The Problem with the Democrats’ New Brand
By Kirk Cheyfitz and Liz Manne
A new story, by itself, can’t close the gap between the party’s promises and America’s reality.
The day after the Capitol riot, with the American experiment seeming close to its expiration date, Congress certified Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory and the Democratic Party immediately began worrying.
Distressed by losses in the House (13 seats), slimmer-than-anticipated gains in the Senate (4 seats) and modest-but-depressing increases in Republican control of state legislatures, the Democrats’ leadership fretted about their future and decided the party needed a “rebranding.” More than one major effort to work on the party’s brand is now underway.
We’re worried, too, because we fear the Democrats misunderstand what a brand is, and are about to rewrite the story they’re telling without making matching changes in the product they’re selling. If the current effort to retell the party’s story is like past efforts, it’s based on the notion that a brand is nothing more than the claims it makes in TV ads. This ignores the reality that brands have an actual existence beyond marketing, myth-making, and storytelling.
If you’re branding potato chips, it’s immediately obvious that it’s not good when the brand’s crispy and delicious claims — the “brand promise” — are inconsistent with the “brand experience” of eating chips that taste like damp drywall. It’s far more treacherous when the brand promise is freedom, justice, equality, and prosperity, while the brand experience for most is painful injustice, obscene inequality, and a constant struggle to survive. In the potato chip business, untrue claims are called “false advertising” and can be subject to criminal penalties. In politics, claims untethered from reality are variously called “false claims,” or “lies,” or “disinformation,” all of which are legal.
When experience consistently fails to match political storytelling, the result is disillusionment, anger, and, eventually, rage, often followed by violence.
America’s wide, wide gap between political promises and people’s real experiences started, of course, before the country’s birth. It is a feature of every party’s performance, not just Democrats’. In a 1959 essay titled “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South,” James Baldwin says, “Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began.” Baldwin was focused on America’s lethal hostility toward providing Black people the freedom that the nation had promised to all at its inception. History shows that America’s treatment of Black people has been particularly egregious, but the promise of freedom and equality has amounted to disinformation for most Americans of all races, creeds, and genders.
The “standard of human freedom” Baldwin referenced is found in the Declaration of Independence, which tells a story based on the promise that in America “all men are created equal” — a promise that was self-evidently disingenuous and that Baldwin understood to be an illusion.
For our purposes, you can think of the Declaration as America’s first political ad — a brand promise from Thomas Jefferson’s not-yet-formed Republican-Democratic Party. It was a recruitment ad crafted to appeal to the common people of the colonies who had fled a long history of inequality in Europe, where the nobles had everything and the people had nothing. It was meant to persuade people to sign up for the Revolution, and it worked. This promise of equality was quickly abandoned once the Revolution was won and America was freed from the rule of King George III. The concept of equality does not appear in the Constitution and, over the past two-and-a-half centuries, “equality” has never matched up with most people’s experience of life in America.
When experience consistently fails to match political storytelling, the result is disillusionment, anger, and, eventually, rage, often followed by violence. That’s where too many of the people of the United States are today. Franklin Roosevelt proposed an economic bill of rights in 1944, telling the nation that “necessitous men are not free men.” Recent research confirms, indeed, that Americans do not feel free if they can’t make ends meet; can’t afford a doctor or an education. So, if the Democrats change their story without permanently changing the experience they deliver while governing, the already profound disillusionment with government and politics will grow worse and things likely will go badly for the party, the people, and the country.
The first rule of branding says a successful brand must solve a problem or fill a need that people actually want solved or filled.
Democrats recognize they have a “brand” because strategic storytelling, developed by sophisticated corporate marketers, has entered politics, along with the modern, science-based understanding that brands are public narratives — stories co-created and co-owned by the brand and by the brand’s audience, who are labeled either “consumers” or “voters,” depending on what’s being sold. (This is a decade-old concept in corporate branding.)
The brand revolution involves a relentless focus on understanding the audience’s deepest motivations, desires, feelings, and beliefs, which are located in the unconscious. Science says our decisions — what car to buy, whether or not to vote, who and what to vote for — are formed in this unconscious realm of the mind. Polls and focus groups, the traditional mainstay of political research, cannot get at these deep motivations. People from diverse disciplines working on narrative have developed entirely new ways to research the content of people’s unconscious and use the results to shape core stories that actually have the rare power to change minds and behavior — to persuade and activate. (There are numerous citations for all this. We recommend How Customers Think, by Harvard’s Gerald Zaltman; Beyond Advertising by Wharton’s Yoram Wind and Catharine Hays; and Human Communication as Narration by USC’s Walter R. Fisher.)
Understanding the audience is critical because the first rule of branding says a successful brand must solve a problem or fill a need that people actually want solved or filled. This is the perfect imperative for making policy in a democracy. Yet, the Democrats’ branding work is focused exclusively on persuading and activating “voters” — every two to four years — to choose sides in a system, while ignoring the fact that the system isn’t solving people’s problems or providing what they want and need.
Recently, Anand Giridharadas, the gifted progressive writer, recalled urging the activist attendees at the first Obama Foundation Summit in 2017 to reach out to those with clashing beliefs and “win them over.” Delivering the opening keynote, Giridharadas said, “It isn’t enough to be right about the world you want to live in. You gotta sell it, even to those you fear.” It is emblematic of the Democrats’ problem that even someone as empathetic as Giridharadas did not mention that it’s also necessary to understand the world that others want to live in. Otherwise, there’s no chance of selling them anything.
People’s internal stories and real needs should be the starting point for policy-making, not reports from Brookings or private chats with big donors.
