Like Business

You can read a lot of political news these days with an election a month away. Today, I read about the prospects for the two main political organizations -- democrats and republicans. In this article from an Arizona website, I was intrigued by this quote: "In some ways, Democrats were bound to face this kind of pressure. The party's recent run of good political fortune is hard to sustain."

In fact, political parties are just like companies who "market" their services to consumers (voters). In politics, the parties seek some kind of sustainable edge -- often the concept used is political realignment where some kind of enduring coalition is built. In business it is called "sustainable competitive advantage." But the notion of sustainable advantage is becoming more fleeting all around as the quote above indicates. Perhaps, it is because consumers have so much better access to knowledge. In any case, political analysts may want to be careful asserting such a thing as political alignment just as business leaders should not assume they ever will reach that holy grail of sustained competitive advantage.