Passion is the Trump Card

I’ve had several email exchanges with various mates in the USA following Donald Trump’s ‘shock’ victory. I have friends on both sides of the political divide and their analysis, as well as their joy or despair, vary accordingly. We’ve compared notes on Brexit versus the Presidential Election - are they both a victory for the bigots or a sharp reminder that the political elite need to pay more attention to the concerns of ‘ordinary people’? And since most of my friends work in marketing in one form or another there has been the inevitable discussion about how the polls got it so wrong and what lessons for brands can we take out of this? One friend and much admired colleague, a self-confessed metro intellectual, summed it up this way:-

“I think the death of the truth and the over reliance on data vs emotion are big stories that will reverberate through the media and marketing worlds for a while.

And what did everyone in both media, polling and marketing miss?  Passion.  As we know, brands that generate passion - especially in our hyper-share mobile world - will win every time.”

He is so right. Telling a pollster which way you intend to vote does not give any indication of your strength of feeling and without that how can we get any true sense of which way the wind is blowing? Because that is the point, if you feel something passionately then no amount of headwinds or crosswinds will blow you off course. As one TV pundit put it, the number of supporters tells you about breadth but it does not tell you about depth.

Whatever mask of rationality we wear in public, secretly we are all attracted to confidence, enthusiasm and passion. It is irresistible. We are driven by emotions (and/or our System One brain if you are into Behavioural Economics). Rationality can over-ride emotions but in these kind of “Hold your nose and vote” choices where neither option is really that appealing for the middle ground of the electorate, emotions will win. There was simply more passion and emotion in the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

I have read some articles that talk about these campaigns in good old fashioned marketing terms. Brexiteers as a brand just sounded more attractive, like buccaneers, and they had better tag lines. “Stronger Together”, the message put out by the Clinton campaign comes across as bland and defensive. “Make America Great Again” is a much stronger marketing slogan, it smacks of purpose and energy.

Political analysts, just like strategic marketers, will of course want to segment the data and sore losers will take some comfort that the overall results were swayed by older, whiter, blue collar, rural, uneducated sub-groups. Their votes outweighed the votes of the younger, smarter better educated, they cost ‘us’ the election or referendum. Did they? Or was it apathy? If these other, apparently more elite, groups had the same kind of emotional investment in their cause could they not have swayed the vote the other way? Of course they could. Hilary Clinton lost and the Remain Campaign lost because their supporters cared less. They cared rationally, they did not care emotionally, or at least not as much.

The lessons are there for brands – it is not about your market share or your functional benefits, it is about how much enthusiasm you can generate based on how much genuine passion you embody.

It is the same for tech start-ups, a world in which I spend a lot of time. It is not really about how good your tech is or how much money you can raise, it is about how much you truly believe your tech can change the world and what you are prepared to sacrifice to do that. You need to care passionately about what you do, you need to pick a fight with the conventional competitors and reframe them as the lazy establishment villains.

And that is a point I have made many times over the years. The art of marketing is not just to position yourself, it is to reposition your competition, just like Apple did to IBM, just like Brexiteers did to Remainers and just like Trump did to Clinton. In every case the opposition were repositioned as complacent, self-serving enemies of the people. The winning side, the winning brands and the winning start-ups, just have more outrage with the status quo, more raw emotion and more fiery passion for their cause. And that kind of stuff does not show up in a poll. Nor can it be confected.