Marketer in Chief: How Each President Sold the American Idea

By Jason Voiovich

A fresh perspective on presidential history.

Why was the Spanish Peso more valuable than the U.S. Dollar? How did a public relations fiasco derail Cuban statehood? Would we remember Herbert Hoover as the Jeff Bezos of his time had he been elected eight years earlier?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jaywalker Publishing LLC
• Release date: Jul 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737001300

Jason Voiovich

In a career that spans more than 25 years, Jason Voiovich has launched hundreds of new products - everything from medical devices, to virtual healthcare systems, to non-dairy consumer cheese, to next-generation alternatives to the dreaded "cone of shame" for pets, to sex aides for cows (really!). He's a graduate of both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota, and he has completed post-graduate studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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MARKETER IN CHIEF

MARKETER IN CHIEF

HOW EACH PRESIDENT

SOLD THE AMERICAN IDEA

JASON VOIOVICH

Copyright © 2021 by Jaywalker Publishing LLC. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form on by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First Edition July 2021

ISBN 978-1-7370013-1-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7370013-0-0 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-7370013-2-4 (audiobook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021910047

Published by Jaywalker Publishing LLC

www.marketerinchief.com

Table of Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Section 1: Innovators

1 George Washington

2 John Adams

3 Thomas Jefferson

4 James Madison

5 James Monroe

Section 2: Early Adopters

6 John Quincy Adams

7 Andrew Jackson

8 Martin Van Buren

9 William Henry Harrison

10 John Tyler

11 James K. Polk

Section 3: Early Majority

12 Zachary Taylor

13 Millard Fillmore

14 Franklin Pierce

15 James Buchanan

16 Abraham Lincoln

17 Andrew Johnson

18 Ulysses S. Grant

19 Rutherford Hayes

20 James A. Garfield

21 Chester A. Arthur

22 Grover Cleveland

Section 4: Late Majority

23 Benjamin Harrison

24 [Grover Cleveland Note]

25 William McKinley

26 Theodore Roosevelt

27 William H. Taft

28 Woodrow Wilson

29 Warren G. Harding

30 Calvin Coolidge

31 Herbert Hoover

32 Franklin D. Roosevelt

33 Harry S. Truman

34 Dwight D. Eisenhower

35 John F. Kennedy

36 Lyndon B. Johnson

Section 5: Laggards

37 Richard M. Nixon

38 Gerald R. Ford

39 Jimmy Carter

40 Ronald Reagan

41 George H.W. Bush

42 Bill Clinton

43 George W. Bush

Section 6: Disruptors

44 Barack Obama

45 Donald J. Trump

Epilogue

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Author Bio

Prologue

A Ruffian in the Land of Ruffles

Benjamin Franklin in Paris, 1780

¹

Anyone who was anyone in the court of King Louis XVI lived a life on stage.

Even a French nobleman’s wardrobe served more than a functional purpose – it was a costume, meant to communicate his wealth, status, and taste. He wore luxurious three-piece matching suits, woven from fine linen, and embroidered with silk designs.² Visible below the knee, even his stockings would feature intricate thread patterns. He would, of course, wear makeup – white powder and rouge for the cheeks, as well as cute, strategically-added birthmarks in the shape of crescents, hearts, and stars.³ Paintings commissioned at the time (and wardrobe pieces that have survived) show men of that era who were…well, the only word is…pretty.

Crafting that look was a 30-to-40-minute affair, minimum, depending on the skill of your servant and your persnicketiness selecting accessories. Women: Expect to be in the chair much longer. In addition to an extra hour of hairstyling, full-length dresses of the French court at that time required innumerable laces to secure the midsection, strengthened with honest-to-goodness whale teeth.⁴

And it wasn’t just the people who were beautifully coiffed.

The outward image of the French nobility reflected how they saw themselves and their place in the world. This is the era of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and its imaginatively clipped hedges, precisely manicured dogs⁵, and ornate gargoyle statues as far as the eye could see. To the French, beauty was culture. They were defenders of the highest elegance and sophistication in Europe. Hopefuls from around the world came to Paris to paint, to sculpt, to design, to write, to invent, and to conduct science. It mattered little to the average French noble that most French people lived a world apart in absolute squalor. No, to him, that was the price of high culture, and he would be damned if he would not do his part to maintain it.

However, despite his French-first mindset, he reveled in global politics. He might not be able to find America on a map, but he certainly understood the importance of colonial holdings in the power struggles between European powers. He likely had heard of the scrappy American General George Washington, if only by reputation, and thought him a bit of a bumbler. Nevertheless, the French nobility relished the thought of Washington embarrassing General William Howe and bringing the haughty British down a peg. Fortunes of any one European power may rise or fall, their power may wax or wane, but there was no doubt in his mind that the realm of the Sun King was going to come out on top. As a nobleman in the court of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, it was his glorious burden to uphold French superiority.

Little did he know that the next 50 years would see revolution, an ill-fated first Republic, the rise of Emperor Napoleon, a restoration of a fragile monarchy, and another collapse. But all those events lay in the future, utterly unthinkable in 1780.

For the average French nobleman, it was all image, all performance, all the time. It’s something the guest waiting in his elegant drawing room would understand perfectly.

. . .

