Political Marketing 101: Why Today’s Politicians are Sending a Damaging Message

A lot of politicians these days need to go back to school and take a communication class. The amount of damaging messages being passed around in political marketing is increasing daily, and damaging political careers. To succeed in politics, and in life, you have to learn how to properly send a message so that your people will stay loyal to you. Learn more about political marketing and messaging with your host Bill Stierle. Join Bill and Tom as they discuss what recently happened at the Ted Cruz and Merrick Garland hearing. Listen to their takes on it today!

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Political Marketing 101: Why Today’s Politicians are Sending a Damaging Message

We are seeing some communication blunders. I think some of our politicians need to go back to remedial communication.

The tactic is, “How do I get somebody to vote for me?” It's the same thing for business and buying a product, “How do I get somebody to buy my product? I can get somebody to buy my product to push on the pain point.” That's the business part of it. In politics, it has some similarities to it, “I'm going to push on the pain point but I'm going to make the other side accountable for the pain. I'm going to activate the pain. Therefore, I don't care if I'm giving a positive or a negative message. One thing is for sure, if I give the negative message and populate a negative soundbite as many times as possible, it's going to override the positive message.”

That's the hard part about this political marketing that we're experiencing. This marketing of the message is there has got to be some kind of fresh brand marketing of the person, good or bad, in the environment so that the loyalty stays with the person. Ted Cruz has a great chance of being a president in the United States. His messaging is already appealing to loyal Republicans. People have the belief that he's this because he's that. They give him a pass out a lot of mistakes or questionable points of view.

Like going to Mexico when your state is out of power.

He’s like, “It's a little cold here. I think I'm going to fly to Mexico. My kids are whining. Because they are whining and I'm a person of affluence, I can fly there.” A voter will give them a pass on that like, “Isn’t he a public servant?” The Dunning-Kruger effect is in play here because the person thinks they are a political force because their vote counts, but they don't actually see that they are just loading up damaging messages about the other side. They are not looking at their own needs or how that works. They are just looking at, “I don't want this other party.” That's what the voter regrettably is not seeing, that Capitalism has made critical thinking soft.

“I am believing if I buy this product for X price, my life will be better,” and it is for about whatever time the product is this thing, until the product falls apart and you have to buy another one of them. I have anticipation that this thing that I'm purchasing has value, and it does. You and I have bought things that have been outside our budget or have been outside our things because we're looking for progress, growth or support. We're buying from that position. Where it shows up in business and politics is you can take one word and create negative soundbites around it. All of a sudden, that's a problem because your brain won't be able to tell what the truth is. It can't tell the difference, regrettably.

You brought up Ted Cruz. He was in the news as he often is because of a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, was there. Ted Cruz and another Republican senator took the opportunity to try to create soundbites to market to their voters. I'm going to quickly set the table here. I don't want to get too much in the weeds, but I have an article and a video for this episode that our audience can check out to look at it more deeply. There have been lots of protests at school boards around the country. The National School Boards Association wrote a letter which the Republican party has taken issue with where they used some language in there that said that some of these people that are attacking members of school boards are domestic terrorists. They had to walk that statement back and apologize for it.

They are trying to protect school board members because school board members have been under attack in this country. The National School Boards Association had written to the Joe Biden administration for support with the FBI in helping to protect school board members. Merrick Garland wrote a letter that was offering support to the local law enforcement with Federal law enforcement from the FBI. Ted Cruz was trying to get also Merrick Garland in the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting to apologize for what he wrote, as if Merrick Garland had somehow called citizens domestic terrorists in what he wrote which of course, he had not.

There were two tragedies that occurred. One is by Ted Cruz where he is trying to get a sound soundbite for Fox News, Newsmax or wherever his voters are going to be hearing it, which is that he's asking Merrick Garland to resign and apologize for what he wrote. That was over the top because it wasn't in alignment with any truth. Merrick Garland was not going to agree with him. 

