While the change in the economy put him unrecoverably behind, McCain made some critical mistakes that probably started with poor market research and poor marketing.
First, you never lead with a word the competitor owns. Just like Walmart owns cheap, Obama owned the word "change". These positioning statements should have never been uttered by the McCain and his team: "Change you can believe in", "Change is coming", and "Change you deserve." He needed his research team to find another niche.
Second, people think of Marketing as creating needs or lying. Good marketing is based on the truth and REAL needs. Lying rarely works. Enhancing REAL advantages and connecting to real needs does. Pushing Joe the Plumber because Joe said he would pay more taxes was a mistake. Good research would have uncovered that Joe would save taxes under Obama's plan. Surely another plumber named Joe who makes more than $250k exists. Similarly, pushing Palin as an alternative to Hillary missed the mark on WHY people liked Hillary. These were not just failings in Marketing. They were failings in Market Research.
More specific to Market Research failings, I found concerns about the Bradley effect interesting. The election results virtually mirrored the best polls. People confuse the Bradley effect with the poor market research techniques that existed in the early eighties. Subsequent studies of polling bias by Andrew Kohut of Pew Research has found that have found that poorer, less-educated whites are less likely to opt into polls. Studies that do not adjust for these issues in their methodology will have errors. Is there a special effect occurring when there is an error in a poll whose methodology involved hiring Black ex cons to exit poll suburban whites in the wake of racially charged LA violence?
Interesting article on polling techniques
Comments