Brands are sticky. Visceral reactions, emotions, gut instincts, what was spinning in your head the last time you were exposed to the brand — all have much more to do with how you respond to that brand than intellectual thought. That’s the mistake too many people make when it comes to PR and marketing: it’s the feeling, stupid, not the thought. And that’s the problem Barack Obama has right now and, unfortunately, for quite some time to come.

When it comes to marketing (and politics is the ultimate in marketing) feelings trump intellectualizing every time. People feel a brand. They feel a candidate. Relatively little deductive reasoning enters into their personal equation. And what they feel is the sum of lots of different feelings felt at different times. Permanently added into the sum of feelings people have toward the Barack Obama brand are the controversial words of his former pastor. For many people, that’s not going away. For them, it will color, at least a bit, how they forever view Barack Obama even if they forget all about Rev. Wright.

The big problem for Barack Obama? Brands are sticky. You can’t intellectualize away what sticks to a brand. That’s how the Obama team is trying to deal with the Rev. Wright problem. That’s all they can do, and they are doing it very well. Problem is, brands are sticky — for months to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 6:46 am and is filed under Politics, Race and Ethnicity, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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