Personifying Families as a Political Tool

I've been wondering about personifying as a marketing technique. U.S. politics is a straight-forward example: personifying the Republican/conservative family ideal is so much more concrete than personifying the Democratic/liberal family ideal. Close your eyes and imagine the Republican family ideal. Do it. No one will see you. The Republican ideal has a specific family structure, clear roles, traditional genders, coherent values. And Republicans need to connect their leadership to delivering that image. They implication is: "If the image is attractive, give us your vote!" No, that doesn't mean the Republican "tent" isn't big enough to include other sorts of families. Republicans have various non-Caucasian wings, gay and lesbian wings, etc. But the core imagery is consistent. These various wings say, essentially, "I realize my party doesn't portray me as a traditional member, but I am drawn to the broader ideals." That is, "I am a Republican despite my idiosyncrasies, not because of them."

I remember being amused to hear that if you give 6 - 8 year-old American children a crayon and ask them to draw a home, the vast majority draw the same thing: a square with a triangle on top. A door and a window or two. A chimney. You know it in your mind's eye. The amusing part was that this image is even consistent among children living in dense, urban, multi-family dwellings--children who have never seen that archetypical detached, single-family house outside of a book or picture. And who do they--and you--"see" living in this house? Is it a father, a mother, a kid or two, maybe a pet? The concreteness is staggering. And if this is not your view or your family, I've got a hunch you don't see anything WRONG with that image. And that's the power. I believe that humans tend to embrace a general ideal and dismiss or accept some amount of conflict. Up to a breaking point of fundamental difference, a positive image is worth supporting. Is the father working...or out of work? Are the children adopted? Is the mother a VP...or a stay-at-home mom? For most, these aren't deal-breaker conflicts with the Republican ideal. They will say, "No problem, give me a reality anywhere close to that image, and you can have my vote." But variation from that core image is, of course, a spectrum. What happens when the parents switch breadwinner roles? Does the image lose a few advocates? Maybe. OK, what happens when both parents can be the same sex? Do we lose a few more? What happens when each parent can maintain a second family to support their emotional or financial needs? Wait. We just lost 22 states. Where's the line? To a large extent, I believe that understanding this spectrum is core to driving success in American politics.

Close your eyes again. What's the Democratic family imagery? Do you get as concrete a picture? No chance. The Democratic "ideal" includes families with dramatically different forms: varied gender roles and mixes, varied physical home styles, varied interpersonal relationships among parents and children, varied racial mixes, varied value structures. In a word, variety. "That's the strength," say Democrats. And perhaps so. But the marketing challenge--where "marketing" means "influencing behavior" to vote Democratic--is far, far more difficult.