Marketing and Engagism

Last month, I received a note from a friend of mine about a recent survey of Americans. The survey demonstrated that more people can name the seven dwarves and the three stooges than the nine Supreme Court Justices. Is this because the dwarves and stooges are inherently more memorable than the Supreme Court? Possibly. But I tend to think it's because the traditional avenues that government and civic institutions use to get their message out just don't work as well in an engagist society.

This prespective applies to pretty much any marketing problem you can think of. Recently, I was struck by how this applies to the political realm. Here in DC (where the primary was over yesterday, thank goodness), we had what seemed like a gazillion candidates for various offices. And every single one of them did all the traditional campaign things -- signs, doorbelling and those annoying taped messages that are left on your voice mail (on the day before the primary we had 13 such messages). Of course someone won, but in my opinion no one stuck out in the crowd. And I doubt anyone on the street could name all the candidates if you paid them.

I think that ESPECIALLY in the civic and governmental arena, promoters of candidates and ideas tend to think that if it's a "good cause" or the "right thing to do" or "important to society" (like the Supreme Court) it will be naturally memorable. Really, not so much. These individuals need to adopt a more engagist mindset.

What does that mean? Well, in the DC primary example above, how much more memorable would it have been if one of the candidates paid one of DC's poor starving musicians to write a jingle -- or better, had a jingle writing contest on their website? Then they could have used that for their pre-voting day phone messages. I sure would have remembered that. Or what about developing a "get candidate X to the mayor's office" video game that people could play on the website or that could be delivered on CD to people's houses when doorbelling? Or online wiki that would allow citizens to make realtime edits and suggestions to a candidate's platform?

These engagist techniques would not only appeal to a group of people that expect to interact -- they would be memorable! Sure, some people might not respond well. None of these ideas are the "safe" option. But the "safe" option is almost always the "gee, who is David Souter?" option...