I saw a standalone shelf of Crystal Pepsi in the grocery store a couple months ago, under a marketing display sign ominously stating, “You Asked for It!”
I shudder to think that anyone asked for that.
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I’m not so sure that’s how it will be remembered, there are a lot of other bullets on that list:
- get caught doing a whole bunch of really sexist stuff
- be associated with racism to the point that many supporters are unwilling to admit to supporting you
- encourage violence, instill fear
- echo the rhetoric of a foreign power trying to advance your agenda
- get a last minute boost because the head of the FBI breaking longstanding policy to intervene on your behalf
All resulting in: win despite being considerably less popular.
None of that says textbook success to me. I think it will be remembered as bizarre and chaotic, not methodical. At any rate, I wouldn’t base my new cola ad campaign on it.
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And it still flopped!
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Legendary designer Michael Beirut of Pentagram wrote a fascinating essay (which may have been posted on BB earlier) comparing the success of Trump’s marketing to the logo and identity program he & his design firm worked on for Hillary. A lot comes down to branding that didn’t look corporate (the shitty but instantly-identifiable MAGA hat) and a campaign revolving around talking directly to the people he wanted to talk to – a focused message-- versus a scattershot widespread broadcast of a generic message.
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By all means, if you are convinced that Trump won because half of America wants violent racism, keep thinking that way. Don’t let me bother you.
I meant most of those points to be things that went terribly wrong.
I’m just saying that if I was marketing something and over 50% of the country was convinced my product marked it’s users as racists, I wouldn’t call it “textbook” even if I ended up being successful.
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I just don’t think you can look at it as simple in the end.
Say I wanted to run a marathon. I get advice from trainers and previous runners on how to work myself up to, put in the time and effort required.
Then during the marathon there is a flood that leaves half the route in waist deep water, a gas explosion that kills the 20 front runners, someone tries to stab me only be to attacked by a lion that escaped from the zoo earlier, and it turns out one of those cups of water someone handed me was laced with speed without my knowledge.
It would be odd for me to then look back on my training regimen as a model of success because of my win, even if my training regimen was very sound.
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Oh, absolutely, by no means am I saying that his win was that simple – there were many factors involved and I’m sure that future Trump-wannabes will try to use his playbook in their campaign and fail utterly. Beirut’s essay was just comparing his Hillary logo vs. Trump’s intentionally crappy visual identity.
That was very very subgenius, for sure.
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If companies marketed the way Trump did, they’d be out of business in a year—or spending piles of cash just to stay afloat. But targeting motivated assholes was obviously rather effective.
[quote=“hawkeward, post:41, topic:104239”]
I shudder to think that anyone asked for that.
[/quote] I always thought it sounded like a threat.
No, it’s a con job. Nevertheless, that was still a part of Trump’s message.
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At the time I thought this slogan invoked broke as in “broke through,” “broke out,” i.e. the year punk succeeded at what it was trying to do.
But in hindsight, the other broke seems more relevant: The year punk damaged itself, the year punk stopped working right, the year after which punk was never again fit for purpose.
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Certainly not half. Certainly not even all his voters. But they were certainly OKAY with someone who dog whistled and worked with people who indeed support violent racism. So there’s that.
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pshh, true dat!
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More like:
- Coke did decades of marketing that generally worked.
- Coke made Coke taste more modern driven by a theory by new marketers about how things might go badly at some point in the near future
- decades of marketing had exactly the psychological effect Coke would have hoped for – even among people who remember liking Coke when they were younger, but hadn’t bought one in years – at the worst possible time
- Coke caved and went back to the old way of doing things, and fired the new marketing people, but at least enjoyed a peak in sales due to the publicity.
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Several times I’ve summed up this last election as “the Democrats chose the only candidate who could lose to Donald Trump, and the Republicans chose the only candidate who could lose to Hillary Clinton.”
I know people who voted for him, and the reasoning was basically that both candidates were terrible in different ways, so may as well ignore them, fall back, and help their party steer the future direction of the Supreme Court. That the Republicans also took Congress surprised most of them.
Not to open old wounds, but this is the one thing that I have to dispute. Comey closed the case for lack of information, then got new information and re-opened the case. At this point, he was legally required to inform Congress that the investigation was once again open. The timing sucks for Clinton, but he followed protocol.
Not that it really matters, because it’s not like Clinton wasn’t already incredibly polarizing. She’d already lost all those votes before the issue.
(And as someone who once had access to (I assure you, the most boring possible) classified information in another life, I can say it’s impossible to accidentally email it to yourself at an insecure mail address. Also, every paragraph begins with a classification code: in order to “lose them” and mishandle the documents in ignorance as she claimed, you’d have to have an intern omit them as he re-type the whole thing.)
Comey’s own testimony was that:
- He didn’t believe he had a legal duty to report it.
- His decision to report it was based on his belief that Clinton would win.
That’s political interference in an election. I’m not saying he was backing Trump personally, because I have every reason to think that’s not true. But if he’d gone through the entire election with the “we don’t comment on investigations” line that the FBI should be taking during a campaign he would have been on solid ground. If I were Obama I would have fired him on November 9 (regardless of who won).
If someone without Clinton’s political clout did what Clinton did I am quite sure they would be fired and quite possibly prosecuted. I think that choosing a candidate who is known to be under criminal investigation is a completely insane thing for a political party to do. None of Clinton’s badness exonerates Comey, who chose to actually interfere in a political campaign because (and this is his own account) he was afraid it would appear he interfered if he didn’t.
Every poll shows that the Comey news destroyed her poll numbers at the nth hour, right before the election. Even though she still won the popular vote by a wide margin, the margin would’ve been far wider without Comey’s interference, and he’s admitted as such.
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