Branding politics: Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication
Author: Michael Serazio
Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107484
This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries.
Post-print version of an article published in Journal of Consumer Culture : doi:10.1177/1469540515586868.
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Branding politics:
Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication
Abstract
This paper examines and critiques the logic and practices of branding that inform contemporary American political campaigns within the context of ethical surplus, sign value versus use value, emotion and reason, and the tension of authenticity and cynicism.
The original research is based upon 38 one-on-one, in-depth interviews with political consultants, including media strategists, communication directors, and advertising producers who are involved in the encoding and cultural production of political discourse. The qualitative findings illuminate a professional ideology among these elite practitioners that obfuscates the pursuit of power by strategizing texts that involve emotional evocation rather than rational deliberation and embed candidates within signifiers of and proxies for authenticity. These efforts are intended to strike a disinterested, non-instrumental pose on behalf of the “branded candidates” they represent.
Keywords
Branding, political advertising, emotion, authenticity, consultants
Branding Politics 1
The best political commercials are similar to Rorschach patterns. They do not tell
the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to
express those feelings. Commercials that attempt to tell the listener something are
inherently not as effective as those that attach to something that is already in him.
– Tony Schwarz, media consultant and creator of Lyndon Johnson’s infamous
“Daisy” advertisement (McNair, 2011: 94)
In the aftermath of deregulated campaign financing, as ever-greater sums of donor cash flood into candidates’ coffers in the United States, political consultants are exerting more power over the conduct of those campaigns (Vogel, 2014). Simultaneously, some scholars fear that “leading political actors think about the media not only when campaigning, but also when governing and in the policy-making process” (Stromback,
2008: 239). This article inquires into how those consultants inform that thinking –
specifically, how the logic of branding guides contemporary American political
communication texts and practices.
Drawing upon dozens of interviews with these elite operatives, the research
examines how they construct and encode the “sign value” of a politician at the potential
expense of his or her “use value;” how they engineer ethical surplus and opportunities for
audience identification on behalf of those candidates; and how they co-opt “real” people
and places to bolster their claims to credibility. The study concludes by offering a
cautionary critique of this professional ideology (summarized by Schwarz above) that
sets itself against rational deliberation and informed democratic participation.
Throughout this look at political branding, a portrait emerges of a delicate approach to
power – one that self-effaces its own intentions by opting for emotional implication Branding Politics 2
rather than policy explication and foregrounds disinterested pretenses and authenticating
symbols.
Literature Review
Influential marketing practitioners like Kevin Roberts and Marc Gobe have long
advocated an “emotional” rather than “attribute-driven” approach to commercial
branding to elicit true consumer passion (Thompson et al., 2006). Simultaneously,
management theorists stress the need for multinational corporations to think of
themselves primarily as cultivators of image and myth – not simply as manufacturers of
products (Klein, 2000). The aims of brand culture, therefore, reside in “building an
affective, authentic relationship with a consumer, one based – just like a relationship
between two people – on the accumulation of memories, emotions, personal narratives,
and expectations” (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 8). For this reason, Adam Arvidsson (2005)
theorizes branding as an open-ended, two-way process, dependent on consumers taking
an active role in the generation of “ethical surplus” (“a social relation, a shared meaning,
an emotional investment”) and co-creating through their voluntary labor the cultural
worth that, in turn, represents the source of brand equity and economic value (237).
Some, thus, decry a landscape of promotional culture that evades forthright
salesmanship in favor of subtle persuasion through symbolic affiliations and evocative
images (Wernick, 1991). One emblematic study, for example, charted the apparent trend
over the course of the 20th century away from “rational” and “utility-oriented” advertising copy and marketing strategies (Leiss et al., 2005). Against this backdrop, Jean
Baudrillard (1988) theorizes the ascendance of the “sign value” of objects over their “use value,” wherein the symbolic dimension (what it means), untethered from its material Branding Politics 3 referent (what it does), represents the essential, desired component and propels commercial exchange. These signs can accommodate a consumer’s identity project more flexibly than traditional, ascribed social structures; moreover, because the cultural positioning of goods now perhaps matters more than their functional worth, the design of such codes increasingly organizes and dominates the production process (Slater, 1997).1
Such patterns find parallel in politics. For instance, the demagogic force of feeling – defined as “affect,” “emotion,” or “passion” – has long been conceived as distinct from, lesser to, and intruding upon the sober wisdom of reason – defined as
“thinking or cognizing” (Marcus, 2003: 187). Research has shown that an emotional soft-sell approach in political advertising by and large dominates, as images and music can be exploited for their powerful, yet subtle, influence (Brader, 2006). For critics like
Jurgen Habermas (1989), who stresses a rational, informed citizenry as the precondition for democracy, advertising’s influence on that public sphere degrades political communication from fact-based reasoning to affective manipulation. This political critique has its commercial analogue in the writing of Benjamin Barber (2007), who laments how consumer culture encourages “infantilization,” wherein the task for marketers is “to immerse products and services in a nonspecific sentimental miasma from which ‘emotional decisions’ can ‘naturally’ arise (natural as a creation of artifice, and emotional decisions as irrational and nondeliberative and hence scarcely decisions at all)”
(184). This research will therefore inquire how American political consultants construct the “sign value” and generate “ethical surplus” on behalf of clients.
