Say what you like about Donald Trump but he is an exceedingly successful politician. For all his obvious faults (the management chaos helped boost the sales of newspapers and wrote material for comedians), the man inspired passions and somehow every issue in the world’s most significant nation became all about him.
Even with his
criminally inept (the world’s most advanced country having significantly more
Covid cases and deaths than India and Brazil – which are both developing
nations. Incidentally, when someone wrote a Linkedin post about how Singapore
needed to ban people from places like India and the Philippines, I replied that
we needed to ban white Americans for spreading misinformation along with the
disease – my comment was deleted by Linkedin for “bullying” – but apparently
it was OK to talk about banning people from Indian and the Philippines even if White
Americans are more likely to give you Covid than an Indian or Pilipino) management
of Covid-19, he still managed to get more votes than anyone else in history and
one can say that the 2020 election was not so much a case about Biden winning
but Trump losing – a case of more people voted against him rather than for Joe Biden.
Furthermore, one cannot rule out the possibility that should he run again in
2024, he may well be back in the White House.
I will undoubtedly
come under fire for what I’ve just written and its worth understanding why people
whom you might deem a rational and decent would cheer on a man who openly targeted
an ethnic group (the one that actually does work in the USA – or as one Mexican
guy said “the group that actually makes love to women”) and didn’t seem to find
anything wrong with the fact that Neo-Nazis and members of the KKK felt so embolden
during his stint in the White House.
So rather than
talk about his policies, let’s look at why he’s managed to inspire so much
passion. The answer lies in what the man is – which is a brilliant sales man. The
Donald instinctively understands that humans are essentially emotional and when
it comes to buying products and services, how feel about the said product or
service is perhaps more important than the dry details of that product or
service’s benefit. If you look at what Donald Trump did in 2016, you’ll notice
that what he was doing was creating feelings about himself rather than reeling
off product benefits. He made it such that his opponent, a known “policy wonk”
turned out to be dry and well, the less said the better.
Sure, we live
in an environment where marketing has become “left brained” where data
analytics and research consultants have grown in stature at the expense of
creative agencies. Whilst the more technical side of marketing communications
may be on the rise, some of the best drivers of sales have come from advertising
that brings out feelings.
David Ogilvy famously
said “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you
find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the
product.”
Bill Bernbach,
the legendary creative director of DDB went further and made the point that “Facts
are not enough.”
https://notrelienquotidien.com/2014/06/17/bill-bernbach-on-datas-facts-are-not-enough/
When I was an
intern in Citibank back in 1999, my then boss, Mr. Eddie Khoo would tell us
that “there is no sale without a story.” Trump told stories and people could
feel whatever he was saying, regardless of the facts.
Let’s look at
the comparison in Singapore. Our ministers are good at reeling of statistics.
If you talk about open door policies on immigration, they will inevitably reel
of a bunch of statistics on how that benefits you, the voter.
However, even
if those statistics are true, they don’t tell a believable story, especially if
you’re talking to a forty something year old retrenched PMET who can’t get a
job and has a mortgage to pay and all he notices is that the HR manager in ever
company he’s applied to happens to be from a particular nationality.
Which tells a more
believable story? One that reiterates statistics or the one that people can relate
to from their gut?
Yes, facts are important.
You have to be truthful and not lie and mislead people. However, just telling
facts on their own won’t do the trick. You need to make the facts relevant.
Credit where
credit is due. The Donald told stories that people could relate to and made it such
that dry facts on their own didn’t matter.
This is
something that people need to remember. Having data is good. Having facts on
your side is good. However, you’re not going to get very far if you can’t make
the data relevant to your audience.
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