Standing to receive him stood a barrel chested, big man – between 5 foot 9 inches or 5 foot 10 inches tall. (French noblemen averaged 5 foot 4 inches.) His guest wore practical leather shoes, unadorned stockings, simple brown canvas knee britches, a clean linen shirt, and a durable, plain brown topcoat. His scraggly gray-blonde hair fell past his shoulders. On his round face were curious spectacles with two lenses for each eye. And to top it off, he wore a furry coonskin cap that made him look even taller. It had ear flaps.⁶

Far from put off by his guest’s terrible French and backwoods appearance, our nobleman would have delighted to have a few minutes with the famous American – Benjamin Franklin.

During the Revolutionary War, Franklin would spend countless hours in the homes of noblemen, attending parties in his honor, learning stilted French in the bedchambers of prostitutes, and being seen in the Royal Court of the French king – all to obtain financial and military support for General George Washington’s overmatched, ragtag group of volunteers. The situation was dire: The Continental Army faced not only the English regular army and world-class navy, but also a hired force of Hessian (German) mercenary forces to augment English troops and handle much of the dirty work. It may seem odd to us today that an American diplomat on a mission to secure support for a revolution against a monarchy would ask a rival monarchy for help. However, Franklin was a pragmatist. As bitter global rivals of the English, the French had every interest in taking a bite out of the overseas English pie, and the American colonies would be a sweet price to make them pay.

That said, French support was not a given.

From a realpolitik perspective, no nation wants to aid another in a losing cause. That’s a great way to make an enemy and receive nothing in return. But more than that, the French needed an emotional connection to America. You don’t keep watching a movie if you don’t care about the characters.

Franklin excelled in both of his roles.

As a diplomat, there was little Franklin could do except manage expectations of Washington’s performance. When the General was successful (which didn’t happen often), Franklin wouldn’t shut up about it. When unsuccessful, Franklin would downplay and dismiss the results as unimportant – or better yet, a tactical ruse in a grand strategic plan to outlast the English and drain their will to continue the effort.

But it was in his informal role where Franklin excelled. He made the French fall in love with the idea of America. He himself was the archetype of practical wisdom – what the French believed the Americans to be like – rugged, outdoorsy people making their mark in terrifying and wild new land thousands of miles away. It was a romantic notion, full of adventure and excitement. By sipping wine with Franklin, the French aristocracy could spend an afternoon in America and never leave the comforts of Paris.

And wow, could Franklin liven a party. It wasn’t just his stories, but also his inventions and achievements that so captivated the coiffed class of France. Who didn’t want to hear the story of the kite in a thunderstorm? Or see how electricity could be shown to charge or discharge from one glass jar battery to another – all using words Franklin coined himself. If electricity didn’t excite the senses (ha!), he has a storehouse of American ingenuity at his disposal.

Franklin could regale his guest with a description of the lightning rod, and how it could redirect the energy of a storm safely around vulnerable wood-frame buildings. He might let his guest try out his bifocals – glasses of his own design with two different lenses to assist people as they aged (Franklin was 74 years old in 1780) seeing far away landmarks and reading administrative documents without changing glasses. Did our nobleman enjoy a dip in the Seine River? He might be interested in Franklin’s swim fins. I suspect Franklin may not have described his unique design for a flexible urinary catheter, but who knows? The current state of the art model was a rigid design. (I’ll let you think about that for a moment.) Perhaps while the nobleman considered the benefits of flexibility, he might want to hear a tune from an instrument of Franklin’s design – the armonica – played in a similar way to running your finger over the rims of glasses of water. The last was a personal favorite.

The excitement around Franklin specifically, and America in general, wasn’t simply due to his practical engineering skill, but also his mindset. Franklin was scientific without being elitist. He was virtuous without being religious. He was self-assured without being arrogant. In embodying those traits, he became the archetype for a uniquely American value system.

How do we know that? Unlike other historical figures, where we need to reconstruct their value system retrospectively from their actions and writings, we have the benefit of Franklin’s own words. In his Autobiography, Franklin articulated his value system – 13 qualities in all – that he hoped to improve throughout his life. But it wasn’t just a list of virtues; Franklin devised a tracking system that any modern corporate executive would recognize. It was a grid with the 13 virtues written vertically on each journal page and each day written across the top. When Franklin felt that he exercised that virtue, he would add a check mark in his diary for that day. If not, he would leave that cell blank.

Here are the 13 virtues, straight from his book:⁷

1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

11. Tranquillity. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

I want to pause for a minute. He was 20 years old when wrote these virtues and committed to this effort. 20. Did you catch that? I remember what I was like at 20. I can assure you that I did not have a list of virtues in mind with a system to ensure I worked on them. Additionally, it bears repeating that Franklin worked within the French monarchy. Supporting an insurrection by far-off Colonists might be a thorn in the side of the English, but it may also encourage French revolutionaries to try the same thing. Franklin was a self-made man who believed in self-government – pretty much everything that King Louis XVI despised. For most historians, that he was able to pull this off is nothing less than a fucking miracle.

Franklin’s success was impressive, but it wasn’t magic. He made his own luck by inventing an entirely new strategy of influence and persuasion. Let’s see how he did it.

. . .

