Analyzing campaign speeches of three presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain, reveals interesting stylistic differences and some commonalities.

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ALL THREE CANDIDATES ARE CAREFUL TO AVOID THE GOBBLEDYGOOK THAT SO OFTEN CREEPS INTO POLITICAL DIALOGUE. THEY USE ACTIVE RATHER THAN PASSIVE SENTENCE CONSTRUCTIONS.

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Clinton uses the greatest number of "humanizing" words in her speeches. References to "heart" and "voice" recur throughout her speeches in passages, such as "I come tonight with a very, very full heart," "I found my own voice," and "…we all spoke from our hearts." The "voice" metaphor morphs into "people who whisper to me" and "I will bring the voices of the American people back to the White House." At one point, she even says, "It’s enough to make you want to burst out in song."

McCain also injects a human element with frequent references to "eight years among friends" and "…never just fair-weather friends." Obama refers to people themselves, frequently mentioning his extended family, including his father, mother, wife, daughters, and even grandfather in one speech.

The notion of duty comes through clearly in McCain’s word selection. Phrases such as "an obligation…which I will faithfully discharge" is in the speech he gave after winning the South Carolina primary along with "…sublime honor that has been the treasure of my life." McCain’s speeches invoke the twin notions of responsibility and public service.

Obama is inclined to use the pronoun, "we" rather than "I." Clinton and McCain use "I" quite regularly, imparting a sense of the president as an individual rather than an office.

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Is anyone else as amazed as I am that people are admitting without shame that they didn’t know what they were agreeing to when they signed their mortgage note? The fact that closing documents are so universally acknowledged to be incomprehensible has sanctioned financial irresponsibility.

All over the nation, people are walking away from their homes and mortgage obligations. When asked why they didn’t foresee adjustable rates moving up and requiring higher monthly payments, they all say that they didn’t understand the documents they signed to get the mortgage. While stunned by the cavalier attitude of the borrowers, I’m equally amazed by the lenders who seem to acknowledge that the borrowers couldn’t have been expected to understand what they were signing.

Have legalese and the confusion it engenders moved from being a nuisance to an economic cataclysm? After all, “small print” exists in large quantity. Do you understand your health insurance policy? Your credit card agreement? Your homeowners’ policy?

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A 2007 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INSURANCE COMMISSIONERS (NAIC) SURVEY REVEALED THAT ONE-THIRD TO ONE-HALF OF HOMEOWNERS’ INSURANCE POLICYHOLDERS WERE MISINFORMED ABOUT WHAT PERILS ARE COVERED BY THEIR POLICIES AND HOW MUCH THEY MIGHT RECEIVE IF THEY MADE A CLAIM.

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We shouldn’t be surprised. Policies are lengthy legal documents constructed with boilerplate language that is then modified with numerous notices and endorsements.

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It is one of the most prevalent ideas in the brand world: Capture the brand loyalty of a person when they are young, and they will be yours forever. Companies pursue this idea with a vengeance, abandoning older audiences to win the hearts and minds of children, teens, and college students. And it is one of the biggest mistakes brand professionals can make.

A recent study showed that, in fact, consumers are likely to switch brands within a range of product categories regardless of age, indicating that brand loyalty is not captured at a young age and held for life. A different study, conducted for AARP, echoed this finding, demonstrating that in some categories, older consumers are less loyal and actually more likely to switch brands.

Think about your own life: You are probably not wearing the same clothing brands you did in your youth. Or driving the same car brand. Or even using the same kind of laundry detergent. Your tastes change. Your household income changes. You get married, have kids, get busy, retire. There are very few brands that can see a person through all those changes in life—and there are very few brands that should even try.

Taste, Experience, and Self-Expression
The “get ‘em while they’re young” theory works differently among three different types of brands:

• Taste Brands—food, beverage, or household brands that involve your sense of taste or smell
• Experience Brands—when the consumer experience can be the driving factor, such as financial services, retail, and online brands
• Self-Expression Brands—when the products you use say something about you, such as clothing, automotive, and some electronics

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I am often amazed at how companies slice and dice their customer base into a million slivers in a quest to meet specific needs while overlooking the basic needs of any customer—clarity, convenience, and confidence. Customers want to clearly understand what they are paying for, how to use the product or service quickly and easily, and to feel confident that they have made a wise choice.

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When a manufacturer first introduces a product, customers are often so enamored of its function that they are willing to overlook flaws in the overall customer experience. Cell phones and software are classic examples—people bought them despite the fact that they barely worked. However, as soon as the manufacturer progresses to produce commodity products—appliances, cars, and cameras—the customer then ranks their experience in terms of other touch points. Ironically, the product becomes incidental and seemingly small interactions become the memorable aspects of the customer-company relationship.

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Brand extension in the technology category isn’t easy. Ever-shortening product life cycles, rapidly converging categories and a constant stream of new technologies give technology marketers little time to establish their brands, let alone find logical ways to extend them. With the notable exception of Apple, who has brilliantly managed multiple brand extensions from iMac to iPod to iPhone, there are few stories of successful brand extensions in technology.

