• my.barackobama.com , Wednesday, November 5, 2008 10:46 AM

Surfing the Web for the dregs of election coverage very early this morning -- would Ted Stevens survive in Alaska? -- with half an ear cocked to the television pundatariat , I decided I'd better get a jump on the morning's roundup of brand marketing.

Nothing was noteworthy on the major newspaper and wire service Web sites and RSS feeds. All the mail bulletins were about election results. The trades lay fallow.

I did learn from Beverage Daily that "Pepsi Stays Dairy-Free Despite Yogurt Drink Launch" in Asia.

And the Wall Street Journal carries a rave review of "The Widow Clicquot" by Tilar J. Mazzeo (Collins, 265 pages, $25.95), a book about Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin who, through brilliant marketing and the attention to such details as the quality of corks, laid the foundation for champagne becoming a global brand. But her major breakthrough is a tad anachronistic -- a distribution coup at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

When I found myself clicking through to a British Web site reporting about a survey that determined that sending customers Christmas cards through the post increased brand loyalty by up to 30%, I resolved to not drag you through a lot of irrelevancies.

John Lewis (D-Ga.), the congressman who has deep roots in the civil rights struggles of the Sixties, was on at least two networks last night talking about the "nonviolent revolution" that had taken place with the election of an African American president.

"If someone had told be back in 1961 ... that I would be witnessing this unreal and unbelievable transformation of American politics, I would say you're crazy, you're out of your mind, and you don't know what you're talking about," he said on ABC .

So the question -- as a French Canadian friend of mine who lives in Rome and heads a new NGO in Geneva, Switzerland, asked me the other day -- is "exactly how" did Brand Obama prevail? With the cachet of Apple, how did he wind up with Microsoft numbers? (Not quite, but you get the analogy. )

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