I’m not really a political guy. I just love good marketing. And that’s why the way President Elect Trump won this election was so fascinating to me.
Last year, when Trump the billionaire real-estate mogul and reality show star announced his candidacy for president, a lot of people on all sides of the spectrum thought it was a joke. “He’s doing it for the publicity,” they said.
In early 2016, during the Republican primaries, Trump made several performances that were considered so unusual that they started saying “he’s so crazy and unhinged, he’ll never get anywhere.”
Then, when Trump soundly beat Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination and people realized he was actually going to be the name on the GOP ticket, people started to get scared that his prominency would validate a worldview that they didn’t like. So they started attacking Trump with their biggest, baddest weapon: the political media machine.
They ran hit pieces, dug up old videos and quotes of Trump behaving questionably. They had pundits and experts and professional politicians all lobbing every attack they could think of. They pointed out all the logical reasons why he couldn’t be elected. The attacks were so well-crafted that they were sure to drain him politically and financially. And people said, “that’s it, he’s done, he’ll never win.”
But Trump knew two things no one else in the established system knew: First, you can just ignore or downplay the attacks. And second, he figured Americans were ready for a person who spoke in simple terms.
Trump had the money and the style to rise above the public attacks, and he was smart enough to realize that he could beat the system by bringing a campaign so different and fresh that the big clunky machine couldn’t react fast enough to handle it. He and his team crafted a message so different that it appealed to a whole new set of voters that other politicians were ignoring. When businesses do this, it’s called marketing.
If you go back and watch Trump in those first Republican debates, you will see a man who is playing a totally different game than any of the other candidates. He is literally crushing each one of them on an emotional level and he’s making it look easy, using tactics we all learned in elementary school, and then grew older and convinced ourselves were immature.
Remember Trump’s nickname for Senator Marco Rubio? It was Little Marco. How about Lying Ted? Crooked Hillary? These are elementary school insults. And they hit home because anyone can understand them. Instead of long, drawn out explanations and confusing policies, Trump just got down to the business of winning people over on an emotional level. While Clinton kept trying to explain the benefits of specific policies like the TPP and ACA, Trump just told Americans that those policies were “bad.” When Clinton tried to explain a point during the debate, Trump simply and confidently declared her “wrong.”
He skillfully appealed to basic human instincts. And he did it in a way that didn’t sound like he was trying to pass one over on you. Those instincts (trust, belonging, security, and safety) are an important part of how most Americans go about their day. He appealed to people who were fed up with the same old bullshit and gave them something different. Clinton should have realized that voters wanted to shake things up when she came pretty close to losing to Sanders, but she missed the chance to change her message. And the rest of the campaign is history.
I had a marketing professor at Fairfield University called John Neal who explained the concept very simply: “if you ask someone why they buy a BMW, they’ll tell you it’s all about the performance. They’ll quote horsepower numbers and specs and tell you how great of a car it is. But the real reason they fork over $60k for one is because of how it makes them feel when they drive it.”
Trump didn’t give voters much in terms of concrete facts, figures, or specific policies. He just made it so that people would feel good about voting for him. The people that voted for him are, for the most part, regular American people of all backgrounds who were looking for something new. They were sick of the normal American political system. And Trump delivered beautifully. It was a stunning, masterful performance. It will be a classic case study in emotional marketing that will change how politics is done all over the world. But for good marketers, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all.
I run a small SEO consulting business in San Francisco, CA. I like to write a little bit and get in arguments with my friends. It’s the only way I can make sense of the world.