Steve is back with his assessment of the marketing talents of Donald Trump.
Much has been made this
election cycle of Donald Trump’s supposed inherent genius as a marketer… of the
brand “Trump,” and of his highly unconventional yet uncontestably successful
campaign to win the Republican Presidential nomination. The core premise is
that in lieu of a standard campaign based on television advertising and
grassroots organization, Trump has brilliantly manipulated the media to command
constant saturation coverage, and has boldly exploited social media to create
an unmediated, unfiltered personal broadcasting network to his faithful.
Indeed, no one can argue his
success… thus far.
However, in these immensely
tumultuous recent days in which Trump slandered an exceptionally respected and
qualified Federal judge, hijacked Orlando’s blood-drenched AK-47 Groundhog Day
to marvel at his own supposed clairvoyance, and then exponentially expanded his
war on Islam, the question of Trump’s alleged marketing genius needs to be
re-examined.
Trump’s “marketing program”
thus far has had one legitimate marketing home run: an insight that led to his
running the table to capture the Republican nomination.
But under closer scrutiny,
this alleged marketing wizardry appears to be more Barnum than Apple. Indeed, for those unflinching Clinton haters
who recently boarded the Trump bus simply because no one else was still heading
for Mohegan Sun, it will be painful to realize that Trump is actually not very
good at the one thing he is supposedly very good at. But what did P.T. Barnum
allegedly say? Something like “there’s a Republican born every minute.” Let’s start by giving him – in
all fairness -- his due for decimating 16 dwarves to win the Republican
nomination for President. At the core of that campaign was a superior insight
into the target; a huge triumph of marketing.
Marketers know that
that the secret to becoming the dominant brand in a category is to figure out
what is most important to the most people, and then deliver it better
than anyone else. Generations of product managers at Proctor and Gamble repeat
the mantra that Tide cleans best. No
matter how many marketing managers come and go at Visa, the brand is always
“everywhere you want to be.” If you stand for what is most important to the
most people, your competitors are left to compete for smaller market segments
and stake their brands to benefits of lesser importance.
Whether by intuition or
analysis it matters not; Donald Trump took this logic to a Republican Party had
ruptured into three distinct tribes:
1.
The
largest was the “anti-Washington” tribe that hated ineffectual and disingenuous
Republican leaders as much as they loathed Democrats. This is where Donald
Trump put all his marbles, and his message of anger at the ineffectuality of
government resonated with the largest segment of the party. For a marketer, that’s just determining what
is most important to the most people, and proving that you do it better than
anyone else.
2.
The
next largest was the “Christian doctrinaire tribe” that cared only about
Christian faith and conservative ideological purity. Ted Cruz placed his wager
here, with the second largest group, and -- no shock to a marketer -- he came
in second.
3.
The
big surprise of the primary season was that the “centrist” republicans had actually
become the smallest group, all but
disappearing in the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat. People kept expecting
centrists to settle on one of Bush, Rubio, Christie, or Kasich, and that the
winner of the centrist battle would rapidly jump to 40%-50% of the polls. The
flaw in that logic was that the “centrist” vote was never more that 15% of the
Party. It was not that Bush lost because
of “low energy” or that Rubio lost because he was “little Marco.” They lost
because their message as “centrists” (and believe me, we use that term relatively) was out of touch with the
new mainstream of the party. There were never going to be enough “centrists” to
overtake the “anti-Washington” or the “Christian doctrinaire” segments.
Score that one as a marketing triumph for The
Donald: he identified the largest “tribe” in the deeply fractured Republican
Party. His contempt for “political correctness,” for the incompetence and
gridlock of Washington politicians, and for the Federal government’s failure to
defend American jobs against illegal immigration and questionable trade
practices gave him a platform for a campaign that deeply resonated with the
angry tribe that felt ignored, betrayed, and demeaned by Washington. He rode
the correct identification of the target audience all the way to the
nomination.
However, the weeks since Donald Trump secured
the nomination have oscillated between merely “bad” to downright nightmarish
for Team Orange Hair. Many people were characterizing his assault on Judge
Gonzalo Curiel, a federal district judge in the Southern District of
California, as a “tipping point” in a broad groundswell of Republican backlash
against Trump. And that was before
his despicable reaction to the Orlando tragedy.
From a marketing perspective, the evidence is
gradually mounting that Donald Trump may have had the one very smart initial
strategic insight, but is now being victimized by his own failings as a
marketer. Ah, Shakespeare and thy tragic flaws.
Let’s review a number of the decisions Trump
has made in light of general accepted marketing “best practices,” and take a
measure of how Trump has started shooting himself in the foot and his aim is
now rapidly heading north.
1.
Failure
to understand that his target market has changed.
