In my last post I talked about Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes. We Need You to Lead Us. Yesterday’s historic election of Barack Obama was the embodiment of Godin’s premise that, “The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
One needed only to look at the scene in Grant Park and from other locations around the country to see first-hand how people followed.
In today’s Ad Age, they summarized it this way: “Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing. Take a relatively unknown man. Younger than all of his opponents. Black. With a bad-sounding name. Consider his first opponent: the best-known woman in America, connected to one of the most successful politicians in history. Then consider his second opponent: a well-known war hero with a long, distinguished record as a U.S. senator. It didn’t matter. Barack Obama had a better marketing strategy than either of them. “Change.”
The lesson here for all marketers is that capturing the “leadership” position in a market when it is seemingly impossible is very much possible. It takes vision, a willingness to form and shape opinion, and to have a plan others follow willingly and enlist others to do the same.
All politics aside, it was the ultimate case study for achieving stratospheric marketing ROI, and an historic occasion that we can and should learn from.