Since President-Elect Obama was voted into office in November, I have seen people counting the days till January 20th, 2009, Inauguration Day.  There is a hope that on the 20th the world will change.  The economy will be better.  U.S. relations with the world powers will be better.  Everything will be better because President G W Bush will be out of office.  This  seems ludicrous to me.  Is this a result of the marketing genius that got Obama elected?  Is “Change We Can Believe In” going to be a let down?  I am hopeful that Obama will change the way government operates, but it cannot happen within the first 100 days.  

This got me thinking about marketing an unproven product.  Setting expectations too high could cause a huge backlash that could ruin a company or product.  Nowadays with twitter and ratings sites like yelp, a set of unhappy customers all responding to good marketing is hard to bounce back from.  Any tips to manage those expectations from the start without losing market share?  What about ways of fixing a fiasco?

Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed piece this morning in the NY Times titled “Stop Being Stupid“.  Bob credits Madoff for saying that he paid investors with “money that wasn’t there”.  The piece ends by saying that we need to go into serious debt to jump start our economy and that we need to start investing in world-class infrastructure.  

I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.