First, Franklin was the real deal. After earning an honorary doctorate in law years earlier, he would go by the title Doctor Franklin – not in the medical sense of the word (his catheter design notwithstanding), but rather in the expert sense of the word. His practical and scientific accomplishments were celebrated throughout Europe – not just France, but England as well. Although the English attempted to stymie Franklin’s efforts in Paris, he was a hard man to sell against. Even his English opponents liked and respected him. The foundation of Franklin’s three-part strategy was concrete accomplishment – true substance.

If his accomplishments were the steak, Franklin’s purposefully crafted image was the sizzle. Instead of attempting to duplicate the French court’s dress and manners (as others attempted to do), he recognized that he would embody the America that the French expected to see. That’s why he dressed the way he did: no ruffles, no silk, no shine, no makeup, and no wig. Even the way he spoke French – stilted and pained – was designed to craft an image. He respected the French court, but he wasn’t one of them. He was an American, not some sycophant colonist trying to beg his betters for their charity. There’s nothing less attractive than someone who tries too hard. A copycat is easy to ignore. Careful confidence is irresistible.

Finally, what many historians miss, that any modern advertiser would not, is Franklin’s strategic manipulation of mass media to amplify his message. Franklin was an advertising and marketing genius before anyone used those terms. Through his experience as a printer in Philadelphia, he understood how mass media could shape public opinion, drowning out other points of view and creating a sense of common cause. But to own the means of message production and distribution was only the first step. The next was crafting the message. Writing through various pseudonyms (most often Silence Dogood and Poor Richard), Franklin could create stories from purported real people to test and sharpen messages without damaging his own credibility. And it was more than long-form argument. His iconic Join, or Die drawing basically invented the political cartoon genre in the American colonies.⁸

In the end, however, it was all about the results. And Franklin delivered the goods.

On February 6, 1778, Benjamin Franklin signed a Treaty of Alliance and a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France.⁹ Over the next four years, French supplies, ammunition, uniforms – and most critically, military support – would make the crucial difference. George Washington may be credited with winning the Revolutionary War, but he (and everyone else who signed the Declaration of Independence) would have been hanged and forgotten without French help.

Since then? Franklin’s place in history depends on who you ask.

The French never forgot him. Franklin died five years after returning to the new United States, but he cast a long shadow in French popular imagination. Franklin biographer Claude-Anne Lopez reminds us that, Many French think he was President of the United States. They say, ‘He was the best President you ever had!’¹⁰

His legacy in the United States has shifted over time. After surging in popularity during the war years and immediately after – especially his work to bring feuding factions to agreement in the Constitutional Convention – Franklin was largely discounted and forgotten through the better part of the next century. Only recently have we begun to appreciate Franklin’s genius and savvy. In his 2000 biography, noted historian H.W. Brands called Franklin, The First American.

That description certainly is apt, but I think I can do one better. A polymath in every sense of the word, Franklin’s most important invention might have been his ability to sell an idea. As its first de facto leader and cultural archetype, Benjamin Franklin was America’s very first Marketer in Chief.

Endnotes, Sources, and Further Reading

1 Benjamin Franklin was named ambassador to France in 1778 and remained in Paris until 1785, when he was replaced by Thomas Jefferson. John Adams could have been named Franklin’s successor had he not been such a jealous prick. Adams simply couldn’t understand the purpose of socializing in the French court, and how that process helped Franklin secure support for the American cause. Adams was such a detriment to the effort that Franklin encouraged the Continental Congress to recall him (which they did). The Benjamin Franklin Historical Society has a nice write-up on the relationship, but I prefer the dramatization in the 2008 HBO miniseries, John Adams.

2 In her 1995 book, The Art of Dress – Fashion in England and France 1750 to 1820, Aileen Ribeiro notes that the key difference between the English and the French is that the English preferred more pragmatic choices for their gentlemen’s clothing, and the French more stylistic ones. For example, whereas a British topcoat may feature simple details (such as contrasting color buttons) and more durable materials, the French version would sport gorgeous embroidery on luscious silks. Some of the examples of French style in her book are stunning. It’s worth the price just for the pictures.

3 In the days before widespread inoculations for smallpox, the disease could leave devastating scars all over the body, but especially on the extremities. Heavy makeup could blunt the appearance of those scars on the face, and strategically placed birthmarks could conceal the worst of them. Luckily, we have original sources from the era – think of them as the Elle magazine of their day. One fun example is a 1778 book titled, The New London Toilet: Or, a Compleat Collection of... Receipts for Preserving and Improving Beauty, Etc. It’s available as a free, digitized eBook from Google where you can learn not only about makeup recipes, but also the recipe for something called iced Maroons. I’d stay away from anything that encourages you to use lead or mercury, so follow the recipes at your own risk.

4 Women’s fashion of the 18th century valued a pushed-up bosom and ramrod straight back. Fabrics and tight lacing helped, but alone, they weren’t enough to create the look designers were going for. A scaffold of sorts was required. The material needed to be strong, but flexible, and these were the days before plastics. Neither woods and metals performed as well as baleen – sort of extended teeth that help massive whales filter tons of tiny plankton and krill from the surrounding seawater. Most people are familiar with the devastation of the whale population from whale oil streetlamps of that era. I suspect fewer know that those streetlights helped illuminate pushed-up boobs.

5 According to the British and American Kennel Clubs, the Poodle (and specifically, its iconic haircut) are a 16th century German invention, not a French one, despite the Poodle being the national breed of France. However, the French monarchs took to the breed with a gusto, and they refined it further than any of their contemporaries.