I appreciate you introducing this because politics is about damaging the messenger. When we damage the messenger, we can get market share and loyalty. For example, and this is a true story, if I'm Papa John's Pizza and I put a commercial of my delivery cars next to Pizza Huts delivery cars, and my national advertising campaign is, “Better ingredients, better pizza,” and I'm putting their logo next to my logo. The Pizza Hut people said, “That's not true. We're going to court.” That case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Here's what the Supreme Court said, “It’s up to the buyer whether it's better ingredients, better pizza. We are not going to legislate the word better.” The people from Pizza Hut are going like, “Our ingredients are better. We use this quality. We use this organic. They don't use that. Ours is clearly better. They are not doing a truthful sentence.” “We are not going to legislate.”

The Supreme Court decided they were not going to be the arbiters of what is better. They viewed it as subjective and up to the consumers.

The only win out of it is that Papa John's could not use Pizza Hut’s logo in their advertising. From that moment on, the logo wasn't there, but the impression is still living inside the human being, “This type of pizza is better than this type of pizza.” Pizza Hut is going to counter with its various different marketing campaigns and was not able to do a retaliatory piece. In politics, you can do retaliation against a party name.

“The Democrats or the Republicans are trying to destroy our nation.” You can do that type of narrative over a period of years, but that's not a peaceful democratic way to run a nation. You can't run it from an adversarial place, and there's no arbiter now. How does it weigh violent language against itself? It’s having a hard time doing it. We're going to see cases like this. You cannot have freedom of speech and violence to another person exist in the same space. “I'm going to kill you” is not a healthy sentence to allow somebody to use and hide or stay under freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is an interesting thing because that came up in discussion with Ted Cruz and Merrick Garland at this hearing where Ted Cruz is accusing Merrick Garland of writing this letter to the National School Boards Association and offering support from a law enforcement perspective. He didn't use any of the same kind of language that the school board did, claiming that school board members were being attacked by domestic terrorists. Ted Cruz is trying to hang that around Merrick Garland's neck.

I appreciate you going back to the truth. All of a sudden, I'm going, “That's a great truth that you're saying.” It's about, “I'm trying to damage the guy's name. I'm trying to damage Merrick Garland.” This is a problem too. Mitch McConnell damaged Merrick Garland's name. Merrick Garland is a center-right guy. He's not a center-left guy, and he's most certainly not a left guy. Barack Obama is putting him up because he's 50/50.

He thinks he's going to get approved easily, that the Republican should want to.

Instead, McConnell stonewalls him and then does brand damage on Merrick Garland's name. He’s like, “We're not going to approve him because he's on their team.” Everyone is looking around and goes, “This guy's not on their team at all. He is a centrist. He's right in the middle.” Look at how slow he is in getting out in front of the public now. He's not great at leading. He doesn't know how much of his job is marketing and messaging. He's doesn't know that he has to market and message this in a way that will stick with people, not stay after what you did which was, “I wish the senators would quote me exactly.”

That’s what Merrick Garland said. He said, “I wish you had used my actual words when talking about what I said.” Merrick Garland is being very much a lawyer who looks at things as right or wrong, yes or no, and black or white.

He is at a marketing street fight and he doesn't know it.

He didn't help himself in that discussion by sticking to the truth. As you have often said, truth does not always matter. Even though Merrick Garland was correct, he could have handled that with Ted Cruz much differently.

I'm going to pretend I'm Merrick Garland, and we might as well give him a little bit of coaching here. It might sound something like this, “I can appreciate Senator Ted Cruz being able to speak freely and create a message about the freedom of speech. I really think the freedom of speech is also very important like Senator Ted Cruz and others that will be talking about how important freedom of speech is for those people that are there. What we're talking about is the need for safety and protection for people who are threatened. We need to have safety and protection because the threats have become larger. Everybody may notice that people are responding in a more violent and threatening way. What we're going to do is we're going to provide school boards protection for the people who are threatened. If you do not threaten someone, you're going to be fine. Please continue with your freedom of speech, but if you are going to say something threatening, we will take a step in order to protect other people because that's the nation that we stand for, and that's what the legal system is for.”

