Preface: This is a post about marketing, not about politics. Should you be inclined to submit comments, please bear this in mind. Political comments aren’t going to get published.

What do Dell, Microsoft, and Governor Palin all have in common? They let their competition succeed at defining them. This is a major marketing problem; short of major PR disasters, like the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak in the early 1990s, I can’t think of many kinds of marketing/PR problems that are worse than this kind.

First, I think the McCain campaign could have avoided all of this by putting Governor Palin on the entire press circuit and all the talk shows immediately following the Vice Presidential announcement on Friday. Governor Palin was, and to a large extent still is, an unknown quantity to a lot of Americans; this means both significant opportunities and risks for the McCain campaign. Had the McCain campaign gotten Palin to define herself first on all of the talk shows and the traditional press circuit then they could have probably nipped a large amount of the media speculation firmly in the bud. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, the campaign did little to get Palin’s story out through the mainstream media the way they wanted to tell it. So McCain’s opposition stepped up to the plate instead. They labeled Governor Palin as a country yokel; a delicate, fragile woman incapable of standing up to tough questions and scrutiny; a careless mother; and someone who was devoid of any sort of achievement or record. These are the labels that hung in the air prior to Governor Palin’s speech on Wednesday night. It doesn’t matter of they were fair or unfair. So what did she do?

Simply, she capitalized on those low expectations set by the opposition and used the spotlight of the Republican National Convention to surpass them by an order of magnitude that was not to be believed had you taken everything written about her as the gospel truth. That’s all she had to do: demonstrate in a public and prominent fashion that the expectations set by competitors were well below reality.  To quote the National Review Online for a moment:

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn’t worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How’s that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your “devoted husband John Edwards” routine?

Palin’s nomination acceptance speech last night was a fantastic start for the McCain campaign’s public relations battle in defense of their Vice Presidential selection, but it’s only a start. I expect we’ll see a lot more of Palin on the campaign trail and on the press circuit.

The Parallel to Microsoft and Dell

I see a lot of parallels with this story and the story of Microsoft, Dell, and Apple. A quick passage from Fast Company should serve as a good introduction:

“Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way Apple has messed with Microsoft,” says Enderle. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the competitor just sits back and takes it. If somebody tried to do that to Oracle, you wouldn’t be able to find the body.”

Dell is just as affected by Apple’s marketing as Microsoft is; Microsoft provides the “lame, crappy” operating system and Dell provides the “lame, unreliable, broken hardware.” Apple has, with the help of Microsoft’s own missteps during the initial release of Windows Vista, lowered the consumer expectations for Microsoft products below the level of reality.

Don’t believe me? Watch even one video from Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment - the entire point of that campaign is that the perceptions of Vista fall well below reality and the campaign does a very effective job in challenging and even changing those perceptions.

As the poster in “Eight Years of Wrongness” points out, all of these companies have simply taken attack after attack after attack without offering a substantive rebuttal. The Mojave Experiment is a great start, but that’s all it is: a start. Dell, Microsoft, and other PC vendors should follow Lenovo’s lead and start developing much more direct counter-advertising, like this ad:

So what do I recommend that Dell and Microsoft do? Simply this - take every opportunity to seize the spotlight and directly rebut the expectations set by Apple. Apple’s products are far from perfect and Dell/Microsoft’s aren’t the complete and utter disaster that they’re portrayed to be. Don’t try to set any new expectations or new messages - challenge and correct the dominant ones set by the competition first.

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