The race of the two presidential candidates of the Democrats in the US, Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton, is becoming more and more dramatic. It receives extensive media coverage and surely has many interesting aspects. It even fits into our blog on strategy, since both candidates’ campaigns follow their particular strategies. Unfortunately, the further this race goes the more it is driven by reactions to latest developments instead of an overall strategy. Well, I don’t follow this issue closely enough to elaborate on it in more detail. However, two of our regular contributors to our Management Portal obviously do. They are both experts in branding. So they both wrote down their view about the branding aspects of presidential campaigns in general and of Mr. Obama’s campaign in particular.

In the first article Naseem Javed discusses The Presidential Branding. He states that ‘these days, the know-how of Presidential branding is as important as the keys to the Whitehouse itself. The combined billion-dollar costs of campaigns to get votes is no longer a simple matter of shaking hands and soundbites. Today, all over the world, national leaders looking for breakthrough images depend on ultra sophisticated branding and image identity systems to strategise and oversee their campaigns.’

In the next article, Dan Herman asks: Can Short-Term Brand “Candidate Obama” Transform Successfully Into Long-Term Brand “President Obama”? He concludes that ‘if he [Mr. Obama] wins the nomination, then this will certainly be the next challenge which the “President Obama” campaign masters will have to overcome:  to smoothly handle the transition from short-term brand “Candidate Obama” to long-term brand “President Obama”.  Time will most certainly tell.’

I think this branding issue is an interesting aspect of the presidential election in the US. When all this is over and the US have elected their new president, it will be worth to look bank and thing about the branding lessons we can learn from each candidates fortune or misfortune.