Trump Brand Changes Political Marketing Forever

The stunning success of Donald Trump’s earned media strategy proves that social media and content marketing work when brands are willing to take risks.

There are so many different aspects to Donald Trump’s drive for the Presidency – the misogyny, the xenophobia, the hair – that your humble columnist barely knows where to start. But there is one topic more than any other that should interest marketers about the Trump phenomenon: his approach to media is electrifying.

Trump has not only out-thought his rivals for the Republican candidacy, he has changed the rules of political marketing forever. A recent analysis by the Smart Media Group and mediaQuant provides some eye-opening comparisons between Trump and the other unfortunate politicians attempting to beat him to the White House.

For starters, Trump has barely spent any money on traditional forms of advertising. The $10 million he spent up to the end of February might sound like a lot of money but it’s peanuts in the world of American politics. More than $6 billion will be spent on political advertising before America selects its 45th President later this year. Despite this astronomical figure and the significant lead that Trump now enjoys, he has spent a fraction of the money on TV advertising and direct marketing compared to his rivals. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the comparison between Trump and Jeb Bush. Bush enjoyed only 1% to 2% of the Republican vote before dropping out of the race in February having spent ten times more than Trump on political advertising.

Not only is Trump winning without traditional advertising, he is winning against it. As his lead has increased, his main adversaries Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio spent millions on anti-Trump advertising again using traditional TV spots to make their point. According to Kantar Media it is not unusual for $6 million to be spent in a single day on anti-Trump advertising all, so far, to no avail.

The reason for Trump’s apparent immunity to attack ads and his remarkable ROI can be seen in the Smart Media Group data. While Trump has spent only $10 million on owned media, he has accrued almost $2 billion in earned media. To put that in perspective, this is almost double what President Obama spent on his whole re-election campaign in 2012.

Above sources: mediaQuant, SMG Delta. By The New York Times

It’s not taken long for marketers in the US to point to Trump’s success as further evidence of the power of content marketing and social media over traditional forms of communication. Clearly they have a point. Trump is achieving infeasible success from an incredibly small investment. He is the perma-tanned poster boy for everything that the new media revolutionaries have been telling us for the past decade.

There are, however, a couple of caveats. First, social media works best – as the name suggests – when people use it to communicate with each other. For all the political point scoring and billion dollar budgets, the Trump campaign is another example of the power of social media when it connects people. When brands try to join in the conversation it all goes a bit awry. “I don’t want to have a conversation with my chips,” as one of my favorite marketers puts it.

The fix for that has been content marketing. Yes, our brand might be fundamentally tedious but with clever content we can create traction and earn untold media. That might be true in theory, but it’s much harder in practice than it might sound. With a few very noble exceptions, most content marketing has piss-poor impact and fades from view with barely a whimper. Too many brands are risk averse, inherently boring entities run by risk averse, inherently boring people. Not a good recipe for enduring and effective content.

Again Trump provides the exception here, or rather his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski does. On the muggy June afternoon when Trump decided to run for President, Lewandowski took a marker pen and wrote a four word strategic imperative across his whiteboard that would come to summarize everything about the campaign to follow. “Let Trump be Trump” were the words scrawled in black ink. In a world of managed political identities and leaders that change opinion with the daily polls, Lewandowski had the guts and smarts to realize that the only way his candidate could win was by being himself, especially when all his adversaries were being anything but.

The Trump story is a case study that should inspire a renewed faith in content marketing and social media over traditional channels of communications. But it should also provide a reminder that these tools work best when the product is a person and that person happens to be naturally, horrendously, enduringly fascinating.

This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.

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