As smart as Trump may have been to identify the
correct tribe within the Republican Party, he has totally failed to grasp that
as the primary season changes into the general election, the target changes. In the general election, the candidates must do
all in their power to (1) continue to galvanize their loyal base so that
follower will turn out and vote, and
(2) they must expand their appeal to
compete successfully for the “undecided” voters who often determine who wins
and who loses.
As we turn to the general election, it is no
longer a question of what the most Republicans
want, or even – frankly – what most Americans
want. The candidates must address the question of what the “undecided” voters
want. To be even more precise still, the question is now “what do undecided
voters in the key swing states want?”
It’s a mistake to think that undecided voters
in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are identical to the rabid conservative
under-educated rural white voters around whom Trump built his campaign. And yet
that appears to be his current assumption.
Since securing the nomination, Donald Trump has
given little indication that his general election campaign will vary from his
primary campaign. If anything, he has seized opportunities to become more emphatic about the most incendiary
messages of his primary campaign: racially-charged rhetoric aimed at Hispanics,
and an ever-expanding frame for his personal jihad against Islam.
2.
Focusing
on awareness when he does not have an awareness problem.
In my years running an advertising agency,
there was no shortage of clients who came to me with a very thorny problem:
their product enjoyed very high awareness, but its reputation was weak or
eroded. Very rarely would I encounter
the delightful inverse: an outstanding product that simply needed to become a
more familiar brand name. The latter can be addressed largely through
generating awareness. The former must be addressed by changing perceptions… a much tougher task.
Donald Trump is running his campaign as if his
core problem is simple awareness. He says outrageous things with the full
intent of dominating the news cycle; there is not a microphone he won’t grab,
not a tweet he won’t bleat, not a sound he won’t byte. And every time he does,
he repeats versions of the same ideas he used in the primaries.
Now, if you are comfortably ahead by five points in the polls, go
for it: repeat your winners all day long. But if most polls show you trailing
your rival, a smart marketer knows that mere repetition is not going to change
the game. If you know that your
disapproval rating is higher than your opponent’s, you might want to try to
change perception rather than simply beat the same drum ever louder.
Indeed, this moment in time – nomination won,
convention still weeks away – would be an ideal time for him to step back,
rethink, and recalibrate his message for the entirely new marketing challenge
that lies ahead. He is not doing this, and that is not smart marketing.
3.
It’s
time to beat a hasty retweet.
Here’s a fascinating fact: Donald Trump’s
campaign recently announced that his total social media following on Twitter,
Facebook, and Instagram now exceeds twenty million people. Want some context
for that number? It happens to be the exact number of Walter Cronkite’s peak
audience on the CBS Evening News.
Yes, the Donald Trump Personal Broadcasting
Network now has the exact same reach as the most trusted newsman of all time
had at his peak of popularity. This fact would make me deeply concerned if I
was convinced Trump knew how to use it. But the problem is that Twitter is a fickle and
deeply ironic medium. And it sure is not
the CBS Evening News.
First and foremost: Donald Trump’s Twitter
following are the people who already buy
in. They are his most loyal followers. So Donald Trump is spending all day
long tweeting to people who are already committed to voting for him. There is
no question that this has value for that all important task of galvanizing your
supporters to get out and vote.
But at this point, that is the smaller of
Trump’s marketing problems. At just the moment when he should be reaching out
to those undecided people in crucial swing states, he is feverishly
key-stroking his twitter feed to climax. He needs to do more than master the base, no matter how much
pleasure it gives him.
Worse still -- and here is where the irony
comes in – the only of Donald Trump’s tweets that undecided voters see are the
most heinous, awful ones that are plastered all over the mainstream media when
Trump is at this most evil. Think about it. The only tweets centrist voters
read is when CNN broadcasts Trump’s verbal pillages of Carly Fiorina, his
horrific abuse of Heidi Cruz, his steady drumbeat of Islamophobia, or his
bizarre moment of self-congratulations to mark the worst mass shooting in the
history of the United States.
Twitter simply reinforces the polarization of
the electorate. His followers are happy to follow his 24/7 master-race-baiting,
Islam-hating, and Benghazi-Gating, but all the left-leaning media needs to do
is broadcast just one horrific tweet a
week in full view of the undecided voters, and Donald’s twitter feed
becomes his own worst enemy.
Had Donald Trump indulged in some well-designed
and executed market research on his current standing to the general population
(another rather basic marketing practice), he might have found that many
undecided voters believe that he has certain strengths but is thin on substance
and his knowledge of a complex world. If people are concerned that you are a
lightweight on substance, perhaps you should not make your primary medium the
one that limits your communication to 144 characters. Sure, it is easier to
write twenty words with no discernable syntax, punctuation, or factual support,
but those are probably the reasons why hostage negotiations and cancer
treatment protocols are rarely conveyed on Twitter feeds.
