— 10 October 2003
The Politics of Branding
I have been thinking about the role brand played in the recent landslide election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the office of governor of the formally-great state of California. All the political pundits could talk about in the post election haze was the role of voter anger in ousting Gray Davis from office. This reductive focus on the mechanics of representative democracy misses a far larger point: Brand.
Schwarzenegger, if he understands anything remotely linked to politics, understands the strategic value of brand. Brand has been defined as the credible promise of a compelling experience and its place in politics and international relations is not as well understood as it might be. In the political realm, brand goes beyond the mere charisma that the German sociologist Max Weber felt was one of the keys to thinking about leader/follower relationships. Brand, for political leaders, can map on to bureaucratic political structures so that authority flows from both the rational relations of political power and the brand position of an individual.
The Schwarzenegger brand at its core is about strength and heroism. Supporting attributes include affinity to the Kennedy political legacy, wealth, outsider status, and ambition. This is an incredibly potent combination and was extremely well managed by Schwarzenegger political team. It makes perfect sense that someone from Hollywood understands this. On the other hand, Brand at the international level in US policy has been needlessly squandered by the US since the end of the Cold War and it is partly the reason we are so unpopular as a nation today. USAID needs to get someone in there who understands effective branding and can perform triage on what remains of our reputation in the international community. Unlike Schwarzenegger's, the current US program just isn't cutting it.
© 2008 Cheskin Added Value