Can you imagine if he did anything like that? Ted Cruz would have been stopped dead in his tracks, and that would have become the soundbite that gets amplified instead of Ted Cruz trying to get the soundbite of, “You should resign.”

Watch this, “I appreciate the thought of him asking me to resign but I feel torn. I'm not sure if the Senator is clear about what my job is. My job is about protection and safety as well as making sure that the freedom of speech stays intact. I need to fight the freedom of speech for both people. Although the Senator would like the freedom of speech just to be for one side, my job is to make sure I'm an advocate for the same thing. I'm wondering why he's not advocating for the same thing. Freedom of speech is very important for all people in America, don’t you think?” That little don't you think was a little snarky. I would tend not to do it.

I could do the same thing on the right or the left. This is not a right or left thing. If you want to advocate for something and you want to stay in balance with something with a balanced narrative, you've got to change demands into requests, if you would like that to take place. “I demand that he resign.” “I hear that you're requesting me to resign.” The word demand has a very short shelf life. Try it with your kid or your spouse. You'll get it once but you will pay for it later.

That's one of the things that the Republicans are not getting. You can't keep lighting a firecracker on a stick of dynamite all the time because it creates shell shock and shrapnel. People are tired of it. Because they're tired of it, what ends up happening is the person that is speaking from a grounded place, but yet in a place of strength will pull those swing voters over to the side.

Barack Obama did it. He pulled all the swing voters onto his side. The loyalists are going to be loyalists, but the swing voters are what makes the election move. You’ve got to generally set it reasonable, accountable, and somebody that has everyone's best interest in mind. If you keep doing the style of politics that's being done, it's not a very strong long-term play.

There's one more example that I want to bring in for this episode which is a little bit humorous but there's a real good lesson in it. There was a reporter that was chasing after Representative Mo Brook at the Capitol Building. He was literally chasing him down a flight of stairs trying to ask him a question and clearly, Representative Mo Brooks wanted nothing to do with answering the question. There's a video of it. It was on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He made fun of it, which is funny in many ways when you look at it, but there's a lesson here.

You could do it both ways. It could be a lesson for the representative in Congress and also for the reporter who clearly is not going to get this guy to engage him in a serious way with the tactic that he uses. Representative Mo Brooks had come out, endorsed and was in support of the candidacy of Roy Moore in Alabama. This is a very troubling figure that has gotten in all sorts of trouble for many things, especially with underage girls. He was always a troubled candidate.

The reporter is trying to ask him if he still supports or regrets his support for Roy Moore. He's trying to pin him down and get an answer on this, which he's never going to get. He chases him down the stairs. They're running down this flight of stairs in the Capitol, and he keeps saying the same thing over and over. What does Mo Brooks say in response, and this is more to your marketing point of view because he's trying to answer with a marketing message that's not only trying to deflect from the question he's being asked, but also to amplify this marketing message.

He says, “I believe the Democrats will do great damage to our country on a myriad of issues.” As they're going down the staircase round and round multiple times, the reporter keeps asking the same question. Mo Brooks keeps giving that exact same answer. It was almost like a mantra if you were meditating. It was surreal.

I felt the reporter for not doing a better job. He could have gotten Mo Brooks to willingly stop running down the stairs had he said something different. I think Mo Brooks could have also said something that would have more successfully deflected from the question he was being answered and put it to rest. It's obvious when you're running down the stairs. That's not a position of strength dealing with an issue. That isn't going to go away. 

Both sides of it. The first side of it is Mo Brooks doing what his job is which is, “I am going to throw a rock at Democrats and I'm going to take a moment to damage them and their message. I want to do some brand damage on the word Democrat. I don't want the issue. Even if the issue will help my voter, I still need to damage the word, Democrats. We need to damage it by painting them into the thing that I want to paint them into."