Centrally related to this discussion of emotional branding is the interplay of and tension between authenticity and cynicism, for the pursuit of corporate profit has always Branding Politics 4 coexisted uneasily with consumers’ affective attachment to marketed goods and services
(Banet-Weiser, 2012). Departing from a premise that much of advertising already assumes a reflexively cynical viewer, Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson define authenticity as “the search for individuated space outside the commodity form and outside the spectacle” (142). Brands that “successfully shroud themselves in the cloak of authenticity are able to convey desirable consumer meanings of inner directedness, lack of pretense, and genuine commitment to brand-related activities” (Thompson et al., 2006:
53). To achieve this authenticity, in other words, the brand has to seem “disinterested” in the “commercial intent” that is its ultimate reason for existence and furnish itself, rather, as the resource needed to enable production of the consumer’s self (Holt, 2002: 83). That authenticity can be fortified by, as explored in wine marketing, reinforcing heritage, making links to specific geographic place, and virtuously embracing cause over commerce (Beverland, 2006). This research will map these ambitions in a campaign communication context – seeking to understand how consultants manage the challenge of authenticity in mediating a politician’s brand.
The increasing centrality of branding logic, authenticity schemes, and emotional angles within strategic communication is occurring at a time of significant change as new models of networked, digital politics emerge. At a juncture of democratic malaise across the Western world – with declines in voter turnout, party identification, and institutional trust – campaigns are increasingly professionalized through spin doctoring and symbolic politics, as leaders and elites become further removed, socially, from the general public
(Davis, 2010). To some, governing has itself morphed into a “permanent” marketing campaign (Newman, 1999); to others, the global rise of personality-centered political Branding Politics 5 popularity furnishes a “much-needed shortcut” to make electoral judgment (van Zoonen,
2005: 69).
Such shortcuts may seem necessary in a contemporary era of information abundance, when technology enables decentralized participation by non-traditional organizations and comparatively chaotic news flow (Bimber, 2003). Within the United
States, for example, Daniel Kreiss (2012) has shown how the Democratic Party has responded to these new media changes with a combination of organizational management and grassroots empowerment, where “authenticity,” in particular, became a strategic buzzword for the practices of Obama 2008 campaign. Similarly, “personalized political communication” – that is, using “people as media” through door-knocking and phone bank outreach – has been augmented and revived by advances in networked computer software and the co-optation of “real people” will be further illuminated here (Nielsen,
2012: 7). Although some research has taken a practical, administrative approach to the nascent study of political branding (e.g., Schneider, 2004), others have advocated an empirically-informed critical approach to the subject (Moufahim and Lim, 2009), as this project pursues through in-depth interviews and qualitative analysis.
Methodology
This research takes a media production approach to the analysis of political communication and views consultants themselves as part of a culture industry of sorts, in that they oversee “the industrial production and circulation of texts” and “social meaning” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 12; Howard, 2005; Peterson and Anand, 2004).
Stephen Medvic (2001) usefully likens these professionals to “semiotics engineers,” as they are responsible for “determining which campaign signs and messages will be Branding Politics 6
decoded in the most advantageous manner” (47). However, as Stuart Hall (1980) long
ago established, the meaning of messages is not preordained by creators but rather negotiated, more or less hegemonically, by receivers. Nonetheless, the encoding of texts on behalf of branded candidates by the operatives examined here does provide some of
the “raw materials” for or “parameters” of that subsequent reception work, which makes
this a valuable and unique contribution to political communication research.
The sensibilities and activities of consultants need to be brought to light; this is, of course, challenging, given that the field is both inherently secretive and deeply competitive, which could explain the relative shortage of scholarship on operatives
compared to other facets of the political communication process (Thurber, 2000).
Qualitative methodology lends itself as especially applicable to this shadowy, elite
population; by discovering patterns in the thick description of semi-structured interview
transcripts (instead of simply measuring pre-selected phenomena via quantitative
surveys), a more in-depth understanding of their logic and practices can be charted and
critiqued (Brians et al., 2010). Indeed, the diverse array of interviewees involved in the
work of political branding – playing different roles at different times on behalf of
different clients – meant that any standardization of data measurement would preclude a
holistic ability to address these topics. Thus, interviewees were not even necessarily
asked a standard, formal set of open-ended questions, but were engaged about their
particular experiences as they relate to the themes elucidated in the literature review.
