Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

Brand Obama: How Barack Obama Really Won the Presidency

There's been much discussion over the last two weeks of what exactly Barack Obama's campaign team did right to help him win the presidency of the United States.

In their November 17th Business Week column "Three Reasons Obama Won,"  Jack and Suzy Welch focus on lessons business leaders can take from McCain's loss and Obama's win. They make three points which they say business leaders can learn from:

• Start with a clear, consistent vision.
• Execute well.
• Have friends in high places.

While I agree that all three of these are true, they've missed something critical: in a very short time, Obama built a strong, powerful personal brand--basically from scratch.

I teach Branding Strategies at San Francisco State. I ask my students to tell us their favorite brands. We get the usual favorites: Apple, Nike, Target, Trader Joes, Coke, etc. In October, however, several students said their favorite brand was Barack Obama.

How interesting. For the last 18 months, I've had my students evaluate each of the candidates brands, tell me what they stand for and how well they are doing in delivering on their brand promise. This was a fascinating exercise in the early primary season when we had a varied cast of characters from Hillary Clinton to Rudi Guiliani, Mike Hucklebee to Mitt Romney, not to mention McCain and Obama.

In the early days, the candidates were often defined by their demographics (female, African-American, Mormon, ex-POW, divorced Catholic, etc.). But as time went on, it became clear that Barack Obama had done a tremendous job building a strong brand, based on change, hope, inclusion and making a difference for America. He did this using a combination of grass roots efforts, traditional media, and an outstanding use of new media, from websites and blogs to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, from personalized donation emails to brightly colored logowear that was hot and hard to find.

As opposed to McCain, Obama did this by focusing on the future, on the potential for good, and on the positive--not by knocking the competition, shouting and screaming, or defending the current situation.  In doing so, he created a brand that people were proud to be involved with--a brand that transcended race, ethnicity, gender or age. He created the kind of brand all companies wish they had.

And that, as much as the three reasons the Welchs articulated, is the reason Obama won.

Where to go for all things consulting

Women in Consulting (WIC)  just celebrated its tenth anniversary with a big event last week at the Microsoft Event Center in Mountain View, CA. We honored the women who founded WIC and talked about how far we've come and where consulting is going in the future. In conjunction with this celebration, we also relaunched our new website and launched a new blog about all things consulting. Check them out.

WIC is a Bay Area-based community of over 400 consultants in more than 30 specialties. More information on membership.

A New Beginning

Tonight marks the start of the Jewish new year, 5769. To everyone, including all my friends, relatives and colleagues who are celebrating the holiday, I wish you a sweet and joyful new year, filled with health and happiness, peace and prosperity.

What's nice about the High Holiday Season is that Jews treat this not just as a new year, but as a new beginning. Given what's going on in the world lately, it can't come a minute too soon.

I'd like to suggest that it really can be quite therapeutic for everyone to say enough is enough and start again anew. However, anew start is much more effective if you take the time to consider where we've come from and what we're leaving behind at the end of the year. Whether we're talking about business, personal life or the financial mess on Wall Street, if we don't understand what's worked and what hasn't, we are destined to repeat many of the same mistakes over and over again.

The good news is there's no reason you ever have to wait a full year for a new start.  You're all welcome to join us in starting over with the new year 5769 tonight. You still have the opportunity to start 2009  with the traditional New Years celebration on Dec 31st, or again later in January when we'll have a new presidential administration, and  the Lunar New Year at the end of the month.

So here is to a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous new year for everyone everywhere--starting about tomorrow sounds good to me.

Linda

Commemorating 15 Years: Living With Diabetes

 

Today our family commemorates an important anniversary.

It was 15 years ago today that our daughter, Ilana Finer, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, five days before her second birthday. One day she was a normal two year old, the next she was so weak she could barely stand. A few simple urine and blood tests and we were off to Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford for an intense five-day course in regulating blood sugar and managing diabetes.

I very quickly went from a lifelong fear of needles and a horrible dislike of the sight of blood to injecting mixed insulin cocktails and pricking her little fingers six or eight or ten times a day. We learned about everything from the diabetic honeymoon (which was no honeymoon at all) to the  Somagi effect. We learned how to determine carbohydrate levels in everything edible--whether it came in a package with nutritional information or in a bowl at a restaurant. In fact, Ilana learned how to multiply by 15 at a very young age--because we needed to calculate 1 unit of insulin for every 15g of carbohydrate she ate.

