Roseville Professor Sees Minnesota Republican Brand in Tatters

Kent Kaiser, Ph.D., is a professor of communication at Northwestern College in Roseville and a fourth generation Minnesota Republican. His opinion piece recently appeared in The Minnesota Republic, a University of Minnesota conservative student newspaper. He has shared his article with Roseville Patch.
 
Most business people recognize that the most important time to generate good publicity is during or right after a crisis, because ultimately the preservation of one’s “brand” is vital to weathering crises.  Generating goodwill and avoiding bad publicity, as much as possible, are vital to branding.
 
Many people don’t really understand what a brand is.  In brief, a brand is a promise.  It is promise that every time people interact with a particular product or company or whatever, they will experience the same quality and value.  A breech of that promise can tarnish a brand, and indeed, “brand death” is possible.
 
In recent years, there have been reports about how Americans’ affinity for both of the country’s major political parties has waned.  Yet polls indicate that the Democrat brand has not suffered like the Republican brand has.
 
Recently it was reported that the Republican Party of Minnesota is perhaps $2 million in debt.  It has also been revealed that the Republican leader in the state senate had a scandalous, inappropriate affair with a staffer.
 
Rather than engaging in rapid response and thinking strategically to mitigate the damage, as one would expect in a crisis situation, Republican officials and insiders have become engrossed in the crises and have allowed their attention to be diverted from restoring and building the party’s brand.
 
For example: Minnesota Senate Republicans recently met to choose new leadership because of the aforementioned scandal.  The well-publicized yet private, closed-door meeting to choose new leadership took fully 11 hours, and no news emerged from the meeting until the very end.  Consequently, media covering the meeting had little to do but revisit and re-hash the scandal that had precipitated the meeting—all day long.
 
In the end, announcement of the uninspiring new leadership was little more than a footnote in the news coverage that day.  The Republicans reinstated a leader who had left the post only a year earlier, as if no apparent good new leader even existed.
 
Imagine what could have happened: Senators could have spent a couple days making calls and lining up support for their favorite candidates.  Positive stories could have been floated about support coalescing around a particular candidate.  The meeting could have lasted 11 minutes instead of 11 hours.  Republicans might have looked competent, well-organized, and ready to move forward.
 
Just as picking a new senate leader should be no big deal, neither should erasing the party’s debt.  Yet one would think these are the most important Republican priorities, especially based on the conversations among party insiders in social media and elsewhere.
 
Instead of seeing the big picture—and building a positive “brand” for the party—insiders at all levels seem to get bogged down in minutiae and focus on matters that ultimately are pretty irrelevant.  After all, no normal person knows or even cares who is in leadership in the state senate, and no normal person cares about Republican Party debt.
 
Minnesota Republican insiders have taken a terrible public relations situation and milked it for all it was worth.
 
Thus, based on the Republican Party’s focus and what it has offered its adherents lately, what is its brand—what does the Republican Party promise?  Financial disarray?  Loose morals?  A lack of good leadership?  An inward focus on bureaucracy?
 
It is easy to see why Republicans yearn for the days when their party provided big ideas—“thought leadership,” as it is known in PR.  We haven’t seen such brand-strengthening leadership since 1994 on a national level and even more distantly on a state level. 

WThis is why a candidate like Ron Paul can generate enthusiasm in the race for president—he at least provides thought leadership, even if his thoughts are out of sync with mainstream Republicanism.
 
Some of us have long dreamed of seeing candidates for public office posting lawn signs along Minnesota city streets that say, for example, “Vote for John Doe, REPUBLICAN, for office”—like Minnesota Democrats do, and like other states’ Republicans do.
 
For this dream to come true and to restore their party brand, Republican Party officials must get their affairs in order as quickly and quietly as possible whilst getting all players focused singularly on providing the big ideas that hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file Minnesota Republicans want.