When bad advertising wins, who loses?

Voters in the swing states for the presidency have been accosted for some time now by political attack ads. So if you are of voting age in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia or Wisconsin, then you are witnessing the power of marketing and branding communications to do more harm than good.

It’s a lesson that applies to B2B marketing and especially brand identity development. When our firm sets out to build a manufacturing client’s brand identity, we would never think to do it by tearing down somebody else’s brand. Yes, we do use positioning strategies to help a customer segment distinguish the greater value that our client offers, versus the competition. But our method is all about value definition and value recognition, achieved through strategically honest communications.

But wait a minute, that’s what B2B marketing and branding does. And we are talking about political attack ads, which are centrally not about strategically honest communication. Attack ads are crafted to distance, discredit and divide election votes. So a good attack ad is not designed to appeal to your intellect, but to your fears and suspicions, your paranoia and perhaps even your prejudices. A good attack ad does not build an argument around “the issues” or set out to explain a candidate’s plan for change.

There’s always candidate fodder for attack ads, because no candidate’s history is as saintly, successful, so perfectly managed or perfectly lucky as to not have some scar capable of being reopened by exaggerated scrutiny. A good attack ad finds such scars and stabs its thumb into them.

A good attack ad then, is not just an attack on a candidate’s credentials or ideas, so much as it is an attack on the human condition, an attack on all of us who are not perfect, but who are otherwise of good character, intent and have the capacity to do great things.

Attack advertising is as old as America, because in some circumstances it works. But why is that? Perhaps the answer says more about the segment being marketed to, than the quality of the marketing and branding behind the ads.

jb

www.centrifuge-now.com