Fifteen years later, it's amazing how much life has changed. Ilana is a senior in high school--healthy, strong and athletic. She plays varsity soccer and softball, snowboards, surfs and skateboards, plays electric guitar and is in to making and editing videos. She's busy completing college application forms and enjoying her senior year and being a typical American teenager.

For the last 8 years, we've managed Ilana's diabetes with insulin pump technology, which allows her to eat what she wants when she wants and compensate with the right amount of insulin. She just completed a yearlong trial of new continuous glucose monitoring systems (CGMS) sponsored by the JDRF and she now has a CGMS integrated with her insulin pump. Today's insulins work much faster and more predictably, and the amount of blood required for a finger stick is a mere fraction of what it was 15 years ago. New research is unveiled on a regular basis and exciting technologies like stem cell research bring new and exciting possibilities.

We've come a long way since the hormone insulin was discovered by Dr. Frederick Banning in 1921. But not far enough.

Eighty-seven years later, we still live with the specter of diabetes, 24x7, 365 days a year. We still have to do finger sticks, inject or infuse insulin, react quickly to unpredictable blood sugar highs and lows, deal with uneducated and sometimes ignorant people who discriminate against diabetics, and manage simple illnesses made much more complex by the fact that diabetes is always a factor. And we still worry about the long term impact of living with this disease--the potential for complications like blindness, kidney disease, neuropathy and cardiovascular disease.

In 1993 we were told an artificial pancreas might be 5-10 years away. Fifteen years later, we're told  these alternatives are getting close--they're maybe 5-10 years away. We still can't seem to reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Over two million people in the US alone are type 1 diabetics, which means more than two million families suffer from this disease, and tens of millions more are impacted by diabetes in many ways.

On this, our 15th anniversary of living intimately with this disease, we celebrate the successes and triumphs of the last decade and a half and we look forward to the day when we will no longer have to count carbohyrdates or measure blood sugar--to the day when we will  have a real, absolute cure.

To get there, our family team will be participating in the JDRF Annual Walk to Cure Diabetes, on Sunday, October 19th in Sunnyvale, CA. Please support us by donating what you can to our team, Nothing Can Beat Finer, so that 15 years from now we can have a different kind of celebration: counting the number of years since diabetes was cured.

Linda Popky
Mitchell Finer
Ilana Finer

Passion, Purpose, Perseverance: Celebrating 10 Years of Powerful Women in Consulting

Ten years ago, a few women started meeting in the backroom at Vic’s in San Carlos to support each other in their consulting businesses. Today, Women in Consulting® (WIC) is a dynamic organization of 400+ seasoned consultants and small business owners covering a range of specialties. On October 16th, we’re honoring our individual and collective success over the past 10 years—as well as setting our sights on the next decade and beyond. I invite you to join me in this celebration, which includes:

• Dinner and networking opportunities
• Keynote presentation by Kim Fulcher, CEO of Compass and      mylifecompas.com
• A silent auction
• A fine art sale

Learn more or register

Contact me to attend at the special WIC member price.
 

The Sun Also Rises (on former Sun employees)

I had the opportunity last night to attend a gathering of the Sun Microsystems Alumni Association at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

It was not just the wonderful food and great location that made this a great event: It was the chance to connect with over 300 former friends and colleagues who had spent time at Sun Microsystems over the last 25 years.

It's always nice to connect with colleagues you haven't seen in a long time.  Today, unfortunately, Sun is absent from many conversations about technology leaders and the company no longer commands the presence that made it a key player in computing in the 80s and 90s. But what always strikes me at gatherings of ex-Sun people, is the incredible quality, intellect and high caliber of the people who made Sun such a powerhouse for so many years. Many of today's hot technology plays were built on what Sun people created and brought to market all those years ago.

Before there was Facebook or MySpace or Ebay or Google or Linux or a lot of other hot names, there was Sun. The industry is better off for all the people who took what they learned at Sun and went off to populate these and thousands of other companies and organizations, small and large, in technology and other industries, in business, education and non-profit.

After all, we were the ones who told the world the network was the computer. Twenty five years later I think they've caught on.

Stranger than Fiction: AT&T Misses the Connection

This falls under the category of "you just can't make this stuff up."

I've been working with my ISP for two days to figure out why my T1 line has been intermittently flaky. They went to the provisioner (Covad), who has determined the problem is with the line provider, AT&T. In a desire to get this fixed as quickly as possible, I told the ISP to tell AT&T they could come any time of the day or night as long as they called first.

