“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
Peter Drucker

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Call this my next business lesson from the 2012 election debrief.

And here is the lesson:  marketing matters.  A whole lot.

The point comes from John Tantillo (I assume he is a Republican.  He coined the phrase “The O’Reilly Factor,” and he is affiliated with Fox News), in his article Republicans lost because they forgot marketing.  He argues that Mitt Romney lost the election because his campaign did not excel at simple old-fashioned marketing.  He includes the classic Peter Drucker quote above, and he chronicles how the Obama campaign won the marketing contest.  Here is an excerpt:

This campaign led with active marketing that combined an expertly played ground game with crystal clear positive and negative messaging that resonated in the swing states while also helping to retain the bulk of his 2008 supporters everywhere else.  It also listened.  A lot to what voters were saying they wanted.    
This was because Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, didn’t take anything for granted.  When asked by the President to manage his re-election bid, he reportedly informed his boss in no uncertain terms that the honeymoon was over, they were facing a tough fight and could take nothing for granted.
That attitude is the basis for great marketing.  Why?  Because it sets the stage for the marketer to go out and discover the reality you need if you are going to have your product or candidate sell itself.  It’s only by learning what people want that you have a chance of closing the deal.
In other words, Messina was never going to assume some kind of Obama-love or a devoted base was going to get them over the line.  In fact, Messina was basically saying he wasn’t going to assume anything at all about the voters he needed to reach.  
Like it or not, good marketing depends on the kind of humility that doesn’t count on any votes until they can be counted – and avoids the trap of mistaking that the things that matter to party insiders and ideological stalwarts, matter to the vast majority of voters.  A trap, I believe, the Republicans fell into here.

I think there is a lot more we will be learning over the next few weeks/months about just how the Obama campaign won re-election.  And all of it will inform our understanding of success in any endeavor, including our efforts at success in business.