6 In 1938, historian Carl Van Doren describes what we know – and don’t know – about Franklin’s physical appearance. In short, no early likenesses survive, so historians have pieced together bits of information from several published accounts.

7 This is as good a time as any to make a note about spelling throughout this book. Spelling was less formal in prior eras, and varieties in spelling inferred no intelligence – or lack thereof – in the writer. Spelling standards start to crystalize after the turn of the 20th century, but I’m leaving uncorrected any spelling errors in earlier quotes so long as they don’t interrupt the meaning. The writer would not have considered them errors, and nor would the reader. You shouldn’t either.

8 Many people credit Thomas Paine (author of the 1776 political pamphlet Common Sense) for providing the intellectual foundation for the American Revolution. What most people don’t know is that the revolution had started before most people had read it or heard it. Can you hazard a guess who it was who discovered Paine’s talent in 1774 and arranged his transport to the colonies to spread his message?

9 If you want to read background stories about all of America’s treaties, the Office of the Historian at the U.S. State Department has you covered. Although many areas of its website are no longer maintained, it’s still a valuable resource.

10 Historian Claude-Anne Lopez deserves more attention. She was, perhaps, the foremost scholar on Benjamin Franklin, and served as the head of the Yale project to collect and translate all his papers. These original source documents not only helped her write a definitive biography, but they also helped future historians – notably H.W. Brands, Stacy Schiff, and Walter Isaacson – write stunning works of their own. Lopez passed away in 2012, but you can still read transcripts of her PBS interviews and find the occasional video clip online.

Introduction

Shining a New Light on American History

The President as America’s Salesperson

I suppose you’ve figured out by now that this isn’t going to be that kind of history book. In fact, it wasn’t supposed to be a book at all.

The Marketer in Chief project started from pure curiosity and a simple question: Wouldn’t it be interesting to imagine the President of the United States as its Chief Marketing Officer rather than its Chief Executive Officer?

It’s a new way to look at history – not as a historian, but instead as an expert in another field. I’m certainly not the first. For example, when forensic accountants reviewed the financial records of plantation owners in the pre-Civil War southern states, they discovered something…off. Their numbers simply didn’t add up. Those researchers weren’t trying to explain away the evils of slavery¹, but what they discovered helped illuminate why Antebellum society was collapsing under its own weight: Even slave labor couldn’t compete with new automation technology. Financially stressed landowners weren’t the only root cause of the Civil War, but their economic situation certainly contributed. Why hadn’t historians explored the money trail in more depth? There’s no conspiracy. It’s simply that historians aren’t accountants. They didn’t know what to look for; the number crunchers did.

Perhaps I might discover something other historians had overlooked because they didn’t know what to look for.

Beginning the first week of January 2020, I researched, wrote, and published my first weekly essays – one on each President.² Instead of focusing on names, dates, and places – or the standard eras and themes we learned in American history class – I chose to look at each President through my own stock in trade: Product development, persuasion, psychology, marketing strategy, storytelling, value signaling, audience segmentation, negotiation, and sales – or as one of my colleagues put it, how the President makes you feel.³ That doesn’t mean historians are wrong. Far from it. But they’re using one lens. If I had any hope of offering a fresh perspective, I needed to use a different one.

During the initial phase of research and writing, I purposefully chose not to address the Presidents in order. There’s a narrative baked into the telling of all history, and American history is no exception. We tend to skip over decades of history to focus on the big events – usually wars. Personally, I think there’s a little too much emphasis on military conflicts in history. Skipping around (more or less at random) forced me to focus on just one President at just one moment in time.

That approach allowed me to shine a light on stories we may never have learned, told in a way we were unlikely to hear anywhere else. But as I finished my final essay and reflected on the group as a whole, that’s when I noticed the pattern.

. . .

The first series of Presidents – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe – all faced an unprecedented challenge. They may have had basic rules for their new Republic as defined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, but there were no procedures, no customs – not even blank forms. Every decision was the first decision, and each was keenly aware of the precedent a good decision (and more pointedly, a poor decision) might make. They may have been very different people, but they had one thing in common: They were all comfortable with extreme risk.

The next group – John Quincy Adams to James Knox Polk – were the second generation of leaders. Each was a child during the Revolutionary War, and although they saw the transition from English subject to American citizen, they didn’t see the nation the same way their parents did. Yes, they took risks, but their risks were of a different sort. They could learn from their parents, taking advantage of the basic frameworks and traditions they put in place, and build on them. As a group, they set the stage for rapid territorial expansion. By the time Polk left office, and barely 50 years since the last shot was fired in the war for independence, the land territory of the United States reached the Pacific coast.

The rapid growth that followed Polk exposed all manner of problems. The decisions the first 11 Presidents failed to make in the early days of the Republic come back to bite each President from Zachary Taylor to Chester Arthur. Hard. They faced a final reckoning on the agreement they could never reach regarding the abomination of slavery. By Abraham Lincoln’s election (in the middle of this group), tensions had boiled over into an all out Civil War. Many of us are hard pressed to name a President other than the Great Emancipator in this era, but we should get to know them. The conflict came in the middle of a much longer era spanning 10 Presidencies – leading up to the Civil War and attempting to recover from it. The war was simply the bloody middle; it was no less contentious on either side.