Democrats struggling to rebrand will want to remember that:
- Their brand narrative does not belong to them alone; it’s a co-creation with the audience;
- Policymaking cannot remain a top-down exercise for party leaders and lobbyists; instead, the source of the party’s legislative agenda should be the audience’s stories of the future world they want; and
- Changing the world is the goal, not telling a story about a changed world and certainly not just changing the story about the unchanged world.
In-depth narrative research conducted for numerous nationwide projects over the past five years reveals a broad, deep yearning for a new social contract that ensures equal treatment and a better, less fearful and anxious life for all. Even traditional research supports the fact that policies based on people’s visions of a better world can unite the kinds of large majorities necessary to make big, lasting change.
The Democratic Party’s first priority should be an all-out effort to understand the hows and whys of the world that a majority of the people feel they want and need. People’s internal stories and real needs should be the starting point for policy-making, goal-setting and change-making, not reports from Brookings or private chats with big donors. The data, research tools, and expertise to understand people’s most compelling feelings and dreams exist in the discipline of narrative research. Democrats need to understand and use these new approaches. (An excellent place to start is Harmony Labs’ “Audiences @ Narrative Observatory”.)
If the Democrats really want unity to carry us all forward to a better future, the tools exist to make it happen.
Joe Biden and his Democrats have made small starts with the American Rescue Plan, H.R.1, and the $2-trillion infrastructure proposal. There is a sense that a majority of Americans feel encouraged. But no secure, permanent changes are included in the Democrats’ plans, which seem imperiled by Senate rules anyway. All recent learning points to three obvious elements — call them guarantees or promises — that need to be fundamental brand pillars in the Democrats’ new story. Everyone knows the dreadful, unconscionable economic and social facts that make these changes necessary. Now, consider the feelings — and lived experience — that make them paramount for so many people. Imagine the commanding majorities a political party could assemble to support these guarantees. Imagine how the world would change if these promises were made and kept:
- Guaranteeing everyone an equal vote: Voting is the right on which all other rights and all claims to democracy depend. People who feel they are not being heard eventually become hopeless and desperate. Without a vote, they feel the only path to change is violence. Most Americans feel strongly that every citizen should have an equal voice in running this democracy. The Constitution and the Supreme Court disagree. The Democrats should draft, propose and begin the fight for a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing every citizen the right to an equal vote in all elections, including an end to partisan gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the awful ruling in Citizens United that equates corporate money with free speech. (Yes, we know that it’s virtually “impossible” to amend the Constitution, but we see in the data that bold moves for permanent change can create the support needed to do what is now politically impossible.)
- Guaranteeing every worker a fair share of America’s prosperity: Money is what matters most in America and to most Americans. We know the majority of Americans don’t have enough money to live decently and it isn’t because they don’t work hard. Most Americans feel deeply that they don’t matter in “a society whose measure of value revolves about money,” as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his last book. Almost universally, across party lines, people of all races, genders, and religions, with differing worldviews and value systems, have expressed the deep feeling that not having enough money means they are not free. They feel imprisoned; walled off from their dreams. Down deep, they believe the US’s record-breaking level of inequality is an intentional attack on them. The people who make America work — which is the vast majority — want a world where their lives are not a constant struggle to get by — a world with living wages, where people have a real say in the conditions they work under, and where everyone has access to truly affordable or free health care, and advanced education. The Democrats’ new brand has to guarantee economic rights and economic justice to everyone.
- Guaranteeing equal justice: Even as white supremacy has reasserted itself in America, narrative research shows that majorities of Americans long deeply for a world where everyone is accepted and is free to own and express their identities, and where these differing identities make no difference at all — where identity has zero impact on anyone’s freedom, safety, opportunities, earnings, or family life. All identities — all the variations of race, gender, religion, age, ability, sexual orientation and more — need to be lifted up, protected, and accepted. At the same time, identity politics ultimately can be counter-productive for a party that needs to unite massive majorities to make change for everybody. (Our use of “identity politics” is intended to mean exactly what it meant for the Black feminists who published the radically beautiful Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977: “Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics.”) Identity politics has been and must continue to be crucial in building confidence, agency and power within groups defined by their identities, but it is not a structure that bridges the last mile from power-building in separate groups to unifying many groups based on common needs and desires. The Democrats’ new story needs to guarantee justice for everybody, regardless of identity, starting most importantly with economic justice (See #2 above.) and including each critical element of a good life — good housing, universal education and health care, clean air and pure water for all communities, equal treatment by the cops and courts. The party has to acknowledge that the vast majority of Americans are thwarted and punished by the system that sends virtually all the country’s economic gains and political power to the wealthiest. The party’s brand story has to be located in an America that knows there’s enough for everybody in the world’s richest country. Then, the battle against discrimination will be winnable.
Joe Biden’s inaugural speech from the recently besieged Capitol sounded like something plagiarized from the Book of Revelations. “A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country,” he began. “Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making…will be deferred no longer,” he continued. “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” he added. “And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.”
It sounded like Armageddon. Biden had just one idea to stave off the end: “That most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.” Unity means “enough of us,” not all of us, Biden said. With enough of us, he predicted, we can “carry all of us forward.”
If the Democrats really want unity to carry us all forward to a better future, as the head of the party says, the tools exist to make it happen. But the Democratic brand that achieves unity won’t be merely a new story, it’ll have to be the promise of the whole new world that’s envisioned, yearned for, dreamed of, and co-created by more than enough of us.
Kirk Cheyfitz is a writer, storyteller, journalist, narrative strategist, and non-traditional marketer who now works exclusively with progressive causes and candidates. He founded and ran the path-breaking content agency Story Worldwide, working with many global clients, including Unilever, Google, Microsoft, Lexus, General Motors, Bank of America and others).
Liz Manne is a former entertainment marketing professional (HBO Films, SundanceTV, Fine Line Features, Capitol Records) who applies her expertise in storytelling and strategy to advance social change.