By doing that brand damage, all they need to do is report a talking point that their side can use, “Look at how he's fighting for you who voted for him. He's a fighter. We want more fighters.” It’s the same thing with Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's a fighter and an instigator. It’s the same thing with Donald Trump. He's a fighter and an instigator. He's going to mix things up. What the voter doesn't understand when you're voting for that type of person is that brand damage starts to leak from the party to the country.

America has some brand damage. “America's democracy is messy,” is what General Mark Milley said to the Chinese. He said, “We're fine. This is the problem that we have with democratic governments. Democracy is a little messy sometimes,” to try to give them reassurance because their cultural belief is speaking up is messy. They have oppression on speaking up. They are trying to manage the message before it comes out of the person's mouth. “You better not speak up or we're going to put you away.” This one is, “We allow people to speak up and things will settle down after it.” That's the way we do it.

From the reporter’s standpoint, the reporter is pursuing truth but look at how truth is running away from him. He is not getting any truth at all. He's trying to get that this guy is supporting Roy Moore. That’s not what's happening. He's supporting an R. He’s supporting a vote. He just wants an R, whoever the R is.

For Mitch McConnell, it’s the same thing, “I need an R in the seat that's voting for the things I want to vote for. I want the R in the seat. I don't want the D in the seat because the D is not voting for me. I don't want to talk to the D. I want R in the seat. It's so much easier if I have R in the seat. If I have R in the seat and my Rs are all voting for me, then I can get things done the way I would like them done. I can prevent the other guy from getting the things that he or she would like done.”

This challenge about this political marketing 101 is, “I am going to exercise brand damage on truth, on reality and on the other side to get the votes that I need. I want to keep my sheep in my own stable. I don't want them to go wander off. I'm going to keep a common message.” Fairness is a twelve-year-old need. Remember the last time you ever talked about fairness? You were twelve, “It’s not fair.”

I hear it from my 12-year-old and 7-year-old every week.

They are trying to wrestle with the concept of fairness. The problem is that a lot of voters are wrestling with the concept of fairness. It's very hard for a working person to experience that fairness. It’s that somebody that has less money and less opportunity to them is getting help because we are trying to bring them up into a vibrant part of a capitalist style of economy.

If they don't have any money to spend and they're on the street, they are not helping our economy at all. They are not a purchaser. I need people to purchase stuff to make economies work, houses, apartments, picture frames, cars and computers. We're really in the political space. You can't run politics like cannibal capitalism. We can't eat the system, which is what is happening. We're cannibalizing our brand respect. We can't eat ourselves here. That's what we're looking in. That's the thing that's very upsetting.

It seems that if people had better awareness of how to communicate more effectively, this would be a much different country we're living in now.

Our affluence would be off the hook. That’s the thing there. When there is a strong social program, the trickle-up that takes place is nutty. If you think about the 1940s and 1950s, it's all about building the middle class and making sure the middle class has strength so it can buy things. That's what you want. If they can pay taxes and buy things, that strength is the trickle up. There's more coming. What’s important in all that's taking place now is that there's an activation of the limbic brain to get votes for the short-term. They have been doing it very strongly for many years. It’s brand damage, then vote for us, "You don't want those other guys. You want us. We're more excited over here doing brand damage.”

Like you've said before, “It's not my job to do the right thing. It's my job to get them to vote for me.”

It's not my job to correct the truth. It's not my job to educate the voter. It's their job to sort through my BS. It's hard. It’s this idea of how do we get a healthy discussion about fairness to take place and put fairness in the perspective that it needs to be put. If something is not in the place of fairness, then the other person, whether it's business or politics, will not come back if they get a sense of, “This wasn't fair. I don't want to participate in this way.” That's the thing to put our arms around. It’s to have one of those different kinds of experiences.

Thanks very much for that. I enjoyed it.

Thanks a lot.

Important Links:

• Video – Greene, Gosar and Brooks Face Growing Scrutiny For Jan. 6 Insurrection: A Closer Look
• Article – GOP Senators Erupt At Garland In Heated Hearing. Cooper Says They Misrepresent The Facts

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