The concept of extension is well-known to consumer product marketers. In the classical definition, there are two types of extensions: line extensions (for example, Colgate creating mouthwash, whiteners, etc.) and brand extensions (e.g., Virgin creating Virgin Mobile, Virgin Atlantic, and Virgin Bride, among many others).

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What is social media?
At the basic level, social media provide the tools to develop a relationship between one and many users. It’s a conversation. A brand site is “social” if it allows and inspires conversation as it appears in the “comments” section. If it uses “rating and reputation” and tools to facilitate engagement, social media will allow and encourage a dialogue to develop. Some social media provide tools for people to contribute online, like YouTube, while others are intended for rating and criticizing, like del.icio.us and Digg. Still others are tools for questions and answers, such as YahooAnswers and HelpShare. These days the most headline-grabbing are MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and, of course, Second Life—a content-providing and community subset of the social media. Just using a blog, videolog (vlog), or podcast format doesn’t automatically qualify something as a social medium. Genuine social media depend on running commentary, criticism, and conversation. In short, social media are about participation. In our digital democracy, social media are the public forum. In our actual democracy, social media are the newest frontier of the First Amendment, as we see in citizen journalism sites like NowPublic and Current.tv, which inspire users to report news and events.

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A BRAND IS SOCIAL IF IT ENCOURAGES DIALOGUE, PARTICIPATION, AND RELEVANCE.

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What are social media tools and how are they used?
There are many different types of social media tools, with more being developed every day. Social media tools fall into roughly four categories:
+ Social Networks: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, InnoCentive, Second Life
+ Tools: Blogger, YouTube, PodcastNation, Twitter
+ Rating and Reputation: Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg.com, NowPublic
+ Questions & Answers: YahooAnswers.com, HelpShare, Wondir

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As every CMO should know, great brands are built not just with advertising and promotions,
but by harnessing the power of customer information—turning data into useful,
action-oriented insights. But, we still see marketing and branding teams who have
access to important customer data, but don’t have the IT tools to make sense of it all.

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While nonprofits strive to spend every dollar they can against delivering their mission, carefully allotted funds must also be distributed to the efforts that keep their work visible. Branding has quickly become one of the necessary investments these organizations embrace, realizing that their dollars go a long way once they begin to capture attention for all the right reasons. After all, convincing individuals, partners, and influencers that your institution is worthy of their support over peer organizations is a daunting task. Here’s what we’ve learned from our engagements with nonprofit organizations from universities, to social service organizations, to foundations.

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In every company or government agency where we find a showcase simplification project, we find an individual who is the driving force behind it.

Great simplifiers share intolerance for the status quo, impatience with the rules, and boundless optimism. They view simplicity as a virtue for its own sake—as well as a sign of productivity, integrity, and fairness. While simplicity appeals to the logical, it also touches on the spiritual.

Who are the enemies of simplicity? I have found they gravitate toward certain professions, notably law and technology. In both cases, jargon, convolution, and obscurity are rewarded rather than decried.

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Most mergers fail. Many organizations, ranging from McKinsey & Company to Big Four accounting firms to the Hay Group, the human resources consultancy, attests to this fact. In one such report on mergers and acquisitions, KPMG reported that “61% of M&A created no discernible difference, or actually destroyed value.” Why this failure occurs remains a matter of ongoing debate.

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With rare exceptions, conglomerates get little respect. Labeled “holding companies,” or “portfolio businesses,” the implication is that, at best, they are no more than the sum of their parts. Despite what may be a respectable financial performance, these complicated organisms fail to gain the long-term interest of stakeholders that more focused companies do. In short, they are “cursed” to be forever appreciated, but never admired. The costs of this curse are high, particularly among investors, whose skepticism is ever present. This fact has led many conglomerates and near-conglomerates to attempt to fashion corporate brands that simplify their story. Why so many fail—and most do—can be traced to how they approach the challenge.

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You may have heard about a new smart credit product known in the financial industry as “the contactless credit card.” It enables consumers to make purchases without having to swipe their credit cards, making it faster and easier to transact.

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What’s big, broad and influential, whether it wants to be or not? The societal brand.

Today, we are witnessing the rise of a new phenomenon on the brand landscape: orga nizations whose sheer size, wide sphere of influence and fundamental impact on the national or world economy makes them, by definition, societal brands; that is, they literally shape how society works, whether they intend to or not. They are agents of societal change.

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The 13 stripes of IBM, the flowing ribbon of Coke, Mack Trucks’ belligerent bulldog, the blue box of American Express, the golden arches of McDonald’s, my MTV, 3M and the ultimate e-commerce brand, Dell. These familiar, iconic symbols evoke emotions, including trust, prestige, independence, innovation, and control in the minds of tens of millions of customers around the world.

Trademarks that achieve this stature are priceless. This is particularly true in businesses where product advantages are subjective, susceptible to replication by fast followers, and difficult to protect by legal means such as patent or copyright. The customer preference derived from familiarity and trust provides real competitive advantage.

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