A total of 108 potential respondents were contacted between June and December
2012 – a season maximally situated for U.S. election discourse, which takes place at the
beginning of November. Targets were determined through both purposive and snowball Branding Politics 7
sampling – means considered ideal for a “relatively limited,” “hard-to-reach,” and
“somewhat interconnected” community like campaign consultants – and interviews proceeded until tests of “completeness” and “saturation” had been met (i.e., “an overall
sense of the meaning of a… theme or process” was achieved with little new material
elicited from subsequent interviews) (Schutt, 2004: 151). More than a third of those
contacted agreed to participate, resulting in 38 one-on-one, in-depth interviews lasting, on
average, 37 minutes each (see also Author, 2014, 2015).2 (While longer interviews are
certainly always preferable, it was something of an accomplishment to capture even that
much time from high-level operatives and elites.)
Two “key informants,” with whom the author had prior friendships, proved
essential at the start of the research; these included the press secretaries for a Democratic
presidential candidate and a Republican congressional representative. These informants
permitted interviews of their own and assisted in networking with other colleagues who
work in political communication. Subsequent snowball sampling ultimately netted
approximately half of the total number of interviewees who participated; the author also
“cold-contacted” a wide variety of other consultants who appeared in news coverage as
potentially germane to the research. Moreover, a diversity of professional perspectives
was pursued, resulting in an even number of Republicans and Democrats – including 9
self-described general consultants (handling a variety of tasks), 8 digital strategists, 7
press secretaries or communication directors, and 7 advertising producers, as well as
other, even more specific roles like media buying, speechwriting, blogging, and
opposition research. These roles, however, were not static and can be seen as but a brief
snapshot within an ever-shifting industry; it was not uncommon to hear from participants Branding Politics 8 about career arcs that found them taking on different and overlapping jobs in political communication. Washington D.C. was home to a large number of interviewees and most worked at the higher echelons of campaigning on behalf of both individual candidates and national parties (i.e., in state and national races, at the presidential and congressional level). The sample included a diverse range of career lengths and ages – from those fresh out of college to those nearing retirement with decades of professional experience, although most were in their 30s and 40s and skewed exceedingly male (all but 2 of the
38).
Findings and analysis
Symbolic differentiation and use-value marginalization
Within the world of commercial advertising, “producing marketable commodity signs depends on how effectively advertisers are able to colonize and appropriate referent systems” (Goldman and Papson, 1996: 9). Reebok, for example, can be economically successful only to the degree that it carves out a competitive cultural meaning from the semiotic space not already established and occupied by Nike or Adidas, given the inherent similarity of products. Political consultants, particularly on high-level (i.e., presidential) campaigns, must contemplate a similar challenge of branding differentiation. This is especially true during primary season; one contender vying for a party’s nomination can be successful as a media representation (and, in turn, potentially successful electorally) only to the degree that he or she carves out a meaning not yet colonized by opponents. Long-shot candidates therefore face a political economy challenge in defining their brand uniquely against front-runners who have staked out a larger or more advantageous share of attention and referents (e.g., in the Republican Branding Politics 9
Party, for example, singularly tethering themselves to “family values,” “national
defense,” “libertarian rights,” etc.). As the campaign manager for a “second-tier”
presidential primary contender lamented:
At the risk of making a marketing analogy and turning these guys into products,
for candidates who are not in the first tier with the press, this felt a little bit at
times like trying to introduce a new cereal against Kellogg’s and Post. Kellogg’s
and Post get the best shelf space in the supermarket. (The Institute of Politics,
John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2009: 149)
This vying for differentiated brand space takes place not just on the campaign trail, but also throughout the legislative year, as the act of governing indistinguishably blurs with the process of campaigning, largely upon the advice of consultants. One press
secretary for a high-ranking U.S. lawmaker explained how his communications team
constantly sought to position their boss uniquely from others; decision making, about
both image and policy, therefore flowed from the premise that they were constructing
him as “the thoughtful conservative” as opposed to “the earmarks guy” or “the pro-life
guy” – conceptual representations apparently already occupied by other “name-brand”
Congressional representatives. Another interviewee, the communications director for a
national legislator, said she very consciously focused, in marketplace terms, on what
issues her leader defined himself through and would therefore only engage upon, adding,
“If we get an interview offer on CNN to talk about [an issue] that is not with the realm of
his brand, I’m not going to put him on TV.”
