Donald Trump is not particularly popular here in San Francisco, or in California as a whole. As I teach my classes around the San Francisco Bay Area, whether in San Francisco or in Palo Alto, I do not encounter many people who are Trump supporters. This may be because those who support Trump are more than a bit intimidated by the political correctness of the Bay Area, or it may be that there just are not that many Trump supporters.
I’m not that concerned one way or the other.
Let’s leave aside your feelings about Donald Trump, whether he is the savior of our nation or the worst possible outcome of the presidential election, and let’s focus, instead, on his genius as a marketer. Hillary Clinton, after all, had an incredible advantage in terms of marketing dollars as well as a unified party apparatus behind her, and yet she was defeated by Donald Trump, who, despite being a billionaire, was really the scrappy challenger.
Just take a look, for example, at the expenditures of millions of dollars by Hillary Clinton on paid advertising versus the way in which Donald Trump leveraged the free media of social networks such as Twitter and was able to turn the media discussion to his favor, time and time again. Whether or not Donald Trump will turn out to be a good, great, or disastrous president is an open question for the history books. But even, as this is written, in January, 2017, it is very clear that Donald Trump has to go down as one of the most incredible marketers in American history!
In fact, I am so intrigued by Donald Trump as marketer in chief that over the holiday break I sat down and wrote a short book on Donald Trump as a marketer, called The Art of the Deal (er). Similarly to this very short blog post, my goal was not to judge Donald Trump, as to whether he is good or bad as a person or a potential president. I actually don’t find that to be an answerable question. Instead, I focused the book on his 23+ principles of marketing and, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, explain these principles in a very short book. You can find my book on Amazon.com here.
