How Can Republicans Repair Their Brand?

When I worked in brand management at Procter & Gamble in the 1990s, we learned about the importance of connecting to one's customer. Over the past five years, the Republican Party has lost touch with its voting customers and its brand is in need of repair.

Poll after poll throughout the 2008 election cycle showed that on the issues that mattered most to Americans, voters favored Democrats over Republicans.

A Gallup Poll of 30,000 respondents released in late January revealed that Democrats now have a 36 percent to 28 percent advantage over Republicans in party identification. This is the largest advantage either party has had in 20 years.

Earlier this decade, party identification was roughly equal between the parties. Over the past five years, problems managing Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and the economy have undermined the Republican brand.

Brand management theory places a high priority on a product's message and messenger. The GOP needs a message that resonates with middle-class and younger voters.

The Republican brand equities of caring about smaller government, a strong national defense and middle-American values are all strengths. The party must recapture and re-emphasize them.

The success of the "surge" has taken Iraq off the front pages and the Bush administration's anti-terror policies have helped keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Republicans should continue to remind voters of these two facts. However, developing new domestic policy solutions is critical to its future message.

Middle-class anxiety over the economic crisis and the fraying safety net is real. Republicans need to develop credible policy solutions on issues like health care, education, a balanced budget, entitlement reform, work-force training and pension security.

Federalism matters, and the federal government should not do everything. However, it can do some things and what it does it should do well. Republicans cannot be seen to be only opposing federal action.

Just cutting taxes no longer provides a compelling narrative for the American middle class. In the early 1980s, when the top marginal tax rate was about 70 percent, cutting taxes was an imperative. Even in 2000, when government revenues from the tech boom were booming, cutting government made sense. With lower rates today and a $1 trillion projected federal deficit for 2009, those arguments carry less weight.

The GOP must rebrand itself as a party of creative solutions to domestic policy challenges. Its success in the 1980s and in 1994 was based in part on such creative solutions.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, I had numerous conversations with Republican campaign officials hungry for policy ideas. At the same time, I had a relatively difficult time getting my policy ideas in front of the Obama campaign team. In part, this reflects the fact that while smart Democratic policy wonks were flocking to the Obama campaign and flooding it with ideas, the Republican Party's cupboard was relatively bare.

In brand management, we tried to develop products that met the unmet needs of the consumer. Much as the Democrats responded to their political losses in the mid-1980s by forming the Democratic Leadership Council and by developing a new series of centrist ideas with broad appeal, Republicans need to fill the unmet need of developing a moderate, serious, right-center group that comes up with smart, new policy solutions.

The Republican brand also needs to think about finding messengers who can appeal to younger voters, minorities and women.

A lifelong Republican campaign volunteer, who happens to be a Hispanic woman, complained to me this week about the challenges she felt volunteering in Virginia for Republican candidates in 2008. She expressed that the party had become less welcoming to her diversity over the past two election cycles.

This is one anecdote, but does speak to a larger problem, that in demographics, in policy and in style, the GOP is perceived as too homogeneous, too anti-immigration and too locked on a narrow range of positions. This weakness is underscored in contrast to the relative strengths of Barck Obama, and the result is that pollsters find a whole generation of young voters attracted to the current president. The Republican brand needs smart, diverse leadership, and messengers who in style and substance have broad appeal.

Repairing the Republican brand will take time. The good news for the GOP is that politics is cyclical. The pendulum will swing back in time.

Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney have become lightning rods, and as time passes so will the weight they place on the Republican brand. Democrats will overreach their support on some issues, and soon Mr. Obama will be seen to own the economic challenges of the nation.

America is largely still a center-right nation and broadly shares the underlying values of the GOP. National security continues to be an area of GOP strength.

In brand management, those brands that stand the test of time are those that adapt their message and update their messengers to meet the changing requirements of the times. The Republican challenge and opportunity is to update its brand to appeal to today's voting customers.