Such single-mindedness bespeaks an early lesson about the marketing of
American political consultants that emerged from interviews: the paramount need to Branding Politics 10 brand candidates as simplistically and repetitively as possible. Contextually, this instinct among campaign consultants can be traced, at least partly, to their sense of information overload that they believe defines our era and plagues voters’ attention spans (Bimber,
2003). The chief creative officer at a media consulting firm detailed this thinking and the reductiveness such “logic” demands when conjuring the imagined audience:
The consumer or the voter has a big Rolodex in their head and when you mention
a brand… they immediately go to that Rolodex and they very quickly find that
card and there’s probably a word or no more than a phrase that’s written on there.
The same thing is in politics… If the average candidate… tries to give you this
paragraph narrative, you’re asking a little too much of the consumer… What
you’re really trying to do is get a couple words on that Rolodex.
The superficiality of tone in contemporary political discourse might, therefore, be partially born of such assumptions about shallow citizens by those consultants who encode the speeches, advertisements, and PR materials consumed: “People don’t read – if we put up a 20-page white paper, nobody would read that. So we’re trying to use the visuals… to try and illustrate a narrative,” explained one communications director for a
U.S. representative. This conjecture is not to be taken as empirical fact but as strategic circular logic: a supposition of an uninformed, unmotivated electorate needed dumbed- down content that, in turn, would do little to remedy the allegedly uninformed. And, as suggested by the communications director, political branding seems to parallel its commercial counterparts in giving careful consideration, even conceptual primacy, to associated symbolic imagery: that is, the sign value of a leader (e.g., “political party A means this, as opposed to political party B, which means something else entirely”) Branding Politics 11 matters more to consultants than their client’s use value (“political party A will run the country efficiently”) (McNair, 2011: 90). In other words, the tenets of this professional class dictate that the utility of a branded candidate (i.e., what his or her legislation will do for citizens) is marginalized, if not eclipsed, by the importance of constructing a convincing cultural performance (i.e., how his or her image will evoke identification with citizens). The president of a media consulting firm illustrated this encoding logic through a detailed example:
In political advertising, associating candidates with certain visual imagery can be
incredibly powerful… I took a shot of [one U.S. senate candidate] standing in
front of the water tower in the little town where he grew up and that shot of
[him]… became a very iconographic image… Everybody in [that state] knows
what a water tower with a town name on it means – it means… ‘This is your
hometown.’ By standing him in front of that water tower, it said to people…
‘Well, OK, he’s a Democrat, but he’s really a small-town guy and he shares your
values and he’s not going to be a crazy liberal like the rest of them.’
Values, in other words, appear to derive as much from the appearance of political style (e.g., the water tower as authenticating accessory) as the detail of policy substance
(e.g., how, concretely, that candidate might help the fortunes of that small town). There are, moreover, a limited number of accessory signifiers available within the political branding referent system; this perhaps explains the historic dearth of creative variety seen in election season commercials, where the same visual and conceptual tropes get recycled over and over again. “You try in this business to be original, but at the end of the day, things are used frequently because they work,” conceded another president of a media Branding Politics 12 consulting firm. “You could watch 100 ads and you’re going to see the ‘diner shot’ a lot; you’re going to see the ‘walking through the factory shot’ a lot; you’re going to see the
‘walking down Main Street shot.’” Such spaces and symbols offer lingering proxies of integrity and nostalgia at a time of widespread political cynicism, even as they are deployed, somewhat cynically, by these encoders of campaign communication to do the work of trustworthiness that elected officials apparently can’t do on their own. These
“props” act as a means of localizing the otherwise distant; purifying the otherwise corrupt.
Such superficial semiotic devices can help generate the ethical surplus necessary for political brand equity: If a candidate is “a little too rough around the edges,” the president of a direct mail and opposition research firm will “soften” him up with a commercial featuring “his mother, in a diner, or something like that.” On the flip side, to cast an opponent as a “Washington insider,” the partner at a media consulting firm will
“have [our] candidate outside and dressed more casually and you show pictures of your opponent who’s always in the suit and tie with the capital in the background.” This contrast usefully evokes the tension of tribal familiarity versus conspiring Other; consultants jockey to make their client’s brand more accessible and relatable than their opponents, as the president of a direct mail and opposition research firm commented:
Issues don’t matter… It comes down the person. I firmly believe that the beer test
– who would you rather have a beer with – is probably one of the most important
barometers for electing a president and I think that’s what the American people go
by… When you say ‘authenticity’ or ‘character,’ that’s the most important aspect
of the campaign… It’s probably more telling by looking at who gets beat and Branding Politics 13
what you see is character flaws and personality flaws, not necessarily bad stances
on the issues.