And, indeed, when the timing of the candidate’s
communications initiatives appears to be motivated by something akin to
spontaneous combustion, Twitter is not your friend. Premature twit-aculation is when you send a tweet out too quickly
in an ill-considered, out-of-control rush of anger. Twitter could make good
money offering a ten-second delay option in posts so that people with anger-management
issues could force themselves to take a moment of reflection prior to
publication. At just the moment when Donald Trump would benefit from appearing
thoughtful, measured, and contemplative, he is acting like a trailer for “Angry
Tweets, The Movie.”
But, in the end, anger and rage are central to
Trump’s candidacy; therefore they are central to his marketing, and, in turn,
to his communication on Twitter. Here’s an interest take on that:
“Propaganda
must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for
hatred.” – Joseph Goebbels, on the purpose of propaganda.
(And, yes, in case you are curious... that
quote and attribution are precisely 144 characters.)
4.
Great
marketers understand the importance of their sales force and distribution.
The smartest marketers don’t walk around acting
like the sales force is somewhere below them on the intellectual food chain,
and they don’t think the distribution channel is a necessary evil. Savvy
marketers actively market to these vital constituencies every bit as they
market to the consumer. They want the sales force to be pumped up, to know the
product story, to have the right incentives, and to feel that marketing is
providing the right support.
In this little fable, the “sales force” is the
rank and file of Republican Party elected officials, and the “distribution
system” is the network of state organizations that operate at the grassroots
level, finding and getting out the vote.
Donald Trump is taking extraordinary pride at
making clear that he can succeed without any of the traditional mechanisms of
party politics. Hey, Mr. Speaker of the
House, up yours. The rest of you?
It’s time to get on board, stick to the script, or shut the hell up.
The point here is not that Donald Trump needs
to suddenly abandon the renegade, rogue mentality that took him this far. But
it’s probably true that he doesn’t need to go out of his way to make those
party loyalists feel like so many eight-track cassettes and used Swiffer
refills.
The mutual disdain between the Republican apparatchiks’ and their candidate is now
measured somewhere between Michael and
Kelly and Kanye and Taylor. To
characterize the Republican establishment’s current sentiment as mere “buyer’s
remorse” is a minced Preibus-ism; “buyer’s remorse” is what you feel when a
better house comes on the market after your closing; not how you’d characterize
the discovery that your new split level sits on a sewage-filled sink hole that
was created by untreated radioactive waste.
Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Kelly Ayotte have sold out but they
can’t run from Fox microphones fast enough; John Kasich is still refusing to
buy in. Each seems genuinely unable to come to grips with dealing with a
candidate whose policy and platform are shaped largely by Tourette’s Syndrome.
They are turning up their palms, rolling their eyes, and shaking their heads –
just about anything they can do to convey despair and alienation without
actually getting quoted.
At the most fundamental level, the cost of
Trump’s disdain for his sales force and distribution channel is that he is now
fighting a two-front war. Just as Democrats are seen to be coming together,
Trump is taking heavy incoming from his own party… and he is not handling it
well.
More than anything else this election cycle,
the Republican rank and file wanted an outsider.
Donald Trump is so “outside” that he is now paying no attention to any
Republican voices, many of whom he views to be as much the enemy as Hillary
Clinton. It has been fascinating to watch as Republicans learn that being as
“outsider” doesn’t simply mean that Trump won’t listen to the party
establishment… he won’t listen to anybody.
5.
Doubling
down when the message needed to evolve.
Above all, a brilliant marketer nails the
message. “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” “When it absolutely, positively has to
be there on time.” “Yes, we can.”
Donald Trump has “Let’s Make America Great
Again.” It is a fascinating choice, because the key word – “again” -- is so
glaringly and unapologetically retro.
“Let’s go back in time” may be a good slogan to address to aging undereducated
white guys who were last seen on top of the sociological totem pole when
Studebaker was battling for market share with Rambler. However, I am not sure
how many women, Hispanics, African-Americans, and members of the LGBT community
are really keen on bringing back those good old 1950s.
Interestingly, Ronald Reagan never talked about
“turning the clock back.” His most famous marketing campaign – “Morning in America”
– presented an upbeat, positive, forward-looking
view. Indeed, Presidential campaigns inevitably come down to two key
themes: the incumbent party talks about
“four more years,” and “staying the course;” while the party out of power
speaks about the dire need for change.
Going backward qualifies as “change,” to be sure… but it is inherently a
retreat.
