Brand K: Creating the Harris Campaign
Kamala's Journey from Zero To Hero and What Marketers Can Learn
It’s been less than a month since Kamala Harris went from a 2020 also-ran and an unpopular vice president to a Presidential candidate with unprecedented momentum.
In the weeks that Biden equivocated on dropping out of the race for President after his disastrous debate performance, half a dozen names floated around as a potential replacement. Harris’s name was rarely in the top four, even though her role as VP meant she would inherit Biden’s formidable campaign funds and ground organization.
But since he stepped down and endorsed Harris, her popularity has skyrocketed.
A few brand lessons from how Kamala built and capitalized on a brand campaign like no other.
Tapping fandoms
The campaign team has figured out fandoms and how to ride with them without overshadowing them.Kamala’s campaign kicked into high gear with one of 2024’s hottest artists and fellow half-Indian woman’s endorsement. Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala IS brat” shortly after Biden endorsed her, and her fans moved fast, making lime green Kamala shirts to party on Fire Island. Kamala’s campaign team seized the moment with a campaign HQ banner, and this cultural moment cemented Kamala as a cultural juggernaut. (Incidentally it also catapulted Charli XCX into the mainstream, with searches for her name doubling.)
A week later, Harris surprised Simpsons fans by zooming into a talk at the capital of all fandoms, Comic Con.
Dropping Merch
Merch isn’t new by any means, and the MAGA party had tapped and mined how to use merch to drive a core identity by taking over the color red.
When Harris picked Tim Walz as her VP, she brought on a whole new vibe to her campaign—football coaching, hunting, and dad jokes. He’s known for his occasional camo hats and Midwestern background, which conveniently overlaps with Chappel Roan, the pop phenomenon behind the album and related merch Midwestern Princess.
The tongue in cheek hat immediately sold out and endless reporters unpacked the significance of the Democratic party being able to claim camo.
Activating audience(s)
Whereas many brands look for their one audience out of a segmentation or a psychographic profile, politics has always been more of a compilation exercise, often based on identity. Campaigns spend time building support from White suburban women, Black churches, the Hispanic vote.The Harris campaign is no different, but their support self-organized along these lines. The week after Kamala’s announcement, people mobilized. It started with Black women for Kamala, kicking off with Kamala’s deep network of Black sororities, cresting with the world’s biggest Zoom call of white ladies for Kamala and culminating with the White Dudes for Kamala with the number one dude, Jeff Bridges.
Defining the enemy
Defining an enemy is a core part of brand strategy and positioning development. What does your competitor stand for and how do you create a bright line of difference?
After eight years of trying to define the MAGA movement as a threat, the Democratic party has finally found a definition that works—weird. A simple syllable that repositioned the other side. And that helped launch Veep pick Tim Walz into the public eye.
By defining the enemy as the guy who ruins Thanksgiving dinner with his weird conspiracies, instead of a dark threat looming to destroy democracy, Walz made the enemy a much easier target. He took the fear out of the Democratic message. By positioning the enemy as weird, Democrats became “normal.”Picking KPIS
All marketing is only as good as how effective it is, and you make what you measure. Setting a key performance indicator is one of the most important parts of marketing because it defines what you do.
The most important KPI is, of course, what happens in the voting booth, but in the meantime money and polling are the data points most often tracked. But Trump is laser-focused on one data point: crowd size. Funnily enough, Kamala is also winning on that KPI.
What I love about the way this campaign has ridden cultural waves, from Kamala being crowned brat, to building multiple meanings out of camo. As a counterpoint to the MAGA campaign, which has created an insular and self-referential culture, Kamala’s campaign has opened the door to so many corners of culture. Everyone from gay club kids to hunting dads can have a piece of the culture. I didn’t even get into how Kamala fans have begun winning the meme war, which has long been right-wing territory.
A few fun analyses of the Harris campaign’s success: