INCINNATI - He has hawked goods for General Electric, Xerox, and Apple Computer. And now Rick Segal is putting his most potent marketing tools to work for his latest product: Steve Forbes.
In a two-story, suburban office building here, Segal, in his trademark bow tie and owlish horned-rim glasses, oversees a marketing and technical team of 12 dedicated solely to Forbes.
They are busy, he says, ''branding'' each of the Republican presidential candidate's proposals, and they are conducting highly detailed market research to find out what kind of people support Forbes, how much money they earn, and how much education they have. They are even engaging in a little political espionage.
In the Forbes campaign, health care is not called health care anymore. Instead, it is ''The Steve Forbes Medical Savings Account.'' Education is now known as ''The Steve Forbes Power to Parents Plan.'' Social matters fall under ''America's Moral Compass,'' and foreign policy is referred to as ''Freedom's Passport.'' The marketing involves more than just putting clever labels on policy notions; the campaign has also refined the art of targeting Forbes's message to the most receptive voters.
''If Forbes can be successful at packaging these proposals as products or offerings that people want to buy, it may be easier for voters to support him,'' said Segal, 42, Forbes's senior media adviser for Internet strategy.
All candidates have political consultants, pollsters, and other advisers who test messages with focus groups and broader surveys. But Segal and his team are a different breed. Segal, though he dabbled in politics as a young man, came to the campaign from Hensley Segal Rentschler, an award-winning marketing firm here. He is leading Forbes's campaign by using cutting-edge marketing methods and Internet technology.
The campaign has been aiming to boost Forbes's support for the straw poll of GOP presidential candidates in Iowa tomorrow. In the long run, it is an open question of whether these tactics will help Forbes; he lags in the polls despite launching the campaign's first major TV ad blitz and spending millions of his own money. But the Forbes approach could well become commonplace as campaigns become more technologically savvy.
Despite his shallow support now, Forbes might be the most serious threat to the front-running candidacy of Texas Governor George W. Bush, if only because the heir to the Forbes magazine publishing fortune has the means and the zeal to sustain his campaign through the last primary. He has paid more than half a million dollars for the Internet marketing work to Segal's firm.
Forbes, 52, is pursuing a dual strategy: promoting himself and his ideas, and attacking Bush as a tax-and-spend liberal Republican.
What is unique is the aggressiveness with which Segal is using the Internet to sell Forbes. He plans to make the Web the principal point of contact for many potential supporters, and, to that end, has placed banner advertising on Web sites such as E-Trade and the New York Times, inviting people to visit www.forbes2000.com.
Once at the Web site, people are asked to fill out questionnaires describing what sort of activities and organizations they are involved in.
''This allows us to send out highly targeted messages,'' said Segal.
Voters who are attracted to Forbes for his flat-tax proposal, for example, would receive electronic mail about his economic plans. Voters who are more interested in his antiabortion message would receive e-mail about his social positions.
The profiling, Segal hopes, might also help the campaign encourage people to turn out at campaign events such as the Iowa straw poll. The campaign has sent e-mail to people who have visited the Web site instructing them to look through their address book, Rolodex, and greeting card list and identify relatives and friends in Iowa.
But Segal can be even more specific.
''I can plug in, `Do I have a flat-tax supporting Rotary Club member in southern Iowa,''' said Segal, and the program could provide him with a list of people he might contact.
''I've never heard of anything that sophisticated on candidates' Web sites,'' said Darrell M. West, a professor of political science at Brown University. ''Most of the candidate Web sites are nothing more than bulletin boards for one-way information.''
In an interview, Forbes said his approach is not designed to control voters' access to campaign information, but to learn more about what voters want to know and give it to them quickly.
''You see this on the business side,'' Forbes said. ''People want in and out, they want something fast, specific, and then they want to go on to the next thing. They don't want to tarry around.''
Forbes compared his unconventional, business-inspired campaign to Alfred Sloan's battle against Henry Ford in the automobile world. Sloan took over the bankrupt General Motors when Ford was running the best and cheapest car-production line. But Sloan needed to find a new way of taking on Ford.
So Sloan began offering customers new models each year and different color cars to choose from. ''Ford said, `Here's the one model and you can have any color as long as it's black - take it or leave it,''' Forbes said.
''What we're trying to do is create a whole new customer base, expand the universe,'' Forbes said of the 2000 race. ''If we play by the usual rules and the usual universe, we lose.''
Segal and the Forbes campaign have taken yet another page out of the business playbook. Just as airlines provide frequent flyer miles and MCI encourages its customers to sign up friends and family for its long distance service, the Forbes campaign is employing incentives.
Volunteers who sign people up for their cyber ''precincts'' will be eligible to win Forbes paraphernalia, such as baseball caps, T-shirts, and mousepads. There is a Top 10 list, showing who has recruited the most supporters to their team.
Segal also brings to the Forbes campaign another trait valued highly in business: an instinct for cutthroat competition.
To cite one example, Segal monitors all of the other campaign Web sites, and has even signed up as a supporter to receive e-mail from other campaigns. One day, he got a note from Arizona Senator John McCain's campaign, notifying him that McCain would be on a radio talk show in Arizona. The host was conducting a poll to see whom his listeners supported, Forbes or McCain. The e-mail urged Segal to call in and vote for McCain.
Segal, however, sent out his own e-mail to all of Forbes's supporters and encouraged them to vote for Forbes, the winner of the 1996 Arizona primary. McCain won by a sliver, rather than the expected landslide.
Normally, Segal said, his marketing work is for ''people making money.'' Even though Forbes is spending money, not making it, Segal could not be happier.
''This is the most exciting thing I've ever done,'' he said. ''It's a hoot!''
