Brand Marketing a Political Party: Inside the Democrats’ Fake Opposition
For the past 17 months or so, much of the US has been steeped in a continual ebb-and-flow of outrage over whatever mess was made most recently by Trump’s administration. This is partly because most US-Americans (like people anywhere else) are halfway-decent people who instinctively reject antisocial behaviors like tearing families apart and spiteful resorts to violence. Homo sapiens is a social species, after all, and such popular dismay can act as an oddly precious reminder of how persistently humane most people really are. But it provokes a question, too — why is it that policies of military aggression, mass-deportation, cronyism, unchecked police violence, and ecological suicide are suddenly facing the ‘#resistance’ when Obama, Bush, Clinton, and the like all pushed identical policies for decades? Did millions really change their views on these issues in early 2017? A more-likely explanation can be found in the astonishingly successful use of brand marketing by the major US political parties.
#Resistance by Democrats™ — ‘America’s Viable Opposition Party’
Electoral politics and marketing share a lot of in common — in both cases, the idea is to use a range of psychological tactics to influence a population’s behavior to achieve a desired result. The goal may be for them to buy a product or to support political causes and candidates but, in essence, the job descriptions are the same. The cool thing about marketing is that its methods are fairly well-known compared to career politics, which are much less transparent. Sometimes, the best way to study politics is to not study politics — instead, study how brand marketing works and the politics follow.
Politically-Useful Concepts in Brand Marketing
In 2004, the personal-care brand Dove began its Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, seemingly in defiance of the beauty industry’s tradition of marketing products by preying on women’s self-esteem. The relevant media praised the marketing initiative, which included not just the garden-variety print, video, or billboard ads but also photo-exhibits, workshops, and even a play. As Dove Skin’s VP put it, the goal was:
“To make women feel comfortable in the skin they are in, to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence and not anxiety”
But whose goal was it, exactly? In the end, a brand’s success profits its owner and Dove is owned by the multinational consumer-goods corporation Unilever. Does Dove deserve support for siding with women harmed by absurd beauty-standards promoted by competing brands even though a lot of these brands are, like Dove, merely part of Unilever’s portfolio? Buying Dove’s products to support its goal for women to “feel comfortable in the skin they are in” seems great — but the money might as well have been spent on Fair and Lovely, a skin-whitening product Unilever markets to dark-skinned girls in 36 countries. For Unilever’s shareholders, it makes no difference.
Umbrellas & Multibranding
The marketing term for Unilever’s approach is multi-branding, a strategy used for taking a bigger share in markets where companies already own an established brand. As it profited off Dove’s fight against advertisers’ distorted portrayals of women, Unilever quietly raked in cash with ads that overtly sexualized and objectified women to sell brands like Axe and Lynx. To be clear, this does not make the issues raised by the campaign less important — it does, however, call into question the sincerity of the private interests benefited by the ads and whether loyalty to their brand is truly an effective way to combat toxic beauty standards.
‘Flanker’ & ‘Fighter’ Brands
Despite already owning the successful detergent brand Tide, the multinational Proctor & Gamble launched a second detergent branded as Cheer — a flanker brand. Bigger firms often use this maneuver to protect an established brand from startups trying to lure customers away from existing brands by offering a similar product at lower prices. A flanker does the same thing but, since it is owned by the same company, it poses no threat to the established brand. A fighter brand is similar but with one distinction — flankers hold down a strategic segment in the market to lock out new competition but fighters are designed to sandbag an existing one.
Form & Substance: The Political Party Brand
Brands tap into how people express identity. Most people know that buying Dove soap is unlikely to alter how ads depict women but, despite the attention to Unilever’s hypocrisy by the press, the ads associated the brand with something people wanted to identify with and sales took off. The contradiction of the brand’s empowered appearance and its dubious ownership vanished. Beneath the dazzling form, substance is obscured.
The ‘resistance’ — or, more precisely, anti-Trumpist — movement reveals a deep inconsistency in how partisan factions in the US respond to perceived changes in policy. If it is assumed that the major parties represent worldviews rooted in differing political values, such discrepancy is hard to make sense of. Thinking of them as brand-based organizations (rather than value-based) seems to offer the better explanation.
The Democrats™ Brand vs. Actual Democratic Policy
If democratic resistance to mass-deportations was value-based, one would expect to see similar opposition as Obama deported more people than all his predecessors for the previous century combined. Looking at presidential democrats’ past immigration policy, it is hard to imagine how anyone would think the people deported by Trump’s regime would fare better if the nation had voted blue. And long before Obama was deporter-in-chief, it was Clinton who signed 1996’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, criminalizing the undocumented and giving broad authority to the Department of Homeland Security to construct border-walls. Policies like Trump’s would be impossible without the statutory framework Clinton’s administration provided.
And sadly immigration policy is not the only instance where the democrats’ brand is contradicted by political reality.
#Resistance: the Democratic Party’s Fighter Brand
Setting aside Trump’s cringey style and sleazy but apolitical personal traits, no part of his overall political agenda differs fundamentally from the one democrats pursue. In fact, a lot of what anti-Trumpists seem to resist is the same policy-framework embraced by Clintonist democrats that drove Sandernistas to revolt against their party. Policy that legalizes corruption, decays civil liberties, guts social benefits, ignores the climate crisis, militarizes racist policing institutions, legitimizes a permanent bloodthirsty state of war — democrats beat Trump to all of that. Mr. Tiny-Hands is just a manager.
Just as Unilever’s advertising alchemy transmuted the desire to abolish standards of beauty set by industro-patriarchs into revenue from hair-product-sales, democrats turn collective yearning for social progress into money and power. Their #resistance brand functions in a way that closely resembles a fighter brand launched to undermine progressive challengers that threaten the party from the left. In 2016, both parties lost control over their bases to challengers who appealed to popular discontent with politics-as-usual and, while the republicans failed to crush their revolt, democrats regained control of their party — barely. While the GOP is reduced to negotiating with their challenger in hopes of a buyout, democrats have a shot at maintaining dominance in their side of the electoral ‘market.’
How the Democratic Marketing Strategy Works
For obvious reasons, the Democratic Party modeled its faux-progressive #resistence brand after the grassroots challenger that arose around the Sanders campaign. Launching its own signature brand of grassroots opposition lets the party draw supporters from the progressive and leftist groups with more radical potential, while also building DNC-funded organizations whose support would be needed by future progressive movements.
Meanwhile, ‘liberal’ news-media aggressively brands the DNC’s flagship product as the ‘ethical’ party by criticizing Trump’s big arms-deals (nevermind that Obama peddled more weapons than any post-WWII president or that Clinton’s USA was also #1 in global weapons-exports); as the party with ‘compassion’ for immigrants (nevermind the IIRIRA or Obama setting the record for most deportations); as the party of integrity (nevermind their equally-shady donors); as the party that stands up for workers (nevermind their opposition to a living wage); as the party that you can have a beer with.
But the truth is that Trump is the best marketing tool democrats could have possibly asked for — and they know it. By portraying the barbaric but routine political events of Trump’s presidency as an all-out assault on a vague alternative presumably represented by the democrats, the partisan news-media uses the public’s genuine outrage to brand them as the ‘opposition party.’ The real problem with Trump is not that he’s a walking version of capitalism’s late-stage failure or that his cabinet is ruthlessly utilizing the savage framework that both parties gifted them — the real issue is that people seem to think Trump’s policies are unusual.
But they’re not.
In solidarity,
John Laurits
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First published at www.JohnLaurits.com
