Obama and the superbranding of politics

January 25th, 2010

My god Naomi Klein takes me back – No Logo is up there for anyone who is remotely interested in brands. And were I to draw up a time line of books I have read and how each book subsequently shaped my thinking – No Logo is at the start.

Here in this powerful piece on brands, marketing and politics Klein forces us to consider once again the power of brands, and their intersection with; truth, trust and ethics. The ability for a brand to shape a message to create a perspective and desire and then treat that as a ‘truth’ is well documented here. For me, Tony Blair and the branding of the Iraq War springs to mind.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his “Yes We Can!” slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is “big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy”. And then their highest compliment: “Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player.”

And, this may not be popular – in fact I hope its not true.

Yet rereading No Logo after 10 years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realise that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street’s addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?

But can you fix a broken system? In No Straight Lines I argue that we are indeed in the toxic tail end of the industrial society. The breakdown is systemic. Klein worries deeply that the biggest risk is that people respond with deep cynicism particularly she writes, ‘among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics.’

But perhaps she concludes, ‘Obamamania will end up being what the US president’s advisers like to call “a teachable moment”. The moment when The Prez and his staff realise the system is broken – and then someone has to press the Reboot button. Then Klein touches on a point that I have obsessed over in the last 15 months – that we are in fact in the process of rebooting the system. Which is what No Straight Lines explores, how do we reboot the system? What is the framework by which we need to rebuild this world? Where do we look? How do you design a world around the needs of people and humanity rather than the corporation? Making good commerce is not a sin, but there is a way that we can do this that does not consume and subsume everything else in its path.

In fact I am reminded of the Chairman of Cadbury being interviewed last week, after the announcement that the board had accepted Krafts bid for the company. The chairman said this is a bitter sweet moment for me. Sweet because as a chairman to the board I must maximise shareholder return and my shareholders are very happy. But we never did get onto the bitter part, I wonder why?

She writes,

What the election and the global embrace of Obama’s brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change – that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.

Klein’s piece asks this question – Is it so that, Obama is not the first, but is in fact, the last of a kind? Is he our bridge, Our gateway to something different. We don’t want to go back to the way things used to be, we are in need of something else, a return to the Enlightenment on terms that are relevant and specific to our time – a view espoused by Richard Sennett. And for those that believe this is a recent development, outside of the 2 world wars, humanity has struggled for identity in a modern and then post modern world. We have worked it out for ourselves this dirty little secret that bling, and shopping does not make us happy, inevitably, something’s gotta give. And the “anti-globalisation movement”, which in fact was a voice far more subtle and complex as regards its issues than its nom de guerre suggested. Was only snuffed out, as the War on Terror got underway, crushing any form of dissent in its path. But as Klein’s final conclusion is telling as we are in the process of inverting the hierarchical process. Communication technologies can be wielded as powerful political agents of change.

As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”

Bookmarks: