“The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because the need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.”

“Marketing Myopia”, Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business Review, July/August 1960

I was working as a corporate librarian at AT&T when I decided to take a couple of evening classes for fun. If I took business classes, AT&T paid, so I took Marketing and Management. It was the fall of 1994. The World Wide Web had been around for about a year, but I’d been on the internet for a long time, as had many, many other librarians. Long before the public had access to the internet, librarians were conducting research on networks of commercial databases, like Dialog and Lexis/Nexis. I always used to say that corporate librarians were running grassroots organizations within the walls of some of the most successful businesses on earth. We got by with very little. At a subsequent job, I had no book budget. I used to threaten to hold bake sales so I could buy books for the R&D folks working for a Fortune 500 company. No matter where I worked, we always had to justify our library’s existence. Upper management always regarded us as expendable, at best. I thought the courses in Marketing and Management might help me learn how to think like a businessperson about libraries.

The Marketing class was a waste of time, but the Management class turned out to be one of the best courses I ever took. We read several Management classics. Marketing Myopia was one of them. I have found myself turning to that article more times than I can count. (Lucky I didn’t take Accounting.) At the time, I was becoming increasingly bothered by my profession. We’d been connected to the internet for years, yet I could see that we were completely blindsided by the growing popularity of the World Wide Web. Marketing Myopia spoke directly to the frustration I was experiencing. In it, Levitt described what had happened to the railroad industry. Railroad companies only competed with other railroad companies. Plagued by its myopia, the industry failed to perceive the competitive threat that cars, buses, trucks, and airplanes posed and within a matter of decades became a shadow of itself. I was seeing the same thing happen in my profession. Librarians should have been on the forefront of internet technology, working side by side with IT professionals to find ways to organize and deliver information, but they found themselves instead attending workshops at their own annual conventions then, and for many years after, on topics like How to Use the Web. My profession’s failure to recognize the competitive threat posed by the new technology, that wasn’t really new to them, has driven many libraries to the brink of, or into, extinction.

I’ve turned to Marketing Myopia again. This time, I’m reading it through the prism of my frustration with the Democratic Party. It would seem that the metaphor falls apart when applied to politics. It should follow that Democrats, preoccupied with competing with Republicans, failed to see the rise of a viable third party. However, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, one of the other sources I turn to again and again, described how Republicans found a way to reinvent themselves in the eyes of many who had never believed that Republicans represented their point of view. In other words, our competitor, the one we’ve presumably always had in our sights, to the exclusion of all others, became the other. The Republican Party today bears little resemblance to the Republican party of 40 years ago, and the change happened right before our eyes. Marketing Myopia is really about the failure to recognize change, the failure to recognize that what you’ve become comfortable doing isn’t working anymore. Ultimately, it’s about losing your ability to compete.

Levitt explains it this way. Railroad company executives thought they were in the railroad business, when they were really in the transportation business. They were product-oriented, not customer-oriented. When the product no longer satisfied customers, because new, more appealing products had come along, customers flocked to the new products. The same thing happened to libraries. Turns out they weren’t in the library business, but in the information business. The Democratic Party isn’t in the business of selling the Democratic product. It’s in the business of representing the will of the people. It would be a vast over-simplification to suggest that the people went flocking to the Republican product because the Democratic product no longer satisfied them. Some did. Others found third parties that may not be viable competitors, but managed to eat away at our base. Of course, many became Independents, something I talked about in my column in December, while others stayed away from politics altogether. The point is that the Republican Party found a way to become customer-oriented, albeit disingenuously, while the Democratic Party remained stuck on its product. Worse still, Democrats had become so comfortable with their product that they could no longer really even describe what it was.

I recently attended the excellent PA Progressive Summit hosted by Keystone Progress. Everywhere I went, people were talking about messaging. Wendell Potter had talked about it when he spoke in Kutztown in January. He talked about it again at the summit. Others talked about crafting simple messages, clear messages. They talked about message discipline. Obama had been so great at messaging during the campaign, they said. Now we’re losing the messaging war to Republicans and corporations, they lamented. They wanted to know why it’s happening.

I say it’s premature to talk about messaging when we don’t have a product, or brand, we can describe. In my column in December, I talked about needing a brand, something I stole from our editor who has correctly pointed it out many times. It’s true that Obama was great at messaging during the campaign. His messages were hope and change, simple concepts that inspired us and gave us optimism. So what happened? It’s simple. The messages weren’t tied to a brand. Republicans have a brand. They built it around understanding what their “customers” want to hear and all their messages emanate from it. Even the fear mongering that Republicans rely on is directed at serving the public’s need for clarity. Fear is clear. It’s simple. It’s something people can get their arms around, whereas a 2000-page healthcare bill is not, literally or figuratively. People, I believe, would rather be afraid than confused, and the Republicans have been at the ready to scare the pants off of them. Sure, in recent months, it has appeared that the Republican Party was in disarray, at risk of imploding, yet that hasn’t happened. In fact, the party has stayed intact, wingnuts and all, and, no matter how many Democrats are in office, Republicans are in control. Their brand is national security, small government, low taxes, and, whenever it’s convenient for them, family values. They don’t have much of a track record on any of those things in recent years, but that doesn’t stop them from talking about them. I’d like to think that we could develop a brand we could not just talk about, but deliver. Hope? Change? What are we hoping for? What are we changing?

By the time you read this, Jon Deutsch, Principal and Chief Strategist of Capital D Design, will have spoken at the February Potluck & Politics meeting of the KADC. We’ve asked him to talk to our group about how to develop a Democratic brand and use that brand to craft messages. I’m very interested to hear what he says, but am already forming my own ideas of what the brand has to be:

The Democratic Party is about
People not Persons.

When Republicans resort to fear mongering, they’re appealing to the emotions of anyone who listens. The recent phony outrage is about trying terrorists right here on American soil in American courts and holding them in American jails they could escape from to roam the streets of America, killing Americans in their paths in America! Very emotional stuff. In response to that, we have nerdy talking heads who look like Wally Cox and have tape on their glasses and say things like, “Well, as a matter of fact, to be completely precise, the Justice Department cited in 2008 that 319 terrorists had been tried in civilian courts during the administration of George W. Bush.” That’s how we hit back. Good one! Doesn’t matter that we have the facts on our side—nobody’s listening! Worse yet, we’re being defensive. It’s all about us. It’s all about the product. “Well, our product is no worse than the other guy’s product.” If we brand ourselves as the party that cares about the people and looks out for the little guy, if we think about the customer, not the product, the message becomes this: “Aren’t you tired of being afraid?”

We’ll see what Jon Deutsch has to say about that! By the way, he and Wendell Potter have been invited to sit on a panel with CS2′s Chuck Brown to discuss this very topic at the Berks Progressive Summit on April 24th at the IBEW in Sinking Spring. The day-long summit is an abbreviated version of the recent PA Progressive Summit and is hosted by a new Progressive group, Berks Progress. We’re having our organizational meeting on March 23rd at 6 p.m. at the Peanut Bar. For more information on both events, check out www.berksprogress.org or search Berks Progress on Facebook.