Beginning with the Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, we see the wounds of the Civil War heal enough for the American commercial engine to take off. Immigration spiked during this era as people in droves fled stagnation, famine, and repression in their own countries. This is the time of big America – the founding of the National Parks, the opening of the Panama Canal, the mobilization for two World Wars, the invention of the Atomic Bomb, the mission to send humans to the Moon (and return them safely!), and the hopeful optimism of the Great Society and Civil Rights legislation. There was nothing America couldn’t do…until Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection.

But starting with Richard Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford’s pardons, a retreat from Vietnam, an energy crisis, economic stagflation, and global terrorism, things started to change. Yes, the United States remained dominant, but it wasn’t unbeatable. Yes, it could win wars and flex its economic muscle, but it was like a repeat champion team…one season past its prime. George W. Bush was the last in a line of Presidents attempting to hold onto a past that was slipping away.

So, it has come down to the disruptors – those leaders who saw the challenges of declining dominance and decided to shake up the system to do something about it. Barack Obama and Donald Trump – both in dramatically different ways – were disruptive forces. We can see both of their Presidencies as an attempt to reinvigorate a lumbering giant.

That’s 240 years in about twice as many words. It was quick, on purpose. We’ll go into more detail later, but I stripped away the specifics to show you the pattern. Some of you may recognize it. Here’s a hint: You probably didn’t learn it in history class. If you recognize it, you probably learned it in Marketing 101: It’s the Diffusion of Innovations.

. . .

The name Everett Ev Rogers may not be familiar to you, but I’ll bet you’ve heard some of the language he invented. He coined the terms Early Adopter and Laggard to describe people who buy technology as soon as they can get it…or for your friend who resisted getting rid of his typewriter until they quit making them. But you don’t need to know the theoretical details to notice the pattern. New products, and the innovations they represent, surround us. Rogers’ research simply describes how we choose to adopt those innovations, and more importantly when we choose to in relation to other people. It’s that simple.⁴

Rogers used the curve to represent the reality he saw when he tracked first-time sales of a series of new innovations – automobiles, refrigerators, televisions, and many others. Sales of these products started off slowly, grew quickly, and then leveled off. The theory helps marketers like me describe how many new products I can expect to sell – and more importantly, when.

Figure 1: Rogers used the bell curve to describe the proportion of a population that chooses to adopt an innovation over time. As you can see, most people adopt an innovation (for example, buy their first smartphone) in the middle of the curve. The divisions between groups roughly correlate to standard deviations from the mean. If the mention of statistics makes you want to claw out your eyes, don’t worry. It’s not important here and I won’t talk about it again.

That’s good to know, of course, but it’s not what’s truly important. Here’s what most people miss: Diffusion of Innovations’ true value lies in what it tells us about the psychology of buyers in each group.

Rogers wasn’t an economist. He was a sociologist. He didn’t study innovations from a technology perspective; he studied them from the buyer’s perspective. Taking the buyer’s point of view was revolutionary in 1962. After the end of the second World War, you could fall out of bed and sell millions of substandard products – the demand was so strong and the supply tight with most of the world’s production machinery in shambles. But as the 1950s became the 1960s, competition ramped up. We needed a better way to understand why consumers did what they did.

I think it’s easiest to describe the genius of Rogers’ idea with a simple example: The microwave oven.⁵

The initial concept for the microwave oven was developed in the 1930s and patented in 1937 by Bell Laboratories. The device uses microwaves (a form of electromagnetic radiation, just like light, X rays, and radio waves) to heat the water inside food. The first commercially available microwave was the RadaRange from Raytheon Corporation (yep, the defense contractor). At 5 feet 11 inches, it was taller than the average full-grown American man, weighed 750 pounds, and cost the equivalent of $57,000 in 2020 money.

We all know people who would have bought the RadaRange in 1947, right? Of course, we do. These are the people Rogers would call Innovators. They are the risk takers. They understand that many (if not most) new products and services fail, but they simply must be on the cutting edge of everything. Bluntly, they are the ones with the resources to do it – money yes, but also the access to the specialty retailers and manufacturers who also work on the bleeding edge.

Although they improved throughout the 1950s and 1960s, microwaves remained expensive, troublesome, and high maintenance. Along with the Innovators, some restaurants and commercial kitchens purchased them, but sales were limited. (Using Rogers’ terms, we would say that adoption of the innovation by consumers hadn’t yet caught on.) New competitors wanted to use the (now expiring) patent protections to tap into a wider residential market. By the mid 1970s, microwave prices dropped from $57,000 in today’s money to $4,000 using the same scale (you would have seen a typical sticker price of $495 in 1970). That meant many more people could afford them. Microwaves were still risky and cumbersome, but not nearly as much. The people who paid the equivalent of a used car in the 1970s were what Rogers would call Early Adopters. This group isn’t quite as well off as the Innovators, nor are they quite as risk seeking, but they like new stuff, and as soon as it’s available at a price range that makes sense, they’re on it.

As the age of disco ended, microwave ownership took off.

I remember being a kid in the 1980s when my family bought its first microwave; we were part of the Early Majority group. My parents weren’t the type of people to buy into the newest thing, but once it became popular (and cheap and reliable enough), they wanted one. In 1971, 1% of households had a microwave oven. By 1986, 25% did (that was us). By 2008, 95% of American households had one – fully capturing both the Early Majority and Late Majority groups. The big difference between Early and Late Majorities is resources. If you can afford it, you bought an early model. If you couldn’t, you waited. By the time a Late Majority consumer bought their first microwave in the early 1990s, our family was on its second.