Candidate brands are, thus, defined or limited by the plausibility of their lifestyle
affiliations and cultural credentials (and those, in turn, partially enable or constrain the
odds of electoral success). These symbolic schemes are meant to anticipate and attend to
the identity project inherent to branding: facilitating voters’ agency by furnishing the sign
value of a candidate toward voters’ own self-discovery. In other words, following
Arvidsson (2005), just as the definition of a branded consumer good helps individuals to
articulate themselves (e.g., “I’m a Mac person,” as opposed to a PC), so, too, does the differentiated positioning and social status of a branded candidate help voters to articulate
themselves (“I’m an Obama person”). And that definition and identification is usually
clinched, again, not through issue stances, but rather imagery poses; “I’m an Obama
person” is a more enticing, accessible vehicle for identity than, say, “I’m a 39.6% highest
marginal tax rate person” (to take but one policy example).
To achieve this, the press secretary for both a U.S. senate leader and U.S. House
speaker argued that a campaign consultant has to capture “areas of a politician’s life that
would be interesting to people” – which explains, he noted admiringly, the strategic
placement of George W. Bush on an October 2002 cover of Runner’s World magazine.
On the other hand, the image of, say, “John Kerry trying to hunt went against his brand of
being a northeast, very wealthy senator who wouldn’t know the first thing about
hunting,” he added. All of this contributes to what the executive vice president of a
strategic consulting firm joked is an increasing “American Idolization” of politics; that is,
voters “judging candidates as intensely on attributes as they do on issues… If you look at Branding Politics 14
American Idol, sometimes the best singer doesn’t necessary win as much as the most
entertaining contestant.” Thus, sculpting “entertaining” attributes becomes a campaign
season preoccupation for consultants with branding aims. To some, that style established
might even dictate whatever substance is subsequently proffered; according to the
strategic media consultant at a political advertising agency, “[Branding] sets all the rules.
Because if you’ve defined the candidate’s brand correctly, that affects their policy; that
affects the decisions that they make; that affects the advertising that they do and what the
backdrops look like – everything.” The strategic media consultant at a political
advertising agency further outlined these parallels between commercial and political
branding – and how both are meant to authenticate the status of the consumer’s self:
I feel like buying a car and selecting an office holder are almost identical. It’s a
multi-year commitment that you will… tell your friends that you made rationally:
‘Why’d you buy a BMW, Mike?’ ‘Well, I bought it because it’s a double
camshaft, blah-blah-blah.’ But in reality, you might have bought your BMW
because you think it makes you look good.
On the other hand, unlike commercial goods, “with politics, you’re not selling them a product by which you can say, ‘It does all these things’ – they can go to the store and can buy it and they can come home and have that immediate satisfaction,” caveated the president of a media consulting firm. For that reason – the immateriality of the
“consumer” decision in the voting booth – “the emotional appeal absolutely should be the utmost priority in a majority of your advertising… A logical argument doesn’t always do the trick – you really have to tug at people’s heartstrings.” Indeed, emotion, rather than Branding Politics 15
reason, represents the essence of “ethical surplus” and the central orientation within
branding a political candidate as a cultural product:
I always tell candidates – because they all think they’re going to win because they
think they’re the better candidate and they’ll give you 100 reasons why they’re
better – but I know of no household that holds big meetings where they all do
opposition research and sit down and spend four hours going through an issue
matrix to decide who they’re going to vote for. It’s done on a much more visceral
level, if you will.
Cynical as this assessment may be, the chief creative officer at a media consulting firm hints here at the emotional bias that consultants harbor when strategizing campaign
texts. This confirms Benjamin Barber’s (2007) suspicion, discussed earlier, that branding
is ultimately a project set against deliberation, rationality, thoughtful decision-making,
and perhaps even fundamental consciousness: “Someone once said, you know, emotion
leads to action and thinking leads to more thought. We often say that when it’s the head
versus the heart, the heart ultimately wins the day,” the partner at a media consulting firm
revealed. “If you can find an emotional wrapper to put around your issue, then you’re
just going to get further with a television audience than if you just present sort of cold
facts and figures.” The president of a direct mail political advertising agency further
added: “Clients misunderstand that all the time and people in the campaigns say, ‘Well, if
we can just get them our entire platform, they’ll understand.’ Well, no – this is America.
People are moved by emotions…high-impact, many times, shock value.”
That impetus to trigger affect rather than instill “understanding” in “cold facts and figures” has long been true of the logic of commercial branding. For example, a sneaker Branding Politics 16
company’s ability to wring revenue from mythic invocations and arbitrary sports star
juxtapositions, rather than mere material realities, like how the shoe was produced and
what it will actually be used for, is an enduring testament to that sleight-of-hand. And
just as corporations have sought to make themselves organizationally “weightless,” by detaching from the manufacture of goods on balance sheets in favor of a less tangible, but more profitable brand meaning (Klein, 2000), so, too, is branded politics an effort to make the candidate “weightless” – detached from the manufacture of policies in their media and advertising representations in favor of a more persuasive cultural meaning.
