During the presidential campaign, I watched, actually marveled, at masterful messaging of candidate Obama. Despite my support of another candidate, I couldn’t help but be drawn into the brilliance of the campaign staff, who so deftly applied the Eight Credos of Successful Challenger Brands. I found myself scouring the web to read everything I possibly could to gain that one insight that I could apply to my own little niche — higher ed marketing, specifically business schools.

Now I watch/read the news and I wonder ‘what happened?’ I am now scouring the web for everything I can find so I don’t make the same mistake.

Specifically I am talking about all of the chatter about the President’s economic recovery plan and the “lack of a message.” Nearly every story on the recovery plan includes references to its “lack of message” or “muddled message” or “the president has failed to tell the story to make the recovery plan work in the minds of the American people.”

The unfortunate “tarring and feathering” (yes, I am in Williamsburg!) of Timothy Geithner, blaming him for the “lack of a plan” is not really his fault at all. I have a number of experts around me at the business school and many of them say that Geithner’s details make a lot of sense, that he may even be doing the right thing. But even they say that the problem isn’t the details, it’s that they haven’t come up with a way to communicate those details in a meaningful way!

Score another one for marketing or messaging or perception management. Whatever word or phrase you want to use, it’s obvious. The message DOES matter because it gets people in the right frame of mind to actually pay attention. The flood of details doesn’t give anyone any meaning, it just scares them. And it’s scaring them away and they’re tuning out. And they are left with a sense that this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. We hear, “Geithner doesn’t give us the feeling that he’s in charge… he doesn’t inspire confidence.”

I don’t intend to blame anyone here or second-guess the President’s handlers (although I guess I am). I am not sure who is to blame, but you would think that the President knows better. Sending in the details guy is not the way to win the hearts and minds. He needed to send someone in with a big idea, one so big that it could mean something to a lot of people or people could project their meaning onto it. Didn’t that work for him before? Our Challenger Brand stopped thinking like one!

You don’t feel details and you don’t inspire with them, especially when the details are kind of boring or don’t sound very appealing or include words like ’sacrifice’ or ‘catastrophe’. And you certainly won’t get people’s attention with them, either. You inspire with a big idea that stops them dead in their tracks. You get them to feel by telling a story that raises the hair on the backs of their necks. And that gets followed with “tell me more…”. Nobody is asking for more. They are asking for a way for them to make sense.

I’m not saying the details don’t matter. They certainly do. But they won’t matter to people not paying attention.