As the inauguration of Barack Obama approaches, Gerry Griffith joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger to discuss how the “change” brand will fare in the next four years. Griffith spent nearly a decade as a press secretary to a member of Congress and is currently Director of Communications at the West Virginia University Research Corporation.

As the manager of a few congressional campaigns and a former communications director in the political world, I was familiar with the concept of creating a brand for my candidate and putting it out there to do battle with our opponent’s similar effort. My candidate’s record of service helping constituents with red tape problems, his work securing dollars for infrastructure improvements and his positioning on key social issues made the brand that we promoted. Slap a good logo on the web site, distribute materials that hit the key messages and stick to the script. That was my branding formula and I stuck to it – with the desired results.

But that was congressional level politics. The presidential campaign of 2008 made a mockery of that traditional formula. In 2008, the presidential candidates didn’t seem to be hawking their own brands to compare and contrast to the competition. Instead, they were all battling for control of and identification with one brand – the brand of “change.”

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