In early October, I wrote a post on framing your competition. I used Obama and Romney as an example. Obama framed Romney as an out-of-touch, millionaire who can’t relate to the common man.
With the election now over, I want to show you just how important and powerful the rich-man-Romney-frame was.
Exit polls data
Take a look at the image above pulled from Foxnews.com. When asked what the single most important attribute or characteristic was in a candidate, 21% responded that he “cares about people like me.” That represents about 25.3 million voters.
Romney only captured 17% of those people (about 4.3M)!
Let’s say that Romney had better responded to that frame or changed it altogether. If he would have captured just 23.43% instead of 17%, then he would have won the popular vote (he lost by about 3.2M)!
What if he had captured 50% of these voters, which should not have been outlandish when you consider that he captured more than 50% on the other three candidate qualities. At 50%, he would have picked up 8.3M votes and won the popular vote!
But Obama’s team knew the one area to attack and they attacked it early and often.
Two take-aways
First, setting a powerful frame and making that frame central to your messaging is extremely effective in changing consumer attitudes and behaviors.
Second, a marketer or campaign manager, such as Obama’s, that can aptly identify the right frame and then execute it is worth more than his/her weight in gold. In this case, it was worth a presidency.