Lipstick on a pig

CPAC was this weekend – don’t feel bad, Chris Christie, I wasn’t invited either. CPAC is the annual convention/pep rally held by conservatives, and it gets a lot of attention from the media because it’s an early opportunity to identify the rising stars in the Republican Party. And there’s not much a media talking head loves more than being able to say “I TOTALLY called the Rand Paul ascendency back in 2009 when you all were still on Bobby Jindal.”

CPAC is fascinating because it’s so focused on the die-hard party faithful. By contrast, the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions – while still pep rallies – have to function as an introduction of candidates and policy ideas to voters who aren’t hyper-partisan. They have to smooth the extremes.

Not CPAC. NOTHING gets moderated here. It’s just pure unadulterated conservative id for three days, and on camera. It’s like Almost Famous for people who’ve never seen marijuana in person. Sarah Palin mean-girling the mayor of New York City? A panel on why we’re not racists turning into a discussion about how slaverywasn’t really that bad? Mitt Romney? It’s all happening!

But for me the most interesting development of the weekend was the unveiling of RNC Chair Reince Priebus’s plan to rebrand the GOP and focus on outreach to minorities. Since this is part of what I do for a living, and since marketing is one of those things everyone thinks they know how to do, I have a great deal of experience with people who throw around words like “brand” without totally understanding them. So I’m always a little skeptical… But I actually agree with Priebus that the GOP needs to do a much better job of presenting itself. And it seems that they’re going about it the way one should. They’re not just coming up with a new logo and calling it a day. (For the last time – branding =/= logo.)

For the moment, I don’t buy the narrative that the GOP is foundering. Here in North Carolina we just elected exactly the second Republican governor in my lifetime, and Republicans won the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in a century. While Romney lost, and a few Senate races didn’t go the GOP’s way, they still control the House and a majority of governerships. They still got to oversee the last round of redistricting. But Priebus is looking at what his party will face 20 years from now, which is a good thing.

In a nutshell… Marketing is essentially about differentiation. Why do I buy this widget and not that widget? A lot of factors go into making that decision, and their weight varies depending on the product you’re talking about. For instance, if you’re buying window cleaner, price might be the most important thing you consider – the cheaper the better. But when you’re buying a car seat for your newborn, you’re probably going to focus less on price and more on the safety rating.

“Brand” is more about how buying this widget makes you feel. I tend to use the term “positioning” because it’s a word people can actually understand (unlike “brand,” the meaning of which no two marketing people can agree on). What’s your widget’s position in the market of all similar widgets? Is it the Best Widget (According to Consumer Reports)? The Yuppie Widget? The Quirky Widget? The Who Cares, it was the Cheapest Widget? And the best way to find out how people feel about your product – and therefore why they decide to buy or not buy it – is to ask them.

So I was pleased to see that the RNC had conducted focus groups. I’ve done focus groups, and it can be pretty humbling to hear what people truly think of you – sometimes negative, sometimes even based on inaccurate information. But you need to hear it. Today Priebus said that it was “painful” to learn from focus groups that they thought of the GOP as being the party of “stuffy old guys.” I’m sure that it was, and I’m sure that he was at least a little tempted to run into the focus group session screaming “MARCO RUBIO! NIKKI HALEY! PAUL RYAN IS ONLY 42!!!” (Oh wait! He did – only on national television.)

But here’s where Priebus and I disagree… or at least where I’m hoping he was merely spinning his heart out this morning. Romney didn’t lose last November because he didn’t communicate well enough. Women didn’t turn practically wholesale against Republicans because of Todd Akin’s one little bad interview. Latino voters didn’t stand in line to vote against Romney because they didn’t “get” the GOP policies on immigration – it’s because they DID.

Here’s the thing about brand. It may be nebulous or hard to articulate or intensely individual, but it also needs to be accurate. In other words, marketing that emphasizes brand needs to match the experience of actually using that product. There’s a reason no one markets full-sized pickup trucks to Brooklyn hipsters. There’s a reason you’ll never hear a Taylor Swift song in an Apple ad.

Remember the “Mad Men” episode where a dog food company’s sales plummeted when it came out that they used horse meat in their recipe? The solution was to change the name of the company to wipe away all the bad publicity and start fresh. Well, yeah… but also stop putting horse meat in your dog food.

If the RNC wants to appeal to minority voters and younger voters of any race, communication isn’t the problem. Substance is the problem. As long as Priebus represents a party that is hostile to people who aren’t white and/or have vaginas, and doesn’t acknowledge basic truths about economics, foreign policy, history and how science works, all the outreach in the world means nothing. Successful rebranding is about informing the public that you’ve changed – which means you actually need to change. And no, slapping a trendier shade of lipstick on your pig doesn’t count.

Reince – I know as a Democrat that I should be rooting for y’all to keep doing exactly what you’re doing. But as an American I can’t do that. This country needs functioning parties to refine policy ideas, because it’s only through competition of philosophies that we’ll develop something that actually works. We need gun-owning farmers and loft-dwelling freelance graphic designers, Pentacostal ministers and atheists, oligarchs and welfare moms to talk to each other and find what works for all of us, even if none of us get our way 100 percent. That’s how our system is supposed to function, and it only can do so if both sides are bringing serious ideas to the table.

So, Reince – don’t take from this process of self-examination that what you really need to do is spend more money manipulating voters more effectively. Maybe shift a little – not the message, but the substance. Stop putting horse meat in your dog food and see what happens.