Thus, consultants emphasized the need to avoid decontextualized facts, excessive detail, and quantitative or technical information and reasoning in their communication practices. “I think what happens all too often in the political world is we think, ‘Oh, we’re just going to throw all the facts out there’ and people are going to say, ‘Now I get it,’” commented the chief creative officer at a media consulting firm. “And the problem is there’s so much competition for people’s attention that there better be also some type of attraction other than facts.” When it comes to speeches, as well, the senior speechwriter for a U.S. president added, “If there’s a policy that’s just too in the weeds, then you don’t even need to get into it.” The analyst at a media buying firm aptly summarized the conventional wisdom in this regard:
If I could choose my opponent in a political debate, I would pick someone that’s
talking policy and statistics, while I’m delivering a message that has an emotional
appeal. Literally, if I could choose them – I would be like, ‘The person that’s
going to talk about numbers – I want that guy’… There’s a reason that works,
like, neurophysically. Like, when you activate higher-order reasoning, like, math Branding Politics 17
– things like that, you’re actually going to deactivate the emotional centers of the
brain… So if you’re talking statistics, you’re no longer talking emotions… and if
the other guy’s talking emotion, they’re going to win every time.
This drive to emotionalize abstract policies and issues often leads to polarizing moralizing in the pursuit of ethical surplus. And that elevation of provocative imagery, at the expense of “rational information” has resulted in some critiquing consultants as the
“puppeteers” of campaigns and candidates, forcing “wedge issues upon the electorate” –
that is, heavily symbolic, emotional, and divisive topics and frames that otherwise distort
policy deliberations (McNair, 2011: 94; Medvic, 2004: 34). Such branding to cast
honorable and disreputable characters and leverage emotional angles likely furthers
partisan gridlock and anti-compromise fervor. “Moral outrage and urgency are two
things I like to think about,” noted the vice president of a digital strategy firm. “It’s gotta
be… ‘I can’t believe this is happening! I’ve gotta do something about it – and I’ve gotta
do something about it now!’”
Rather than address citizens with cool logic, the consultant seeks out opportunities
to escalate hot anger toward extreme – and even exploitative – emotional ends. This is
partly because consultants recognize that “politics is pretty low on the decision-making or
importance factor for most people,” explained the president of a political advertising
agency, and so voting needs to be “an emotional gut-check.” As the press secretary for a
U.S. representative declared, “Nobody votes on, you know, whether they believe taxation
should be 16.1% of GDP or 18.6% of GDP. Nobody gets out of bed and goes to a polling
place based on that kind of argument.” Finding the “hook” that best individualizes that
emotion often means casting a subject in as starkly moral terms as are available: Branding Politics 18
“Depending on the specific policy, you have to find the villain that we’re all fighting against; you have to find the hero that we’re all rooting for,” said the communications director for a U.S. representative. Consultant Frank Luntz’s venerated rhetorical transformation of the estate tax into the “death tax” was a superlative example of this for her:
Suddenly, everybody was really mad about it and they said, ‘Oh, my God – this is
important to me! Because when I die, my children will not get what I’ve worked
so hard to build’ – it was no longer about the uber-millionaires who were going to
be dying and giving their estates to their kids. It was: ‘When I die, I want my
children to have that stuff!’
Authenticity proxies and the disinterested brand pose
Within these branding schemes and emotional tactics, authenticity is a preoccupation no less important to political consultants as their commercial counterparts.
This ideal takes shape – and its assumed importance is evoked – in one of the most common practices endemic to all of advertising: the “real person” testimonial. As the partner at a media consulting firm explained, “The best thing you can do if you have the time is to have real people in the ad and if they’re talking in an unscripted way, that’s often the most powerful way.” Such participants serve as human proxies for authenticity, much in the same way that the water tower, the neighborhood diner, and the factory floor, discussed earlier, serve as “props” and “set pieces” for authenticity: anchoring the politician’s brand in something specific, local, familiar, believable, and therefore “real.”
This effort to establish heritage is actually not so different from one of the main techniques for authenticating commercial brands like wine; Michael Beverland (2006), Branding Politics 19
for instance, has found that consumers value “being able to trace a wine to a real place as
opposed to a ‘placeless’ blend,” (here analogized to Washington D.C.) making it “a unique product of its environment” in which “authenticity was derived from… place- based differences” (255). This is all the more important given, as Aeron Davis (2010) argues, leaders are now “less connected socially to general publics” (35).
