Already the postmortems are out
there, and marketers are busily analyzing and spinning along with the best of
them. There is already a host of articles about how the president-elect
successfully built on his brand as a key factor in the election win. Certainly
he did. On the other hand, we cannot forget that there were two winners in this
election. One, Mr. Trump, captured the Electoral College. The other, Secretary
Clinton, captured the popular vote. What happened? This is a constitutional
question and not in the purview of marketing. However, we certainly can ask:
what went wrong?
The demographics and psychographics
first.
In a nutshell, both parties lost
sight of (or perhaps felt helpless to respond to) substantive demographic changes
in their bases. Sociologists and political scientists have pretty convincingly
explained that the Democrat Party, once the party of the so-called “working
class,” has become the party of a new, mostly liberal professional class. They
argue that as this new class has emerged the Democrats have neglected their
roots. At the same time the Republican Party, the party of the so-called
“elite,” has more or less retained that constituency while the “working class”
has drifted, if not fled, in their direction. It’s hard to believe that these
changes were not adequately attended to—but they were not.
The parties, and the Democrats
especially, also missed a swell of attitudinal shifts. The newly ensconced
professional class has grown up with women in its midst and assumed that an
exceptionally qualified leader who happened to be a woman would be acceptable
to all. This class has also enjoyed relative prosperity; the Democrats assumed
that an extension of their experience would have wide appeal—even as their
presumptive candidate was forced to fight an unexpectedly strong challenge from
a self-identified Socialist, Bernie Sanders. On the other side more moderate
Republicans, and even the most conservative of the bunch, looked on in
disbelief as they were forced to fight a candidate with no actual political
experience.
Both of these challengers were
written off, but one of them is now president-elect. On the face of it, the two
have a lot in common. Although Sanders has spent most of his life in the political
sphere, he was able to position himself as an outsider and champion of social
and economic equality. Trump was clearly an outsider and was able to further
position himself as a successful businessperson —a deal-maker and a “winner”—who
could be counted upon to bring his talents to bear on the issues of concern to
the country’s most disenfranchised voters.
This is not to imply that a
Sanders-Trump match-up would have had a different outcome. Although the polls
suggested it, there is no way to know if they were accurate. After all, as it
turns out, the polls also missed cues and incorrectly predicted the election
winner.
Now, the post-election brand
conversation has been primarily a Clinton-Trump one, but that feels easy. “Make
America Great Again” is an active challenge; it implies promise; it evokes
nostalgia. “She’ll Fight For You,” Stronger Together” and “I’m With Her” are
slogans and only that. Two of the three are puzzlingly self-referential. Ironically,
given the strength of Secretary Clinton’s qualifications, they don’t inspire a
sense of fortitude; of leadership; of vision. They don’t hold out for “Hope” as
Barack Obama’s did. If brand promises alone carried elections, we could have
predicted a Trump win 16 months ago.
But what about “Make America Great
Again” and Bernie Sanders’s campaign slogan “A Future to Believe in”? The
Sanders brand voice has two of the essential elements we find in Trump’s: it
challenges; it implies promise. It then takes a different turn: it hails a new
path that doesn’t evoke nostalgia.
Like Trump, Sanders spoke to a
constituency looking for something better, more interesting, more compelling,
than the present. This constituency was sufficiently large and strong to
prolong the Democrat nomination process far beyond what anyone would have
thought. The Clinton campaign then vowed to incorporate some of the Sanders
ideals and principles into the platform, but they failed to consider the appeal
of his message.
And here’s where the genius of the
Republican campaign comes in. Donald Trump identified a substantial, neglected
and angry constituency. This was, he knew, a voting bloc that would be
attracted to a candidate promising to restore a worldview—their worldview. He
knew that they had confidence in a past
they could believe in. This is not just a nostalgia play; it is a message for people who identify with the literal and the concrete. Trump made a bet that this
constituency would overlook his lack of political experience and acumen to get
that. Aside from the branding considerations, he also bet that the bloc would be large enough, with sufficient geographic representation, to get him the win.
His victory reinforces a key principle
of effective marketing: customer first. When we make assumptions about
consumers’ wants and needs, when we don’t hear what they are saying, we may make
the correct guesses and succeed. But on the other hand, we may be wrong.
Which leads us to the essential
question, the most critical one where a brand is concerned: will the candidate
make good on his promises? Because none of this will matter to his constituency unless he does.
