5 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From Obama’s Victory

Despite nearly 8% unemployment, a tepid economy and millions of dollars in negative advertising, President Obama managed to pull off a sizable Electoral College win on Tuesday.
While Obama’s 2008 campaign is now seen as a real-world demonstration of the power of social media, his operation four years later was much more complex. The ’08 campaign is the stuff of textbooks, but the lessons of ’12 are brand new. Marketers of all types studied Obama’s ’08 campaign and they would do well to take a look at his subsequent mobilization effort. Here are some of the obvious lesson of Obama’s triumph this time around:

1. It’s the Big Data, Stupid

Big Data may have its flaws, but this election shows that it’s indispensable. New York Times columnist Nate Silver showed how crunching numbers can render most pundits’ gut instincts irrelevant. The Obama campaign proved the same for the marketer’s gut. As Time chronicled, the O campaign relied on a team of dozens of number crunchers who made predictive calls on exactly the right type of pitch to right the right type of voter. Read the complete story....