Moreover, if the politician’s brand is offered up to audiences as an opportunity for
the production of their identity, utilizing “actual” everyday people is understood to be an
effective way to model that identification and subsequent affective attachment. Examples
like this were cited throughout interviews. In order to “move beyond propaganda and tell
stories that were true and human” on behalf of his client, rather than “just asking people
for soundbites,” the chief blogger for a presidential campaign would sit through long
interviews with supporters full of “messy” details that more effectively “humanized”
them as credible interlocutors: “That didn’t just say, ‘Oh, well, everyone who supports
[the candidate] is perfect and everyone thinks [he’s] perfect… Without that authenticity
that we strove for, I don’t think we could’ve built the movement.” Similarly,
interviewing laid-off workers for an attack ad, the president of a media consulting firm
said, “’Forget the scripts. Let’s just talk.’ Because I could see they had – they were real;
they were authentic; they were genuine.” The unpolished quality of these participants offered the potential for overcoming an inherent suspicion of the glossy, marketed spectacle that mediated politics (and, for that matter, branding in general) has now become – a strategic lack of pretense geared toward audiences already assumed to be
cynical about and alienated from contemporary advertising (Goldman and Papson, 1996). Branding Politics 20
The strategic media consultant at a political advertising agency articulated the logic of
this appeal – and that wider institutional problem it endeavors to overcome:
For people to feel an attachment to [the candidate]… [they’ll say], ‘Well, I’m
never going to meet this guy, how will I get to know him? So that [real] person
serves as an intermediary for me to get to know him.’… They’ll give you a big
dose of authenticity… People don’t believe politicians – at any level – especially
right now people are very anti-politicians.
For a politician aiming for authenticity – and for the backstage consultants
helping to script that performance – it is critical that he or she strike what might be
termed “the disinterested pose.” This is because one of the central challenges for a
(commercial) brand is to come across as a “cultural resource” rather than a “cultural
blueprint” – that is, brands “must be perceived as invented and disseminated by parties without an instrumental economic agenda, by people who are intrinsically motivated by their inherent value” (Holt, 2002: 83). In other words, BMW, Louis Vuitton, and
McDonald’s must appear to be “inner directed” – more attentive and devoted to their own cultural mythology and the identities they afford rather than the economic exchange that drives cash registers and stock prices (Thompson et al., 2006: 52).
Just as authentic brands come across as less concerned with using consumers for that profit reaped from securing the sale – “downplaying their commercial motives” – so, too, should the authentic candidate come across as righteously cause-driven, not vote- driven (Beverland, 2006: 57). The elision of fact-based, policy-heavy messaging, as mapped earlier, further aids in this pursuit – for attempts at more rational persuasion betray intentionality, whereas evocative cultural presentations appear less instrumental or Branding Politics 21 ends-directed. As other scholars have concluded, “In the new media ecology, communication strategists need to work harder than ever… to adopt new styles in order to not seem contrived, insincere, and heavy-handed… Affected unprofessionalism may well hold the key to successful communication” (Gurevitch et al., 2009: 176). Here, then, is the logic of authenticity’s power, as modeled by intermediaries: It builds trust by not appearing to tell us what to do (Author, 2013). As a means of influence, authenticity obfuscates the source – and beneficiary – of its machinations.
Therefore, such “amateurs” working on behalf of a campaign can help “in an age when politicians do not benefit from seeming to be politicians” (Gurevitch et al., 2009:
176). The senior speechwriter for a U.S. president mentioned something similar when he described incorporating into his work the stories of regular folks found in letters sent to the president; likewise, the chief blogger for a presidential campaign would integrate tales from “you know, Joe Sixpack” into their social media output to validate the
“organic, grassroots” nature of the movement. Overall, a rougher aesthetic – both visually and conceptually – was purported to substantiate a purity and integrity of purpose, as the vice president of a digital strategy firm summarized: “Anything that’s overproduced looks scripted and if it has a little bit of a lower quality then I think it appears more authentic.” Ultimately (and, of course, paradoxically), the goal here is to carefully construct something that appears to lack any construction whatsoever – to manufacture a brand image devoid of artifice – in search of what “seems like a real moment,” as the partner at a digital strategy firm put it, because “even when people are reading a script, you don’t want them to think that they’re reading a script.”
Conclusions Branding Politics 22
By examining branding, emotion, and authenticity in contemporary political communication, this study of the marketing logic of American political consultants has also offered a glimpse into a strategic set of power practices. Liberal politics may theoretically be “the politics of reason,” but, as Manuel Castells (2011) argues, “emotions and feelings ultimately decide the way in which politics, and power-making in general, construct meaning, and thus behavior, to determine action that is rationalized rather than rationally decided” (190, 191). A caveat of caution is warranted here: As with any production-side study, one cannot extrapolate or infer the effects of these messaging tactics on audiences or citizens; this methodology is limited exclusively to in-depth interviews with the elites involved in strategizing such communication (a group that is, nonetheless, not often examined in this fashion and worthy of that investigation). One can, however, draw conclusions about the effect of these practices on the discourse and environment of contemporary political communication; in that, the power of these professionals is not necessarily directly on voters, but on the mediated politics and campaign representations that voters encounter.