You’ll notice I said 95%. Not 100%. Here’s why.

Don’t we all know the person who just got their first microwave in the last 10 years? Yep, I know just such a person. Rogers would call him a Laggard. It’s not always that the person doesn’t have the money (the Laggard I’m thinking of is quite wealthy), but financial resources certainly are a factor. However, more often they’re the type of person who resists new things when they come out because they’re new, and they resist trendy things because they’re trendy. They want to be different. They take pride in it. That said, the microwave Laggard I’m thinking of isn’t also a smartphone Laggard – he owns the newest model – but he’s funny about food and nutrition. Rogers’ key insight is that he recognized consumer behavior and psychology was domain dependent. In other words, you could be an Innovator in one area of your life, an Early Majority buyer in another, and a Laggard in a third.

Let’s step back and examine the arc of history the microwave represents.

Figure 2: Adoption of the microwave innovation in United States households since its introduction. Data sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Remember, between 1947 and 1971, the microwave oven was found in only 1% of American households. That’s 24 years. In the next 15 years, the number of households with a microwave increased 25 times. In 22 more years, 19 out of 20 homes had one. If we imagine that increase as a graph, we can see the line that represents microwave ownership plodding along until the 1970s, when the curve bends sharply upward, and finally flattening out around 2008, where it climbs much more slowly after that. The resulting shape you see is a curve that looks like a stretched our letter S.

We see the same pattern repeat again and again. The automobile, radio, refrigerator, television, credit card, internet, smartphone, online banking – when you chart just about any product or service, you see the same pattern.

Why?

This was Rogers’ genius. It was the psychology of different groups of people that defined the shape of that curve. Specifically, how interested in and accepting of new innovations were they? Yes, the technology needed to advance sufficiently for those changes to occur, but Rogers noticed that technology always outpaced psychology. In other words, engineers could come up with new things faster than people would be ready to adopt them. Psychology trumps technology.

Diffusion of Innovations revolutionized marketing and advertising. It gave birth to the Mad Men era in the 1960s, and we never looked back.

For the first time, we could shift from a technology focus in product development to a psychology focus. We understood what it took to succeed at different stages of any innovation’s lifecycle. As leaders, we now understood (at least in broad terms) the different sorts of challenges we would face at each stage, and we knew when we needed to start making different types of decisions as the innovation diffused through the population.

For example, Henry Ford faced different challenges introducing the Model T (people compared his product to a horse) than Alan Mullaly faced when he reintroduced the Ford Mustang in 1994 (people compared the 1980s era Mustang to a box). Or more recently, Steve Jobs faced a different task introducing the iPhone than current Apple CEO Tim Cook does in selling the 10th iteration.

Diffusion of Innovations may not be a theory at the level of Quantum Mechanics in physics or Evolution by National Selection in biology, but it’s the closest thing to truth we have in advertising, marketing, and sales.

We use it as a foundation for pretty much everything we do – for products and services, of course – but also the diffusion of ideas.

. . .

Because the diffusion of an innovation has less to do with its technology and everything to do with buyer psychology, there is no meaningful difference between a physical product and an intangible idea.

Let that sink in for a minute.

That insight helps us think about the United States of Benjamin Franklin’s era in a completely new way. The United States of America, itself, is an innovation.

We don’t think of it that way now, but in Franklin’s day, a government that derived authority only from the consent of the governed was a very new idea – an innovation to be adopted, and not a given to be expected. Why do you think the words self evident are in the Declaration of Independence? Those ideas were not self evident. That’s why they needed to say them.

It’s easier to wrap your head around this concept when you compare the United States to its competitors on the world stage at that time. The prevailing wisdom, especially in Europe, was rule through hereditary monarchy, where power was derived through some mystical combination of birth order or divine right. Other sources of governmental authority included tribal and family bonds, military force and dictatorship, religious adherence, or even the weight of bureaucracy (most evident in China throughout its history). The basic idea may have been pioneered by the Greeks centuries earlier, but even Greece wasn’t a democracy any longer. It hadn’t been for centuries. During the time Franklin courted French nobles, Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire.

When we see it through this lens, we can see each stage of our history as a diffusion of the American innovation.

Are there challenges with this way to look at American history? Sure.

People born in the United States didn’t necessarily adopt the innovation. Additionally, when you plot population growth on a chart in the way we did with our microwave oven example, it doesn’t match the traditional S curve shape. However, we can see immigration rates as a proxy for people choosing to buy the United States as opposed to their competition, where they previously lived. But remember, the specific numbers and precise dates aren’t the point: The psychology of people in each stage of the diffusion of any innovation (and the shifting challenges faced by leaders) is what truly matters.

In each era of the diffusion of the American innovation, we can see Presidents respond to their situations in different ways based on their unique set of circumstances. For example, you can’t ask how Ronald Reagan would have responded to Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from France. Reagan’s situation as the leader of a global power at the top of its game was fundamentally unlike Jefferson’s risky gambit as a fledgling Republic. As most historians would say: We must judge performance in the context of the times. I’m simply providing you a different context in this book – one, I believe, that will seem more familiar. We might take a history course in high school or college, but we see innovations all around us, and we choose to buy them (or not buy them) every day.

