Political messaging: Can Democrats come up with a name-call better than ‘weird’?

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A fundamental principle of marketing is to use brands to distinguish products in a crowded marketplace, develop strong and favorable associations among customers and potential customers, and extend them to other products and market segments. That is, brands are a vehicle to develop a familiar and favorable identity that is portable.

The notion of branding is germane to political markets as well. Candidates and parties use principles of branding to develop familiar and favorable identities for themselves, but also seek to define their competitors with unfavorable identities, a tactic that is not employed in commercial markets. It is natural for marketers of Coke to promote its positive features, but less natural for them to denigrate Pepsi. Meanwhile in political markets, candidates routinely emphasize their positive attributes and denigrate their opponent. For instance, over the years, Republicans have embraced national defense, fiscal probity and patriotism as their positive attributes, and have disparaged Democrats as “tax-and-spend” profligates with loose morals. Democrats have attempted, less successfully in my opinion, to brand Republicans as catering to plutocrats and insensitive to the plight of marginalized communities.

This background helps in an analysis of recent political campaigns. The “Make America Great Again” slogan adopted by the Trump/Pence campaign in 2016 was marketing genius because it captured a distinct identity, including an appeal to nostalgia that is particularly attractive to conservatives, and spoke powerfully to politically unaffiliated voters and independents — the uninformed, the uninvolved and the undecided. Who wouldn’t want to make America great? Therefore the brand was portable. By comparison, one is hard-pressed to recall what the Clinton/Kaine campaign’s branding was that year. (It was “Stronger Together,” a phrase that was neither particularly memorable nor portable.)

In political markets, it is this element of portability that distinguishes a brand from a “name call.” For instance, “Lyin’ Ted” and “Lil’ Marco,” epithets employed against Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, do not travel well. Once attached to an individual or entity, it is difficult to extend these name calls beyond that individual. Similarly, “Crooked Hillary” was effective at associating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a long-running campaign of smears about her integrity and her truthfulness. And “Sleepy Joe” was an effective branding of President Joe Biden as old. But neither of these terms were likely to attract new voters. To attract new voters, the brand has to extend its meaning to convey benefits to these new voters.

The current attempt by Democrats and Harris campaign surrogates — most notably Gov. Tim Walz — to brand former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as “weird” is not particularly portable. It has many attractive features including being catchy, not derogatory (unlike “deplorables”) and thus amusing, as well as it’s potential to go viral (which it has done). And precisely because it is not portable, calling the candidates “weird” does not imply that their supporters are being called weird, contrary to some recent punditry. (I should also note that the term “weird” was earlier used apropos Trump by former President George W. Bush, to describe the Trump inaugural speech — “That was some weird shit,” he is reported to have said). Additionally, calling Trump a convicted felon falls flat because the information is not new and provides him the opportunity to paint himself as a martyr.

So, if a political campaign is to attempt to brand the opposition successfully, it must adhere to two principles: The brand should “stick,” i.e., be memorable and yield unfavorable associations that energize the base, and it should be portable, bringing in new, persuadable voters whose malleable preferences can be influenced. In the current political environment, it should appeal to the “double haters.” I thought Biden attempted to do this when he called Trump a “loser” to thunderous applause. Because in political markets, the brand “loser” has three attractive features:

(1) People don’t like to be associated with losing brands. (K-Mart suffered substantially following the memorable Dustin Hoffman line in “Rain Man.”) Post-election, losing candidates’ yard signs come down quicker than those of winning candidates.

(2) There is enormous evidence supporting the brand’s claim that Trump is a loser. A short list of things he has lost include Trump Airlines; Trump Vodka; the Taj Mahal casino; Trump Steaks; Trump University; $83.3 million; the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections; a vice president, and so on.

(3) Perhaps more important, the term “loser” travels well because of a principle in behavioral economics called “loss aversion.” People hate to lose more than they like to win, as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman famously demonstrated. Therefore, should the Harris campaign extend the term “loser” and pivot to alerting persuadable voters to the things they will lose under a Trump administration, the brand would travel readily and address market segments about specific losses they might wish to avoid. Here is a short list:

• Women will lose the freedom to choose, something that should resonate with women, and men who know women (have a wife, a daughter, a sister or a mother);

• Seniors will lose Social Security, something that should resonate with seniors and their children;

• We all stand to lose Obamacare, something that should resonate with all who benefit from it and those who wish their fellow citizens good health care;

• LGBTQ+ people will lose the freedom to marry, something that should resonate with that population as well as people who know and care for that population;

• We all stand to lose our planet to climate change, something that should resonate particularly with young people in Sun Belt states watching hurricanes, forest fires and heat waves firsthand; and

• We will lose the right to vote, something that should resonate particularly with African American citizens.

In sum, Republicans have historically employed branding with an enviable level of sophistication and skill. The “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” and “flip-flopper” branding of Sen. John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, effectively branded his service record to be a negative attribute. The “Make America Great Again” branding leveraged Trump’s business credentials and effectively silenced talk about his several bankruptcies. Time and strategic choices employed by the Harris campaign will tell whether “weird” or “loser” is the more effective branding strategy for Democrats in the 2024 campaign.

Akshay R. Rao holds the General Mills Chair in Marketing and is chairperson of the marketing department at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. His latest book, “Patient,” is available at https://www.profakshayrao.com