Beyond the campaign theme, Donald Trump has
been mangling his message from the very beginning, committing mistakes that now
threaten that his campaign will arrive stillborn at the nominating convention.
While Trump had correctly identified the largest “tribe” in the Republican
Party, he misplayed and overplayed the “message” to that group.
Trump launched his campaign with a ferocious
assertion that Mexicans who came to the United States were drug dealers and
rapists. The under-educated white males at the core of his base might climax
when Trump made racist claims, but charging that Mexico is a nation of sexual
predators completely overwhelmed the plausibly legitimate debate about the
economics of illegal residents. Had Donald Trump limited his attack on Mexicans
and Hispanics to the relatively narrow issue of whether or not undocumented
aliens currently in the United States usurp jobs that tax-paying American
citizens should have, he might have been perceived as simply a tough
businessman forcing a public dialog on an uncomfortable but legitimate
debate.
Two weeks ago, his claim that a federal judges of Hispanic descent could not be
impartial in cases involving Trump University was labeled by the highest
ranking Republican in the country as “the textbook definition of racism.”
Through his racial attack on the judge, he dramatically elevated public
awareness that one of his own companies was currently in litigation for
fraudulent business practices. There is no plausible argument that a marketing
genius was behind this projectile tantrum.
Trade policy? A perfectly legitimate issue;
indeed, Bernie Sanders inflicted real damage on Hillary Clinton with this exact
line of attack. Had Donald Trump limited his commentary on U.S. trade policy to
the narrow question of whether China’s monetary policies create a non-level
playing field for U.S. companies, he might be viewed as an astute, experienced
businessman bringing real-world experience to bear on government policy.
Instead, Trump has chosen to center this discussion on “the stupidity of our
leaders,” their “incredibly stupid deals,” and the unsupportable contention
that a 45% tariff on Chinese goods will somehow magically bring manufacturing
jobs back.
Literally hours after the last AK-47 bullets
sprayed death in an Orlando nightclub, Trump politicized the tragedy and used
the occasion to double down on his Muslim ban, contending that the killer was
from Afghanistan. In truth, the murderer was an American citizen born a few
miles from Trump Tower.
In case after case after case, Trump could not
be bothered to do the hard work of providing factual evidence for his
contentions; opting in each case to focus on an emotionally charged appeal to
xenophobic instincts and fears.
There will be some that allege that this is
genius marketing; that he elevated each issue into an emotionally charged
threat that transformed his followers into zealots, passionately committed to
his cause. They believe that Donald
Trump has somehow channeled Donald Draper of Mad Men fame, and is now expertly practicing the darkest art of
manipulation, a shaman puncturing the taboos that served as containment walls
for the dormant racism and wild xenophobia of the less educated and malleable.
Those who think he is a genius marketer would
have you think that Donald Trump is living the life and saying the things that
down-on-their luck white guys would be living and saying if only they had ten
billion bucks. And that the allure of this fantasy – with its give-the-man-the-finger
swagger – mesmerizes the weak-minded in the manner of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s mind
games with Imperial Storm Troopers outside the bar on Tatooine.
The problem is that Star Wars was a movie, not
a Presidential campaign, and undecided votes are not Imperial Storm Troopers.
The math is becoming clear: there are not enough Imperial Storm Troopers to
defeat Hillary Clinton.
The theory that Donald Trump is a marketing
genius is a fantasy.
The emerging reality is that Donald Trump is a
one-trick pony; a faker whose default mechanism is set to outrage, a man who
radically dumbs down the problems of a complex world in order to create the
impression that he can solve them. If this is marketing, it is of an ilk that
Abraham Lincoln noted is only effective on “some of the people, some of the
time.”
No, friends, far from brilliant marketing,
there’s enough self-destructive behavior in evidence to cause one to reconsider
the theory that has been kicking about for months -- that he actually does not want to be President. That he, as a marketer, simply enjoys the
“campaign.” That simply being the Republican candidate for President will
dramatically enhance his brand. That, as
a supreme narcissist, he is playing a game of chicken in which he wants to
sustain the idolatry as long as possible and jump away just in time to dodge
the responsibility.
And when he loses, he will find some reason to
say he was cheated, and true to form, he will sue Hillary Clinton, attempting
to create the impression that he wanted the presidency, but that “Crooked
Hillary” robbed it from him.
All of it, taken together, makes me feel a bit
bad for all the Imperial Storm Troopers who fill his arena. In living to stroke Trump’s ego, they are the
people who inspired the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute.”
What about you, Mr. or Ms. Trump supporter?
Are you a Republican?
Or just a sucker?
Which brings me to right now, when we make another prediction based on
instinct and logic: BTRTN predicts that Hillary Clinton will select Senator Tim Kaine of
Virginia as her Vice President.
