I was thinking about the business implications of the Obama juggernaut the other day when a friend said to me, “I can’t think of the word ‘hope’ any more without thinking of the guy.'”  Something about that comment stuck in my head.Then this afternoon, I was going through some piles of clippings and ran across a column by Maurice Saatchi in which he lays out his theory of “one-word equity”:

“What I am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age.  In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind.  In this new business model, companies seek to build one-word equity – to define the characteristic they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.”

If any politician, let alone any company, has ever established “global ownership of one word in the public mind,” it’s Obama’s seemingly permanent grip on “hope.”  Whatever your politics, you must agree that’s an amazing accomplishment — especially for a guy who five years ago was a state senator.  

3 Responses to “Obama’s one-word equity”

  1. Brad Hutchings says:
    June 12, 2008 at 11:43 pm

    How is Barrack Obama’s “hope” in 2008 different from Bill Clinton’s “change” in 1992?

  2. Venkat says:
    June 13, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    If you think about it, isn’ the Google AdWords model of bidding for specific terms a non-brand left-brained counterpart to the right-brained “own a word” in the sense of a design high concept? In AdWords, you own the word in the sense of its use in the deep data-mining and analytics that run our world’s communication infrastructure today.

    And it goes the other way too. Half the world still says ‘get me a xerox of that’ as opposed to ‘get me a copy of that.’ I work for Xerox, and we actually have PR policies to discourage that… a case of a brand-word being category-defining in such a powerful way that the original owner loses control 🙂

  3. Abraham Lincoln Owusu says:
    June 24, 2008 at 6:18 am

    Yes, I think I agree with Richard Sullivan In today’s digital world, “Change” is key. Obama’s “Hope” is good in every facet of life, if people do not realize the need for cahnge, hopes provides nothing but empty promises.
    T