Guess what. AT&T told us they aren't able to call in advance. Wait a minute, aren't they the phone company?  Am I missing something here?  Maybe we should take them over to Sprint or Verizon and help them get one of those great deals on a cell phone.

The Branding of Our Candidates

As I watched the highlights of the Democratic National Convention, I can't help but focus on the brand called Barack Obama. This morning, after hearing about McCain's choice for vice president, I'm wondering about the brand called McCain as well.

Yes, Obama has a brand, McCain has a brand, and so do all of the other assorted candidates along the way. You and I have personal brands, too, though we likely put much less emphasis on understanding and promoting them.

In my Branding Strategies class at San Francisco State, we do an exercise where students are randomly divided up into groups and asked to evaluate the candidates brands: what are their brand promises, what do they stand for, and on a scale of 1 to 10, how well are they doing on delivering on those promises.

This was a much more interesting exercise when we had a full slate of potential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and others. This year, for the first time, we had a full range of choices when it came to gender, ethnicity, race, religion and marital status.

What's interesting is that over the last year or so, the class has consistently said that Obama stands for change and hope and doing things differently, and they've rated him fairly high on fulfilling his brand promise. They had a hard time, OTOH, getting their hands around what McCain's brand promise was, besides more of the same.

Brands are always evolving and adding features and benefits to supplement their current offerings. This week, Obama chose Joe Biden, who brings experience and foreign policy expertise to the Obama brand. McCain chose Sarah Palin, who brings youth, inexperience and a non-Washington perspective.

What do these choices mean for the 2 candidates' brands? It will be interesting to watch how the American public answers this question, but at this point, it looks like Obama has tried to supplement a known weakness in his brand (relative inexperience) by adding Biden. McCain has  addressed the weakness of age, by choosing someone very young and with virtually no experience. He's addressed diversity by including a woman, but I'm not quite sure yet what the McCain/Palin brand stands for?

By choosing Palin, it appears that McCain has done two things he may regret: He may have actually strengthened Obama's brand by making Barack look much more experienced than Palin, and he may have alienated many of Hillary's supporters who were on the fence, by choosing a running mate for her youth and gender and asking voters to accept her as an equal substitute for Hillary, who like her or not, brings a wealth of experience, maturity and seasoning to the table compared to Palin.

The jury's still out on this folks, but stay tuned. Things are just starting to get VERY interesting.

Special Recognition

My parents received special recognition with a Volunteer of the Award named in their honor, and my dad being named the first recipient of the award posthumously.

Hebrew school honors volunteer

 

UHI Unveils and Awards the first Martin and Janet Popky  Volunteer of the Year Award

Driven to Distraction

In preparation for California's new hands-free cell phone law on July 1st, I finally broke down and bought a bluetooth wireless device.

Well, I actually bought my second bluetooth wireless device. I had bought one a couple of years ago, found it to be terribly annoying and not very useful and quite promptly lost it. This time I bought one of the more advanced models, the Jawbone, and I find it to be terribly annoying and not very useful. The good news is I haven't lost it yet.

For the last week or so, I've been walking around with this thing in my ear trying to get used to it. What I find is that I am significantly more distracted using this thing than I ever was either holding the phone in my hand or using the speakerphone. First I had to try two different earpieces and three different earbuds till I got a set that seems to sort of fit my ear somewhat. Then I have managed to either disconnect people who call, call people I don't mean to,  or try to talk out of the phone when the call goes to the headset or vice versa. I can't figure out how to make the volume go up and down in real time, and any advanced features are way beyond me.

This has got to be the law of unintended consequences to the max. Here's the story. I do believe there are some people who are very distracted when they talk on the cell phone, and many of these people talk and drive at the same time. I've seen them and so have you. However, I don't for a second believe that these folks will be any less distracted because they have this thing in their ear.

I also believe that these are the same people who long before cell phones were distracted by everything from the car radio to their kids in the back seat, reading the paper, looking at a map or GPS, etc. In other words, some people are just plain distracted. These are also the folks who probably can't multitask on even simple tasks. That's ok. They can work serially one task at a time.

The rest of us who can multitask fairly well and are even wired to perform better when we're multitasking are now stuck with a regulation that makes our lives more complicated and IMO less safe.

The CHP is supposedly sitting with baited breath just waiting to start citing people who are not hands-free next Tuesday. I just hope they will also take the time to stop all those people who are distracted by other things beyond cell phones, as well as those who are incapacitated and really shouldn't be driving in the first place.  But it might be too distracting to ask them to focus on more than one thing at a time.