How Trump Rode the Wave of Mega-Branding to the White House

 I've started reading Naomi Klein's book, No Is Not Enough.

After an introductory chapter in which she gives an overview of how Trump is (in 2017) shocking the political landscape in the U.S. (and, she forecasts, will continue to do so), she points out that Donald J. Trump is a well-crafted "Superbrand," a type of phenomenon that emerged from the rise of business mega-branding in the 1980s.

To understand Trump and his strategies, Klein says that one must understand how Trump leverages the psychology of modern commercial branding to influence large populations. Mega-branding gets people to attach their sense of personal identity to the brand.

The human psyche has a fundamental need to connect with others, to belong to tribes. Corporate brands seek to create a tribe for their followers to join. It's brand loyalty on steroids.

That is the premise of Chapter 1, How Trump Won by Becoming the Ultimate Brand. She starts with the history of how, in the 1980s, corporations stopped focusing on producing quality products but instead focused on cultivating brand loyalty while outsourcing (often offshore) the actual design and production of goods. And that brand, that tribal identity, can be used to market more than just a product. It could be attached to an experience, and many different products might support that experience. She uses the term "hollow brand" to describe such a brand.

Is personal branding just a lie?

While reading that, my threat radar activated.

When I worked at Google, one of the workshops I led was Introduction to Personal Branding. When I first learned about that workshop, I was skeptical. I was used to brands being less-than-truthful presentations of what a company and its products were about.

In my world, marketing (branding, in particular) is an effort to manipulate my behavior, beliefs, and attitudes about a product or company. They wanted to separate my hard-earned dollars from me, usually at a premium price (because, you know, the brand is always of higher quality than generic). But early in that workshop, facilitators placed emphasis on cultivating an authentic brand.

Personal branding, done right, should give one a consistent framework of messaging to communicate one's true value, both as an employee and as a colleague, not a facade that a person can hide behind. Once I understood the honest emphasis on authentic branding, I was hooked. So, while reading No is Not Enough, I'm still on the lookout for inauthentic personal branding, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to find it in examples from Donald Trump.

The MAGA Tribe of Donald Trump

Donald Trump was a mega-brand before he ran for President. He initially built his brand by attaching to buildings, golf courses, and resort properties (many of which he didn't own), but his breakout move was when he was cast as the star of The Apprentice, a reality show famously punctuated by Trump looking across a table at an aspiring entrepreneur and barking, "You're fired!" The producers of that show carefully cultivated the image of Trump as a tough, no-nonsense business tycoon. So, when Trump ran for president, he leaned into that image and said he was there to "drain the swamp" of Washington, D.C., effectively telling the establishment politicians and bureaucrats, "You're fired!"

Trump's campaign slogan was "Make America Great Again," recycling the messaging from Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980^[1], giving rise to "MAGA Republicans" and "The MAGA Faithful" voter base. This became the tribe to attach to.

It doesn't take much to see people attaching their identity to the MAGA brand. Just watch a few YouTube videos of comedian Jordan Klepper at Trump rallies to see how intense that attachment is.

But, How to Diffuse a Mega-Brand?

This makes a lot of sense: 

• People are vulnerable to marketing. 
• Marketing leverages the basic needs of the human psyche. 
• Build a brand that people can identify with. 
• Deliver message after message that reinforces that identity. 

This looks to me like millions of people are under in a hypnotic trance or under a magic spell. But how do you break that spell? Could it be possible to sever the tribal identity of millions of people?

I imagine that it requires that brand to betray the tribe so blatantly that the members of the tribe are shocked. But, as Klein mentions in her book's introduction, Trump uses shock to deliberately to disorient people, making them more vulnerable to manipulation. So that betrayal might not work.

I look forward to learning what Klein recommends.

Notes:

1: Wikipedia, Make America Great Again