By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.
As much as he annoys me every time I see him on the telly, in my social media feeds or hear him on the radio, I simply can’t avoid admitting the truth: Donald Trump is brilliant. What he’s done matters to anyone who wants to use marketing to attain their objectives because it shows that you can achieve anything if you follow two principles that haven’t changed for many, many years.
The first is understand your audience. Forget what you like to think of them, no, you have to actually understand them before you have a hope of creating a message that will appeal to them. Trump and his brilliant campaign team, for example, understood that a large portion of the US electorate didn’t trust the establishment any more. He built his very own category on the back of that based on political incorrectness.
This political incorrectness was underlined and magnified consistently each time he spoke or tweeted, and he did it about absolutely everything; the wall, Russia, Muslims, that disabled reporter, the war hero McCain because “he got caught”, you name it. The really sound thing about all these messages was that they were all serving the same, sound strategy: to position himself apart from the establishment. People became comfortable with his new category of communications and began to expect and applaud it, and every time he delivered another salvo it reinforced the sense that Trump really was what he said he was: different.
His competitors were anything but; they were all known politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats. The Trump team calculated that their only chance was to capitalise on the disappointment associated with these politicians, and the ingenious shorthand they created for it was, yes you’ve guessed it, political correctness. If being politically correct was no longer working for anyone, Trump had the alternative. This strategy is textbook. It shows he understood and empathised with his audience. And he never, ever, criticised them for their past choices.
His final adversary, Hillary Clinton, ran a competent campaign with a talented team and lots of money but lacked the same strategic adroitness. She showed open contempt for a large swathe of swing voters because of their views and delivered what she thought people should want. She forgot that understanding what your audience thinks, rather than what you want them to think, is the cornerstone of success. Think of the equivalent in business: how many of those bland little shops and cafes come and go on your local high street because the owner had a vision — their vision — and went for it without doing any market research?
The second marketing principle that team Trump deployed to devastating effect is understand your competitors. Clinton failed to grasp how Trump was leveraging political incorrectness to differentiate himself from the establishment. If she had, and she had an extraordinary amount of time to, she would have acknowledged the widespread disaffection among voters and aligned her messages with it. Instead there was a distinct whiff of haughtiness, and no one likes that. Trump never took his competitors for granted, that’s why he came up with such a brilliant campaign strategy in the first place.
But understanding your competitors doesn’t have to mean being different for the sake of it. It’s just about making yourself more familiar to your audience and creating something that appeals. So rather than being a Joe Bloggs dentist who does a bit of everything, really think about how your patients think, put yourself in their shoes. Then you can look at what’s working and what’s not. But never assume you know best — your customers know best. All the winners you love to hate know that. Call on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.
