How Democrats failed in the 4 P’s of marketing

It occurred to me after watching the 2024 election that many liberal arts students just do not understand how marketing drives our businesses and economy and affects our elections.

Many people think of marketing as being the same as sales, but marketing includes what the product/service is, promotion and sale of that product/service, delivery/service of the product and the price for all of that. Those are considered to be the 4 P’s of marketing (product, promotion, place and price).

While most politicians concentrate on sale of themselves, they miss the “total” aspect of marketing of themselves and their policies.

The Product. A marketing-oriented company analyzes and then defines the market and then defines the needs/wants of that market against the competition for that market, which all then determines the product.

Promotion and sale. From the product, a campaign is developed with a message that matches the defined need/want of the defined market so that sales can be made. As a market and product mature, less sales effort is needed and more mass messaging is needed. As a product price increases (e.g., Mercedes vs. Honda), the more individual sales effort is needed as opposed to mass messaging. Marketing determines the message, the promotion techniques and the individual sales effort.

Delivery/Service (Place). How will the company get the product to the customer, and then how will the company service and provide maintenance for the product? Marketing looks at many different methods. Costs. Time frames. In-sourcing. Out-sourcing. How much cost can be absorbed into the product price versus charging for the delivery/servicing?

Price. Many liberals make the mistake of using the terms cost and price interchangeably. Cost and price are different. Cost is expense for making and delivering a product. And price is the revenue that is received. A price is determined by mark-up to cost (how much is added to cost for overhead and profit), by how much the market is willing to pay and by competition. Marketing considers all of that in developing a price. In addition, marketing determines when to kill a product because a price cannot be obtained to cover the costs. Cost to a consumer is price to the provider.

It is obvious from the 2024 election, that Kamala Harris and the Democrats failed at marketing. Since about 80% of voters will vote for the same party in election after election, the national market presidential candidates are seeking are those 20% who are uncommitted. That market is most visible in the battleground states.

Harris failed to win any of the battleground states. Why? Because the product (Harris and her policies) failed to meet voters’ needs so that her promotional activities failed to gain any sales. Harris as a candidate was lacking in what those consumers wanted, and her message did not answer their questions.

It all started by her team not figuring out what that market wanted/needed (those 20% of undecided voters). So she provided a faulty product and an ineffective sales campaign (whose cost was over a billion dollars). She ran on “Trump is bad.” And then she charged too much for her product (policies). Her price to voters was more inflation, more debt, more immigrants, more taxes.

Compare that to Trump. As a candidate, he had faults, but his policies as part of his product matched exactly what undecided voters wanted/needed. He ran on “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” And his promotional techniques worked incredibly well to sell that product (policies) with a much lower product price (less inflation, debt, immigration, taxes).

The Democratic Party vs. the Republican Party? With three-quarters of Democrats in Congress being lawyers and the 45-plus attempts by Democrat lawyers to try to stop Trump with lawfare as a political weapon, and from their 1,600-page budget bill of last week, it is obvious that lawyers run the Democratic Party.

It is also obvious with the Cabinet choices by Trump and the reduction of 1,600 pages to 118, that businessmen are in charge of the Trump administration.

This is from my first book, in 2009, “Save America Now”:

At our MBA program at the University of Arizona in 1970, Dr. Navin would spend much time discussing the stages of a business. … As a Harvard disciple, Dr. Navin believed in the case study approach. We used the following model to analyze the maturity level of the companies in each case that we studied.

Dr. Navin taught us that if you could figure out the emphasis of a company, then you could figure out its stage in its business life/cycle and invest in the company accordingly.

• Research and Development (R&D) = Infancy
• Operations (manufacturing and distribution) = Adolescence
• Sales = Young adult
• Marketing = Mature adult
• Finance = Elderly
• Legal = Dying

This same process works for governments. Since lawyers run the Democratic Party, it is obvious that the party is dying. Why did a record percentage of Hispanics and a fourth of black men vote for Trump instead of Democrats as they traditionally do? Because they could subconsciously see that America is dying when Democrat lawyers are running it and that America is growing when Republican business marketers are running it.

All growth for the last four years came from government spending, more government employees, and more and more immigrants. Democrats need to change their orientation or die, as the Republican Party is the party of growth – which includes the birth rate.