An Inside Look at Obama's Grassroots Marketing

This year's primaries have been some of the most exciting in living memory. There's been new thinking, bold new political approaches and bold new marketing practices. Barack Obama's campaign has been extraordinary for a number of reasons, ranging from the radical use of new media tools to the use of social networking to further his reach. Following is an apolitical summary of five innovative ways the campaign has used messaging and media to help create Obama's grassroots movement:
 
1. Leveraging the power of inspiration

If you want your audience to love you, wear your T-shirt and forgive your weaknesses, then connect with them on a level beyond the rational benefits/details. The voter's long journey to the voting booth may twist and turn on those rational policy points, but selecting the candidate inside the booth is often a split-second, emotional decision -- in much the same way that consumers make product choices on the shelves.
 
Obama's campaign has laid out a clear set of inspiring values -- hope, action, change -- that weaves consistently through all forms of communication. The rest is commentary. And the campaign has been very good at seamlessly translating these values directly into simple slogans designed to elicit the same responses. Phrases like "Change we can believe in" and "Yes, we can" are examples of phrases that epitomize the Obama brand values and speak positively to the subconscious in a way that would make NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) practitioners proud.

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