I want to show you, through each stage of America’s lifecycle, how its leaders attempted to sell you the innovation of America. You’ll realize quickly that marketing means much more than advertising – think of advertising as the tip of the iceberg that you can see, and marketing as the (larger) part that you can’t. That broader perspective helps us shine a light on aspects of the President’s role as Marketer in Chief that would otherwise be hidden. In other words, expect to be surprised by the stories I choose to tell you.

We’ll explore each President in turn – not as a complete biography (I’ll point you to good ones if you’re interested in learning more), but rather through a series of 45 stories illustrating how each President responded to their market. Marketer in Chief is an introduction to a new way of thinking, not an encyclopedia.

Who knows? Once Americans know how they’re being sold, they might demand a better product.

Let’s get started.

The Franklin prototype is behind us, and we’re in full release of version 1.0 of the new Republic. And like most new products, it’s full of hope, excitement, and optimism…and it’s flat broke.

Endnotes, Sources, and Further Reading

1 This is an ugly debate in the historical community, and it shouldn’t be. On one side, you have historians who are linking the entire rise of capitalism to the slave trade, carefully ignoring the success of capitalism in economies without it. On the other, you have accountants and economists dismissing the extent of the brutality of slavery and explaining the Civil War primarily in economic terms, carefully ignoring the chilling effect of a small number of terroristic tactics. If I’ve learned anything about the study of history, it’s that multiple points of view can be true at the same time. In fact, they tend to feed into each other. If you’re interested in more on this topic, and the way history and economics bleed together (an intentional choice of words), I would recommend Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdomand Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

2 Because 2020 was a Presidential election year, and 44 weeks would take me right up to the November election, the timing seemed apt. Oh, and one more thing. Because Grover Cleveland was elected President for two, non-consecutive terms, the Presidential numbers are off by one. Ronald Reagan is the 40th President, but the 39th person to hold the office. I’ve adjusted the chapter numbers after Cleveland to reflect that to avoid confusion.

3 Thanks Tim!

4 Rogers published the first edition of Diffusion of Innovations in 1962. It’s gone through five editions since then, the latest published in 2003. Like all good theories, it’s spawned huge tracts of useful (and less than useful) criticism, as well as additional research, including the Silicon Valley bible Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. I’m skimming the surface in my introduction on purpose; it gets wonky in a hurry. A couple of important clarifications: Diffusion refers to how innovations spread through a society or market. Adoption is the process of an individual person making a buying decision. Think of it like macroeconomics and microeconomics if you like. If you want to know more, go right to the source, and read his book. You’ll enjoy it.

5 The history of the microwave oven is fascinating. If you’re interested, skip the bookstore, and read the engineering articles. You can find essays written for the non-engineer in the IEEE’s Spectrum publication, Popular Mechanics, or the Smithsonian magazine. If you’re really geeky, you can find the original patents online at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. If there’s a level beyond geeky, there’s even a website where you can get the patent art made into a T-shirt. Knock yourself out.

Section 1

When you ask most people about the first personal computer, they imagine the early IBM PCs, the first Macintosh, or perhaps – if you’re a GenXer like me – the Commodore 64. But none of those was the first modern PC. The first machine we would recognize as a personal computer was the Kenbak-1, which sold for $750 beginning in 1971. I won’t bore you with the technical specifications. Suffice to say, the calculator app on your smartphone has more computing power. Nonetheless, the Kenbak-1 was distinct from its predecessors. There were other computers before the Kenbak-1, but they were not designed for personal use. Its affordable combination of three critical features in one package – processor, input device, and display – defined the market.

The first five Presidents share more in common with designers of the Kenbak-1 than they do with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – the people who we usually associate with the advent of personal computing. Although philosophers had written about the ideas that would inspire a new form of government, and other European nations had some semblance of representative democracies, the United States of America was the first of its kind to feature a government formed solely from the consent of the governed, a written constitution and legal structure without any connection to a hereditary monarchy or military leader, and a separation of powers. In other words, the United States defined the market. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were its first Chief Marketing Officers, responsible for tying off the loose ends in that definition.

Don’t remember the Kenbak-1? I’m not surprised; most people don’t. That’s because most true innovations fail. Remember the story of the RadaRange? Does Raytheon still make microwaves? Of course not. The product that defines the market often gets thrown into the dustbin of history. The first five Presidents (of course) had no experience with the first PCs, and weren’t designing microwave ovens, but they faced the same problem. They needed to define what a representative democracy meant – not in lofty language, not in legal documents, but in everyday practice. And in all that, there was no guarantee that their efforts wouldn’t be forgotten and unappreciated.

In these first five stories, we see the Presidents struggling to transform the idea of the United States into a functioning government. Washington used a common currency; Adams, used a common set of values. Jefferson recognized the inherent risks in defining a new territory and hedged his bets like any modern venture capitalist. Madison took advantage of the War of 1812 to create a common enemy – and in so doing, created a unified nation. Finally, it was Monroe’s experience handling personal conflict that defined what behavior the United States would not tolerate.

It’s time we reread the stories of America’s founders from an innovator’s point of view.

George Washington

John Adams

Thomas Jefferson

James Madison

James Monroe

Chapter 1

George Washington

1st President of the United States

April 30, 1789 – March 4, 1797

In Marketing We Trust?