As analyzed here, political consultants play a key role in constructing the sign value and ethical surplus of their candidate clients, just as their commercial counterparts labor toward similar branded ends for consumer goods. These consultants maintain a logic or sensibility that emphasizes simplistic differentiation amidst semiotic clutter, the marginalization of political use value, enabling the identity project of audiences, and the output of polarizing morality tales. Furthermore, just as consumer brand managers must delicately negotiate authenticity bids by restraining commercial ambition in favor of more upright commitments (i.e., the brand exists for its believers, rather than their Branding Politics 23 pocketbooks), so, too, do political brand managers endeavor to avoid their clients seeming too electorally instrumental, much less desirous of naked power. The deployment of “realistic” props and set pieces, as well as testimonials from “real” people, help fasten the candidate to a parochial and, therefore, plausible and convincing context.
Few of these stratagems would seem salutary from a normative standpoint. The utility of democratic politics should reside in self-governance rather than performance for self-discovery. If commercial branding is an effort to decouple the material dimension of the marketplace exchange in favor of a dreamy, mythic counterpart, then these consultants’ efforts evince much the same ambition: to recede considerations of platform and policy behind image and identification. The best political commercials might “not tell the viewer anything,” because they are simply trying to “get a couple of words on that
Rolodex” in the voter’s mind, but the best democracy needs more than that if an informed citizenry is to fulfill its theoretical obligation. Through the speeches, advertisements, and
PR materials they provide, consultants furnish much of the information context for that democratic decision-making and their inclination to impoverish “facts and details” within those texts diminishes the political economy of civic communication. Moreover, it would appear that these consultants are not even interested in formal, conscious deliberation from the audiences addressed if feelings can be conjured first to short-circuit rational calculations.
The construction of highly emotionalized – and even exploitative – political communication has the potential to incite more of the same cynicism that so plagues politicians and their consultants (and necessitates the authenticity proxies outlined here).
When consultants speak of the need to co-opt “real people” in their ads, it bespeaks the Branding Politics 24
“unreality” of the entire political spectacle and campaign branding project – one in which visual indicators (e.g., shots of a candidate in a certain place or with certain people) as often betray truth as reveal it. And because brands are instrumental – in that they represent a means of power to accomplish a goal, be it cognitive, affective, commercial, or political – they have to conceal that intent to come across as authentic. Such power does not formally seek reasoned decision-making from the subjects that it addresses, preferring to cozy up to emotional inclinations instead – nor does it appear in the guise of obvious power, preferring to embed itself in co-opted amateurs and trustworthy spaces.
This, then, is a form of power that self-effaces its own intentions – obfuscating the desire to win office and execute policy behind feelings stirred up and symbols that voters can
(supposedly) believe in. At moment of democratic malaise in the United States and across the Western world, these are not auspicious machinations from the backstage advisors who encode the discourse of political communication.
Endnotes
1 To be certain, Liz McFall (2000, 2004) cautions against reading “too much novelty”
into the present era of consumer culture and, in turn, overgeneralizing the naivety of
consumers and the pragmatism of advertisements from yesteryear; her historical analysis
shows that symbolism and subtlety have long factored into professional promotion and
persuasion, along with anxiety about skeptical audiences.
2 Participants have been stripped of identifying information to protect their anonymity:
Press secretary, U.S. Representative; Press secretary, President, Media consulting firm;
Communications director, U.S. Representative; Press secretary, U.S. Senator; President, Branding Politics 25
Opposition research firm; Executive vice president, Strategic consulting firm; President,
Political advertising agency; Media consultant, Digital strategy firm; Press secretary, U.S.
Senator; Deputy chief of staff, U.S. Representative; President, Digital strategy and online
advertising firm; Deputy communications director, National party committee; President,
Direct mail and opposition research firm; President, Political advertising agency;
President, Media consulting firm; Opposition research partner, Political consulting firm;
Political director, Political advertising agency; President, Media consulting firm; Senior speechwriter, U.S. President; Analyst, Media buying firm; President, Direct mail political advertising agency; Media consultant, Strategic communications firm; Vice president,
Digital strategy firm; President, Political advertising agency; President, Strategic consulting firm; President, Media consulting firm; Partner, Digital strategy firm;
President, Political advertising agency; Partner, Media consulting firm; Chief blogger,
Presidential campaign; Strategic media consultant, Political advertising agency; Partner,
Social and digital media agency; Chief Internet strategist, Digital strategy firm; Chief creative officer, Media consulting firm; Associate manager for policy, Social networking company; Chief advertising consultant, Presidential candidate
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