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March 17, 2007
What Does The Republican Party Brand Really Stand For?
What can we tell from how we experience the actual behavior of the Republican Party about the values Republicans really stand for? We are aware of a series of beliefs that the Republican Party wishes to include in the brand it markets and sells to Americans (and the world). And, let's be clear, political parties -- like companies -- need to have clear brands in our new world of markets, networks, organizations, friends and families. The issue we're putting on the table is about how actual behavior matches those branded beliefs.
In this regard, let's review how the best organizations think about and use brand. There are three phases:
Brand Promise: Using a set of clear beliefs, the best organizations promise behavior that matches those beliefs
Brand Delivery: How the best organizations go forward with products, services, information, distribution, customer service, technology, and more to deliver against the promises made.
Brand Experience: How the customers, investors and others experience what gets delivered -- that is, whether the promise, the delivery and the actual experience match up and reinforce one another.
Recently, for example, Howard Schultz, the brand mastermind who runs Starbucks, sent a memo to his senior executives asking aloud about whether Starbucks efforts to streamline stores (and increase revenues and profits) had damaged certain key aspects of the brand promise: 'romance' and 'theater'.
By stocking prepackaged coffee and using automated machines, Schultz worried that the brand delivery shifted from the promise of 'romance' and 'theater' to the experience of -- my words -- your basic retail grocery store-like assembly line.
"Romance" and 'theater' may be difficult to deliver on in ways that create the intended customer experiences. But, if Starbucks chooses those beliefs and promises to be core to their brand promise, then, as Schultz alerts the executives, it's incumbent on Starbucks employees up and down the company and all across the world to take steps that do the best job possible of delivering against those promises.
The Republican Party has a set of core beliefs with which it has branded what it promises America. These include small government, efficient government, fiscal responsibility, family values, defending America, prosperity through individual opportunity, low taxes and so on.
But, all Americans of all political stripes -- and especially Americans who belong to the Republican Party - need to ask whether the brand delivery and brand experience match up with these brand promises.
What happens to companies can also happen to political parties -- indeed, any organization in this new world of ours. At some point, if the brand delivery and brand experience radically contradict the brand promise, then the customers (in this case, voters), the investors (in this case, contributors) and even the employees (in this case those who work and volunteer for the Republican Party) will actually look at the delivery and the experience to define the brand of the Party and not to the promises themselves.
If, for example, Starbucks fulfills Howard Schultz's worst fears and focuses so much on efficiency and profits that it's coffee -- and the experience of being in one of it's stores -- has zero to do with romance and zero to do with theater, then Starbucks will be branded by customers, investors and, again, even employees as 'just another coffee company'.
This is the reality of managing brands in a world of markets, networks, organizations, friends and families.
And this reality applies to the Repubican Party.
Many news organizations, pollsters, political professionals and other insiders can (and will) continue to monitor the Republican Party's brand solely at the level of promise. In this sense, they can report on and talk about promises, promises, promises -- as if those were -- as in the now ancient days of marketing the only thing that mattered.
But, while they are essentially just talking to themselves about tautologies ("The Republican Party stands for family values because The Republican Party stands for family values!"), an ever increasing number of voters, contributors, volunteers and employees who live in the rest of this new 'real world of markets, networks, organizations, friends and famliies' will persistently -- that is daily and weekly -- bump up against the actual delivery and experience that -- if they radically contradict the promises-- reach a tipping point that then brands the Repubican Party in ways that will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse because -- well, because promises of reversing them will sound like 'promises, promises'.
All of which is to say: Take a moment and reflect on the brand promises of the Republican Party and then ask, what do you observe about how the Party delivers on those promises as well as how you and people you know experience what the Republican Party really stands for.
Do this and, if you can put aside partisanship of any kind (pro or con) -- if you are capable of that -- then try to objectively observe: What's the current real brand of the Republican Party?