If you think about money – I mean, really think about it – it doesn’t make much sense.

It’s almost dinner time for me as I write this, and I admit that my mind wanders to the menu for the fish & chips restaurant near my home. When I go there (and I will, very soon), I trust that when I hand the cashier a piece of paper with Alexander Hamilton’s picture on it, the restaurant will accept that piece of paper in exchange for a fish dinner.

Why would they do that?

The only reason is that the restaurant can use that $10 bill to pay its employees, buy more fish, settle its taxes, and give the owners a little something for their trouble. That $10 bill serves as an intermediary between me and the restaurant. I don’t have to come up with something that they need in exchange.

For much of human history (and more to the point, early colonial history), that’s precisely what you needed to be prepared to do. It’s called a barter economy – exchanging something I want for something you want, directly, person to person. How might that play out? Let’s stick with the fish dinner example (I’m hungry, and this is my fantasy barter economy, so we get to play by my rules). We’ll imagine that I bottle malt vinegar. My local fish & chips place uses a lot of that, so they’re probably interested in an exchange. After a bit of haggling, I bet that I could arrange a trade for my dinner for a certain number of bottles of malt vinegar. However, my imaginary bottling skills don’t transfer to the real world, so it’s lucky that we don’t live in a barter economy. I’d go hungry. And therein lies the problem.

In fact, the whole reason money was invented was to serve as an efficient intermediary between buyers and sellers. Barter economies struggle to operate outside of tightly knit social groups and local communities. Modern matchmaking technology can mitigate some of those barriers, but not all of them. Like it or not, money works. 

However, money only works when both parties believe in its value and the ability to exchange it for whatever they want. But wait a second. Why are we talking about money, and how does this relate to George Washington?

It’s easy to forget that the United States was a new country once. It’s hard to imagine a situation where you might walk into that pub with your $10 bill and the owner might refuse to take it. But that’s precisely the situation Washington faced as he took office as the first President of the United States in April of 1789.

. . .

The United States was broke.

Actually, the country was worse than broke. The former British colonies may have won their legal independence from Great Britain, but arguably not their economic independence. The trade imbalance with Great Britain was so great that the new United States’ economy struggled to get off its feet in the early years following the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis to then-General George Washington at Yorktown.

The trouble did not end there. Because there was no strong central, federal government before the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the states shouldered the debt burden of the war. Also, as one might expect, they did so unevenly. Some states were in tremendous trouble; others, not so much.¹ In any case, no matter the frustration of the more solvent states with the situation of those less well off, those debts did need to be paid. The problem was that the new government did not have a way of funding itself.

Yes, the scrappy rebels (with plenty of French help) had just dispatched the greatest army and navy in the world, but with all the swirling uncertainty in its aftermath, it was natural to wonder if the average person should believe in the United States as a new nation at all. Today, that may sound foolish. It did not sound foolish in 1789.

The belief that a piece of paper with someone’s picture on it can be exchanged for all debts, public and private is the only basis for money. Not currency markets. Not options traders. Not economic theories. Belief. From ordinary people. That’s it. If I can’t get a bag of greasy fish and chips for my picture of Alexander Hamilton, academic theories are just that: Academic.

. . .

But a reasonable skepticism that the new government wouldn’t last was only the first problem Washington faced.² The second problem was that the United States wasn’t starting from a clean slate.

Colonies had issued their own money in Massachusetts starting as early as 1690.³ If you wanted to buy something in Boston, you would’ve been in luck. If you were on a road trip to Hartford, Connecticut? Tough luck. Maybe they’d take your money; maybe they wouldn’t. It depended on the merchant. Luckily, most people didn’t travel that far from their home communities, and they tended to be much more self-sufficient. But as the colonial (and then, federal) economy grew, different currencies hampered economic growth.

It wasn’t just that each state had its own money, it’s that you often couldn’t trust the paper it was printed on. Counterfeiting was a major problem that didn’t end simply because Washington won or because the U.S. Constitution was ratified. As soon as people could get their hands on a printing press, what do you think was one of the most popular items to print? You guessed it. In fact, it was so bad that Benjamin Franklin invented a printing process that embossed leaf shapes on the money as one of the first anti-counterfeiting measures. (Was there anything that guy couldn’t invent?) Frankly, the Continental Congress should have paid more attention to its elder statesman’s invention – during the war years, counterfeits were so rampant that the phrase, Not worth a Continental became a popular slur.

If the average person did not believe the United States would last, or they only believed in their own state’s money, the federal government could not function.

Washington needed an answer. Fast. Or the new United States of America was fucked.

. . .

The unfucking started, appropriately enough, on July 4, 1789.⁴

In fact, it was the second act of the very 1st United States Congress. (The first was to regulate oaths of office. I suppose that makes sense.) Put simply, the federal government needed a source of capital. Without dedicated resources, the new government had no leverage, no authority. It was future President (then Virginia Congressperson) James Madison who interpreted the General Welfare clause in the freshly minted U.S. Constitution to craft the Tariff Act of 1789⁵, which passed Congress, and which Washington immediately signed into law. The new tariff took advantage of the trade imbalance with Great Britain by creating a tax on goods carried by foreign ships (basically, most of them) while levying a much smaller tax on American shipping. In later years, critics would call the move protectionist, but that’s hindsight. Its supporters successfully argued that it was necessary for