What You Can Learn From Romney's Campaign

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Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

What You Can Learn From Romney's Campaign

This isn't a political rant. I have been reading many of the summaries of why Romney lost his presidential bid. Channelnomics and ARS examined the IT spending of both campaigns and found that Romney bought from Best Buy's mindShift (an MSP). The one point they got wrong is that the Dems have two online systems for campaigning developed during Obama's first run for office. It is pretty impressive CRM. But it wasn't all IT. That's like saying that CLEC's are failing because they picked the wrong gear.

As I tell my clients, it has nothing to do with the technology that you are so enamored with. I know that techies love the boxes, the blinking lights, etc. However, that isn't why people buy.

Look at auto sales: it is all about a test drive. They want you to test drive the car, because then you can picture owning it. Romney's 47% speech might have given some voters a glimpse of what ownership would look like.

Really, his marketing was awful. I know Obama went negative early and pounded away, but they spent about $3B on the two campaigns, so it is wasn't the budget. It was the messaging.

In sales, especially in telecom, boy, do we talk about saving you money. That gets people's attention, right? So that's one message.

The other message is to talk to the pain points as a solution provider. Romney never gave details of how he was going to solve any problem. In the foreign policy debate, he pretty much just agreed with Obama, so switching providers wasn't getting you anything there.

Truly, the marketing failed to produce a clear, concise message. What was the value proposition? What pain was he going to solve and how?

Living in a swing state, I was inundated with TV ads from both parties and the SuperPACs as well as ads for the Connie Mack IV versus Senator Bill Nelson. Mack/Nelson was negative ads, but Nelson painted a clear picture of what you would get if his opponent won. Painting a picture, telling a story, giving a demo --- these are all ways to provide the prospect (voter or buyer) with concrete ways to understand your positioning (unique sales proposition).

You can have all the tech in the world. You can have the best and brightest staff in the world and it won't matter one bit if you don't talk to the marketplace about the pain you are solving. Period.

People buy for only two reasons: to get rid of pain or for Pleasure. That's it. And both are emotional decisions that are rationalized by the buyer (hence, buyer's remorse).



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