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A guest commentator on Morphsview.  Dr. Kim wishes to remain anonymous.  As a marketing professor at a large university, the good doctor is a rare thing - a conservative.  As such, Dr. Kim must be undercover a certain amount of time to avoid punitive administrative responses.

A comment from Dr. Kim on Andrew Klavan's editorial:

Interesting article. I really think it's simple. Obama swept into office totally on marketing (window dressing). He had no "product" -- no results, no past, no history, etc. So....he won almost solely based on speeches. Now he has to govern and he both product and marketing.



And what do we know about marketing?

The marketing needs to match the product (think KMart as an example of a failed product/marketing match). When you overpromise (marketing) and underdeliver (product) you will fail. When you say one thing (marketing) and do another (product), you will be discovered. And....when you have a bad product that people don't like (think New Coke), nothing you say can fix it (hence, the elimination of New Coke and a return to Original Coke....and Coke knows a thing or two about marketing and couldn't save the failed product).


What do we know about CEO performance?

Holding everything else constant, experience matters. If it didn't, we would take the 19 year old genius at Harvard and put him in as CEO of Procter and Gamble. But experience matters. It develops tacit knowledge that over time ensures greater knowledge and ability to navigate complicated decisions that CEOs and Presidents encounter.

Put these two together and Obama's lack of knowledge and understanding about how marketing REALLY works helps us understand why he believes that his rhetoric is more important than his policy....that his problem is about what he says and not what he does. The reality is that it's very simple. His product (policy) is inconsistent with what America wants. And the more he tries to convince us to buy his policy (think New Coke), the more he loses credibility, trust, support, and votes. America really isn't as dumb as he seems to think we are -- that we are sheep who ignore what he does and blindly adhere to what he says.


The one thing I do know is that Obama isn't "coachable". He would have "gotten" the message much earlier than now if he had been and adjusted his behavior. Instead, he digs in and commits to his "we haven't communicated well" world view. And what do we know about success? You simply can't succeed unless you are coachable and can adapt, adjust, and alter behavior when what you are doing isn't working.



So....unless unemployment drops to 7% I'm not sure he is re-electable, but time will tell. Maybe this vote was enough of a punch to the solar plexis to wake him up. We'll see.

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