These days, politics and current events weigh heavily on my thoughts. Perhaps you find yourself feeling similarly. Since I try to avoid writing about political topics on this blog, the nature of current events kind of puts a damper on other topics rising to the level of a blog post. Recently though, there's been an interesting aspect of politics that keeps reminding me of important marketing themes, so I thought I would share some thoughts.
In many ways, political candidates and elections are similar to the product marketplace. Candidates position themselves and their ideas, they try to differentiate themselves from the others on the market, and an election is a kind of purchase decision. Viewed through that lens, you can learn some interesting lessons about politics
One of the great themes of political positioning is this idea that candidates start out with more extreme, polarizing positions -- essentially, strong differentiation in certain areas -- particularly in the primary elections, then "move towards the center" as they move toward a general election. This softening of their positions is, theoretically, designed to expand their audience as they approach a more common denominator.
But there's a fundamental problem with this approach; the epitome of center, the lowest common denominator is boring.
In a somewhat broader framing of this process, the candidate is a supposed to build a broader appeal by not having any elements that might serve as barriers to people liking them -- the, "I don't see anything that I don't like about this candidate, so I'll vote for them" notion.
The reality is that products don't work this way, and I don't think that candidates actually succeed this way either. Nobody chooses a product because they believe that it's mediocre or that it's the least objectionable. Safe, qualified candidates frequently lose to incompetent candidates who can build excitement around themselves, positions they hold, or issues they're trying to advance.
Perhaps the easiest example to reference was the California governor election between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis. While Davis was more experienced in government processes and arguably more competent, Schwarzenegger was able to leverage his celebrity status and generate excitement around the issue of the "car tax", vehicle registration fees.
Exciting products and new ideas are risky. While it can be really easy to find people to tear down or minimize a new approach, it's easy to underestimate the appeal of some of these ideas. For example, consider when New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about a 70% tax on income above $10 million. While there was some outrage raised about the idea in the media, when polled, they found that 59% of people supported the idea. What's more, that support spanned many traditionally perceived political demographic borders.
The Problem with "Electability"
Another related political concept is the idea of electability. This concept is often used in an effort to drive this positional shift toward the lowest common denominator. It's also used to skew the true market-nature of some primary elections, pushing voters to try and select the candidate that they think that most other people would be willing to vote for, rather than selecting who they think is the best.
At the core, the problem with this is when people try to make calculations based on what they think that other people think.
Instead of thinking of electability in terms of specific candidates or perceived "reasons why some larger group the electorate might not vote for a specific candidate", it might be better to think about this in product terms. Often, electability is that pre-judgement of a product's marketability, usually wrapped in FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). It's like the thinking that says that the iPhone will fail because it doesn't have a physical keyboard, that people really want a physical keyboard. It's the kind of thinking that speculates people won't buy iPhones because they don't have user-serviceable batteries. What we know from history is that, when it came to buying iPhones, these factors didn't keep people from buying iPhones.
Similarly, perhaps you remember when people said nobody cared about what color their computer was -- you could pick any color, as long as it was beige. When the iMac came out, suddenly color mattered. Suddenly, the external design of the personal computer mattered. And, for a period of time, color was important. Then, as many computer manufacturers began copying Apple and making color computers, color became less important again. In the context of electability, just because something used to seem important or exciting, it doesn't mean that it's still an influential consideration.
What's more, when you think about those products that tried to leverage 'tired' features to help sell their product, there were probably a few seemingly knowledgeable product marketers who thought the idea was good enough and important enough to have it included in the product. These people knew -- or thought that they knew -- what the market wanted, and they got it wrong. They over-weighted the significance of a feature (or features) and the product failed.
Anyway, that's probably enough on this political topic for a while.
