A WINNING MARKETING STRATEGY
Disclaimer: This article has no political or economic bias. It is not sponsored or supported by any political party, foundation, or lobby. It is an analytical essay on political marketing—or, more precisely, the phenomenon of political branding—written for purely cultural and academic purposes.
The paradox is clear: in the city with the world’s most billionaire residents, the new mayor is a man who promised to tax them. He is the living image of what 90% of New Yorkers fear, oppose, or consider utopian: a socialist with a radical agenda, the son of immigrants, thirty-four, Muslim, and convinced he can overturn the economic order of the city that never sleeps. And yet he is there. And not by chance.
Zoran Mamdani won thanks to a flawless, lucid, and surgical political marketing operation. A political branding exercise in which every element—identity, language, image, and communication rhythm—was crafted to undermine the hierarchies of power, not by appearing revolutionary, but by seeming inevitable.
He doesn’t come from a party school or a communications academies. He studied economics and philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine, and learned politics on the sidewalks of Queens, amid evictions, protests, and impossible rents. His career began as a community organizer, then he joined the New York State Assembly with the Democratic Socialists of America, the same faction led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He grew up in street culture and activism, not political ceremony. This is where his strength lies: the ability to translate protest into popular language, and discontent into consensus.
His story begins with an idea as simple as it is devastating: giving New York back to ordinary citizens. Not to real estate funds, not to brokers, not to luxury empires. But to those who experience rent as an open wound, to those who ride the subway every day, to those forced to work two jobs to survive in a city that has forgotten the concept of “human cost.”
His platform contains words that would make America tremble: rent freezes, free transportation, tuition-free public daycare, affordable municipal supermarkets. All funded by a tax increase for those earning more than a million dollars a year. It sounds like a movie, except the film actually aired—and the protagonist won.
In the United States, where the word socialism is still synonymous with threat, Mamdani successfully translated an ideology into popular language. He didn’t preach, he narrated. He didn’t promise heaven, he described the hell his voters already live in. And he did so with a tone that is the exact opposite of propaganda: intimate, ironic, direct, almost artisanal.
On social media, he’s built a persona that doesn’t seem like a politician: he’s the neighborhood kid, the one who stops you at the bus stop to tell you that yes, the ticket should be free. His videos have the power of immediacy, shot on the street, with bad lighting and genuine smiles. It’s the anti-format that becomes format. He’s used vintage to communicate the future: 1970s graphics, quick edits, multilingual subtitles, a VHS aesthetic contaminated by TikTok. All calibrated for an audience tired of glossy productions and polished lies.
His secret is consistency. Mamdani speaks of equality and dresses like an ordinary person. He speaks of community and shows himself on the streets. He denounces privilege and doesn’t flaunt it. In an age where politics is about image, he understands that image must coincide with the person. That’s where communication becomes marketing, and marketing—the art of perception—becomes power.
Now comes the hard part: actually governing that city, with a program that challenges the economic totems of an entire country. But regardless of how it ends, Zoran Mamdani has already rewritten the grammar of American politics. He didn’t sell an idea. He sold the sense that politics can still serve a purpose.
And ultimately, this is true marketing: making people believe what everyone thought was lost is possible.
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Alessandro Sicuro
Brand Strategist | Photographer | Art Director | Project Manager
Alessandro Sicuro Comunication
Sure-com America 