case study: juanita4chief.com

Have a Voice. Have Hope.

Juanita Plummer Wilson for Principal Chief of the EBCI. Or Else.

One thing all political campaigns, except those at a mindbogglingly expensive rarefied level, tend to lack is a coherent brand to help bring forth and enhance a cogent message.

Arguably, one the the things the Cherokee could use right now is a unified, coherent message. Not more of the same.

Designing for political campaigns doesn’t, at some very fundamental levels, differ greatly from the methodolgies used in a marketing campaign designed to sell you new socks. A coherent and present message, delivered in a clear, appealing and, above all, consistent manner do nothing but help enhance your message. The folks running campaigns at the national level sussed this out years ago, which is one of the reasons campaigns have logos these days rather than just the candidate’s name in a large & loud font.

Cherokee is distinctive in any number of ways. At one level, the EBCI is a small, extremely family-oriented community – with all the politics that implies. At another, the Cherokee are a proud people with a rich heritage who are citizens of their own soverign nation, complete with laws and language. The Principal Chief of the EBCI is, in effect, a sitting Head of State responsible for the health, welfare and future of a rare culture – with all the politics that implies.

If you’re going to be pulling together a campaign for a presidential election, it best be coherent. And turns out it doesn’t have to be expensive.

We started with Juanita’s choice of logo and colors from Water Spider, a strong symbol from the Cherokee creation story. We updated her [Hey, any girl needs a bit of a tune-up after a couple of thousand years, no?] to bring her into the digital age. And then we incorporated something else uniquely Cherokee, at Juanita’s request – the syllabary developed bootstrap up by that total freakin’ bad ass, Sequoyah.

All materials incorporate several features: Water Spider, red & black sampled from her, the syllabary, Juanita’s kick-ass campaign slogan, her URL and consistent font choices. Where appropriate, we work in a QR code that routes direct to her site. We’ve also kept design elements uniform where we can – even when not traditional – to enhance that branding goodness. We’ve developed a site tied to various social networking outlets, magnets, rally tent cards and yard signs. And we ain’t done yet.

For flexibility and to keep costs down we built her site in Joomla!, an excellent CMS from the land of Open Source with full featured blogging and update capabilites; we designed it to be smartphone friendly, since the younger Cherokee are deeply mobile compatible. We’ve made sure to have some fun with SEO tricks so she can be found; Juanita’s also rocking Facebook to help in that arena.

We’re not saying that our designing a nice looking rally card is going to get Juanita elected – but we can hope. And help give her a voice.

» Juanita4Chief.com
» Juanita on Facebook