardly mobile people who responded to promises of more money and security. There were not that many polarizing issues among the Bush voters (relative to Kerry’s).

Bush reminded one of pizza: variations on a theme. Someone who would eat one kind of pizza would eat most other kinds as well, unless that person disliked the toppings.
To locate Kerry in our “supermarket”, we have to leave the pizza in the frozen-foods aisle. When we analyzed the Kerry voters, we saw something like the flavor polarization one found in pickle consumers.

· Some people like high-impact sour and garlic pickles; others hate them and like a pickle with a mild crunch. You absolutely cannot please people by giving everyone a middle-of-the-road pickle. It’s impossible when flavor segmentation shows up.
· Kerry’s overall support was about equal to Bush’s, but the voters who could be swayed to vote Democratic fall into three radically contrasting groups, sort of Kerry’s own personal flavor segments, his “political pickles.”
· Some are Improvement Seekers, whose priorities were education reform and new energy policies.
· Others are Idealists, who could be wooed with promises to fight discrimination against women and minorities, improve health care, protect abortion rights, and defend workers against corporations.
· And then there are the Issue Aversives, who were so strongly predisposed to vote for Mr. Kerry that none of his campaign promises could further strengthen their loyalty. In fact, specifics were liable to drive them away because they were turned off by some promises, such as protecting abortion rights, fighting discrimination, and reforming education. The Issue Aversives weren’t so much pro-Kerry as they were anti-Bush. The more Kerry promised the other groups, the more chance he had of offending the Issue Averse voters. It was a tough challenge for Kerry to figure out a coherent strategy that straddled the needs of very different people.


In retrospect, it is clear now that it was not that easy for each of the candidates to keep the voters in their camps. Bush had to yoke a group of ‘dogs’ that generally haul along the same path. Kerry got to harness a clutter of ‘cats’ with individual and conflicting view points. In either case, this information was readily available through RDE’s ‘scanning’ of what people were ‘buying’ or ‘shopping for’ in their political ‘supermarket’. This type of information has been proven time after time to be much more reliable compared to what people claim they like when asked directly in polls and focus groups.

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Alex Gofman is VP of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., a NY based company, and a co-author of the book Selling Blue Elephants: How to Make Great Products That People Want Before They Even Know They Want Them (www.SellingBlueElephants.com) written with Dr. Moskowitz and recently republished in India (it is also currently translated in thirteen countries). He may be contacted at alexgofman@sellingblueelephants.com