Mark Penn. If you live under a rock and don't know the name, you will.
Hillary Clinton made one of the best moves possible for protecting and developing her individual brand with the hire of “Master of the Message” political branding strategist Mark Penn, CEO of public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and past key advisor to huge players Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Bill Gates. Burson-Marsteller is one of, if not the top, PR firm in the nation. Penn, one of the most innovative and interesting personalities in the PR realm, claims his fame on the invention of a concept titled “Microtrends” in which he develops the fact that the most important trends to be examined when developing brand outreach are actually the smallest; in effect, he detects nearly invisible patterns of behavior in American culture that wield a surprisingly and generally unknowingly influence on a political, business, and personal level.
For example, his first identified microtrend was for the Clinton 1996 re-election campaign in which he was able to discover and target the “soccer mom” population. This approach to thinking about problems, wrapping your head around the fact that we should not understand the world today in megatrends but in small currents and discreet demographics that give way to patterns of social change, is extremely hard to do, but rewarding once you can attain that level of understanding. Penn boldly chooses to base his opinions on as much numerical fact and empirical evidence as possible, and that is how he is able to identify the microtrends. Microtrends bring political branding to an entire new, higher, unprecedented level because it finds a way to make that ever important emotional connection with many more people in contrast to campaigning to megatrends (female v. male, old v. young, etc). It is not to say that using megatrends cannon establish the emotional connection – it clearly can and has; it is just to say that examining the microtrends and the corresponding evidence is the most effective way of doing so.
Microtrends sounds wacky at first, and it's really hard to wrap your head around the idea. I have to read every sentence of that book like five times before I can really get at the concepts Penn is talking about. I believe that Penn’s way of brand development will take off in the next few years, but for now, only his select few clients practice it, although they clearly enjoy great success. I am fascinated to see if he can do for Hillary’s campaign what he has done for others and add her onto his extensive success list. He recently published this article touting why Hillary is the chick to beat. He certainly has his work cut out for him. But he is a god damn genius. Keep in mind that everything he writes in the article is something that is HIS idea and HIS doing, not Hillary's. Genius.
Check out an interview with the man himself from ABC Nightline.
He's really kind of a funny guy.
Hillary Clinton made one of the best moves possible for protecting and developing her individual brand with the hire of “Master of the Message” political branding strategist Mark Penn, CEO of public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and past key advisor to huge players Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Bill Gates. Burson-Marsteller is one of, if not the top, PR firm in the nation. Penn, one of the most innovative and interesting personalities in the PR realm, claims his fame on the invention of a concept titled “Microtrends” in which he develops the fact that the most important trends to be examined when developing brand outreach are actually the smallest; in effect, he detects nearly invisible patterns of behavior in American culture that wield a surprisingly and generally unknowingly influence on a political, business, and personal level.
For example, his first identified microtrend was for the Clinton 1996 re-election campaign in which he was able to discover and target the “soccer mom” population. This approach to thinking about problems, wrapping your head around the fact that we should not understand the world today in megatrends but in small currents and discreet demographics that give way to patterns of social change, is extremely hard to do, but rewarding once you can attain that level of understanding. Penn boldly chooses to base his opinions on as much numerical fact and empirical evidence as possible, and that is how he is able to identify the microtrends. Microtrends bring political branding to an entire new, higher, unprecedented level because it finds a way to make that ever important emotional connection with many more people in contrast to campaigning to megatrends (female v. male, old v. young, etc). It is not to say that using megatrends cannon establish the emotional connection – it clearly can and has; it is just to say that examining the microtrends and the corresponding evidence is the most effective way of doing so.
Microtrends sounds wacky at first, and it's really hard to wrap your head around the idea. I have to read every sentence of that book like five times before I can really get at the concepts Penn is talking about. I believe that Penn’s way of brand development will take off in the next few years, but for now, only his select few clients practice it, although they clearly enjoy great success. I am fascinated to see if he can do for Hillary’s campaign what he has done for others and add her onto his extensive success list. He recently published this article touting why Hillary is the chick to beat. He certainly has his work cut out for him. But he is a god damn genius. Keep in mind that everything he writes in the article is something that is HIS idea and HIS doing, not Hillary's. Genius.
Check out an interview with the man himself from ABC Nightline.
He's really kind of a funny guy.
1 comment:
Wow, this is certainly fascinating. It sounds like the 'microtrend' strategy uses similar skillsets that marketing firms use--a combination of qualitative research (i.e. study groups and interviews) and quantitative analysis, the latter of which I presume can be used to either identify the microtrend in the first place or to numerically back up the hypothesis. Sorry, if I lost you there, it's just that I've been doing an independent research for about 2 years, during which I used extensive statistical analysis to determine the relationship between demographics features (e.g. median per-capita income, age, race, gender, housing value) and resultant voting pattern across major cities in the U.S.
This is really cool! To be honest, I didn't realize how sophisticated a PR work can be, but I guess this one surely is. Thanks for the enlightenment.
Getting back to Mark Penn-Hillary Clinton, though, it seems like Mark Penn gave some good advice to Hillary when you do look at certain "microtrends" like Latino voters and Asian American voters in CA (although I wouldn't really call either of Asian Americans or Latino Americans as a "micro"trend, seeing that they are also racial groups just like white voters and African American voters).
I think I heard some Tim Russert or even some superdelegate saying on MSNBC that 3/4 of Asian voters in CA and 2/3 of Latino voters in CA voted for Hillary on Super Duper Tuesday. But I think, as you suggested in your post, this genius idea is of Mark Penn and in fact I think this genius idea of Penn is not being fully followed by Hillary. Despite the identifying of the microtrends and some what of appeals to them, I feel that Hillary doesn't publicly--as in on national media--express embracing of Asian Americans or Latino Americans sufficiently. And I think the lack of follow-through by her makes it difficult for some groups to completely endorse her because for many ethnic minority groups, receiving attention and care doesn't just mean shaking hands with a famous white politician, but rather being visibly, publicly embraced by the mainstream.
Shit, this is too late. I need to sleep. I hope that made sense. And thank you so much for such an insightful post. (do you know what specific set of advice Penn gave to Hillary? or is it too early for that to be disclosed to public..?)
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