How does one market a presidential candidate?

The “soap” analogy (packaging, promotion and the the rest of the 4 Ps) is no longer relevant. Today’s political marketing strategists employ more subtler techniques. The negative ads have got so sophisticated that they don’t even look like ads.

Take Hillary’s campaign. The pitchman isn’t simply the talking head of some famous person. It’s a talking head of the first pitchman, the former incumbent. The medium isn’t even TV –it’s a much distributed YouTube video that happened to originate on television. The ‘negative’ isn’t even negative, in the Sean Hannity kind of slam. It appears so balanced, you can almost miss it.

Watch how Bill Clinton carefully labels Barack Obama without sounding negative, and having lightening responses to Charlie Rose‘s deeper questions that would have trapped anyone else. There’s block-and-bridge, and like Shakespeare’s classic technique having Mark Antony call Brutus “an honorable man,” he’s all praises for Obama, while stomping all over him.

When probed about whether he thinks they are all fit to be president, Bill prefaces it by saying “not to criticize anybody…” calls Obama somebody who is … “a compelling and credibly attractive, highly intelligent symbol of transformation.” Before that he described him as someone with “enormous talent, staggering political skills.”

The key (negative) word here is “symbol.” Earlier on he made it clear that “symbol is not as important as substance.” He calls Hillary the “agent of change” and Obama a “symbol of change.” Careful repositioning of the competition, without sounding like the old-fashioned negative ad.

Come to think of it, it’s a bit like a soap ad –Dove‘s repositioning of “beauty” not as anti-aging, but “pro-aging.”