Market Gopher

Sarah Palin and market research.  Her dirt has already been dug up, chewed over and thrown the Straight Talk Express in a slightly different direction than McCain’s camp might have expected.

So rather than toss in my two cents’ worth on who Palin is or what her Vice Presidential candidacy means, I’d like to take a closer look at that mountain of pennies she accumulating.

When it comes to the bread and butter of my shiny, new blog, I couldn’t have asked for a better opening topic.  Like Palin or not, the buzz she’s garnered has certainly eaten into the dinner-table and press chatter market share that Obama’s team has kept pretty much locked down over the past few months.  Everyone from Jon Stewart and Arianna Huffington’s crew to Bill O’Reilly and Pat Buchanan have the saucy, up-do sporting Alaskan plastered all over their sites—we’ll have to see how long it takes before she hits Oprah’s homepage.

The world which I inhabit is absolutely obsessed with having the freshest approach to what makes everyone tick… consumers, voters, whoever.  It’s kind of like baked goods:  If the stuff you’re selling wasn’t cooked up this morning with the apples your vender picked yesterday, it’s stale.  And luckily for us market gophers, there’re no shortage of fresh apples.

Advertisers will run surveys and focus groups on chewing gum, pollsters want to know whether you’d prefer your presidential candidates to eat corn flakes or oatmeal for breakfast, and now even academics with multi-comma honorifics are chiming in with behavioral studies on The Consumer (Voter) Mind.  So the question here is: What do all of Sarah Palin’s pennies say about voter preferences?

We already know that political contests in the U.S. are characteristically devoid of substantive discussion.  That’s just the way people seem to prefer it.  They want to see themselves in their candidate and most just don’t self-project onto policy wonks who like citing line items from congressional bills.  What’s left to be seen then is which of Palin’s characteristics strike a chord with the demographics she was chosen to sway.  Is she the bad-ass, gun-toting mama of the northern wilderness or is she the random chick that McCain picked only after being brown-beaten out of his top choices?  Or perhaps she’s the woman with family challenges like yours and mine… or the woman with too many distractions at home.

I’ll be on the look out for interesting posts and articles on this but, for now, I hope some of you out there will grace my page with a comment or two.

Muchos thank yous for visiting!