Tag: Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin — Premature Product Launch?

Years ago I was involved in the Portland launch of a mobile phone company called VoiceStream Wireless (now T-Mobile). The company was determined to make a huge splash.

They opened a bunch of stores… spent an enormous amount of money on radio, TV, print, and transit advertising… rented Pioneer Square in downtown Portland for a launch party. It was beautifully orchestrated. Thousands of people bought their phones and signed up for service during the first week.

Only problem was, they didn’t have any near enough towers in place, so the phones didn’t work very well. A huge percentage of their early customers returned their phones and cancelled the service.

It took VoiceStream a long time to recover.

I’m reminded of this as more details emerge about Sarah Palin. Daughter’s pregnancy, husband’s (22 year old) drunk driving conviction, and other stories that are moving the discussion away from whether the McCain-Palin ticket is better than Obama-Biden.

Whether any of these details affect her ability to perform as VP or President is irrelevant now. What’s relevant is that the McCain camp appears unprepared to deal with their emergence.

The Republicans appear to have rushed the product launch without having all of their cell towers in place. The damage to their brand may take four years to repair.

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Sarah Palin as Marketing Strategy

A reader of yesterday’s post about Sarah Palin criticized the choice as “a slimy, deliberate attempt to pander to Hillary supporters.” It’s a thought that deserves its own discussion — so here goes.

I’m inclined to set aside “slimy” — this is politics, and unless money changed hands or sexual favors were granted, this doesn’t show up on the slime-o-meter. “Deliberate” isn’t a bad thing: “inadvertent” would be a much bigger problem. So let’s focus on “pander to Hillary supporters.”

A presidential campaign is one big pander festival (pandermonium?) — an extended sales call on millions of prospects. So does this choice move McCain closer to a sale or farther away?

A good salesperson needs to skip over the prospects who would never buy, and focus on the ones who might. Hardcore Obama supporters won’t vote for McCain no matter who he chooses, so they can be safely ignored.

In this election, there are two big group of folks who can still be persuaded:

1. Many Hillary supporters are available for pandering, and now have some serious thinking to do. Palin may oppose everything Hillary stands for, but she’s a working mother; for those who have long dreamed of a female president, she represents perhaps the quickest path to the goal. If Obama wins, it may be eight years before a Democratic woman next has a legitimate shot at the office. By contrast, the McCain will be 72 on Inauguration Day.

2. Hardcore right-wingers who don’t like McCain, and might have stayed home in November. Palin’s an anti-abortion, NRA member who supports oil drilling. Yesterday, Portland conservative talk show host Lars Larson announced that because of Palin’s selection, he’s climbing aboard the McCain bandwagon. He’s not alone.

There’s also some evidence that the Democrats haven’t figured out how to deal with Palin yet — after some Obama aides blasted the selection, Obama himself made a point of praising her. So the choice may have the added benefit of tying the opposition up for a little while.

So does Palin’s selection move McCain closer to a sale? In other words, will this particular pandering attempt accomplish its goal?

On the basis of early evidence, I’m going to say yes. It hasn’t scared away anyone who was already in the McCain camp, and it’s given two big groups of undecideds a new reason to consider him.

Speaking strictly as a fellow professional in the persuasion industry, I applaud.

An Interesting Side Note

Yesterday, my original post about Sarah Palin brought a quick spike of traffic, which pleased me until a reader pointed out that I’d misspelled her name. When I fixed the error, my traffic started to drop. A look at my stats revealed that the most popular search terms for those who found this blog were…

Sarah Pailin and Sara Pailin

So for those of you who found me with those spellings — or Sarah Pallin or Sara Pallin — welcome.

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Sarah Palin’s Challenge — Our Instinctive Biases

When faced with a new piece of information, we filter the item through our own internal biases in an attempt to make sense of it. The recent Vice Presidential choices of Barack Obama and John McCain gave me an interesting illustrative example.

When Barack announced Joe Biden, the conversation was about Biden’s experience, his voting record, his speaking ability — whether he could help Obama win, and whether he’d make a good President.

This morning the McCain camp announced that Sarah Palin would be McCain’s running mate. The first person — female — I discussed this with knew as little as I did about Palin. In other words, basically nothing.

Her first questions, in rapid succession and at least partially in jest, were:

How old is she?

What does she look like?

Is she fat?

I suspect, for better or worse, this is the initial prism through which many of us will view McCain’s choice.

Am I wrong?

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Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.