The @realDonaldTrump vs the true Donald Trump – Part 1

By Gonzalo López Martí    LMMIAMI.COM

• For months I made a point of avoiding the Trump topic.
• Socially & professionally.
• The “troll treatment”, to use social media parlance.
• One must never acknowledge the existence of a troll.
• You don’t give trolls the privilege & luxury of your attention.
• It’s akin to giving them the oxygen they need to survive.
• SocMed 101.
• However, the Donald is not a troll anymore.
• He’s graduated.
• He’s now a contender within the GOP.
• A different animal.
• So.
• From a marketing, advertising, social media & PR POV, what can we learn from the Trump phenomenon?
• Let’s see.
• First we must separate the made up character from the real Donald Trump.
• (Oddly enough, @realDonaldTrump is his twitter handle)
• The Trump who stands out is not quite the same than the real Trump who will eventually stand up.
• Let’s start by singling out a few lessons from the cartoon he shrewdly created to run his candidacy with maximum traditional & social media resonance.
• To wit:

—Brand name recognition goes a long way.

• The old adage: it don’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name a’right. The Kardashian postulate. Being an attention whore pays. All those years he did commercials for Pizza Hut, moronic reality TV, had feuds with Rosie O’Donnel and appeared on Page Six for having affairs with medium-priced escorts turned The Donald into a household name.
• What did brand name recognition did for Jeb Bush, you might ask?
• Well, it helped him receive a prodigious amount of donations at the beginning of the race.
• Jeb’s fundraising machinery among GOP fat felines was, and still is, second to none.

-Fear is a strong consumer insight.

• Fear mongering turned a small Swedish car manufacturer, Volvo, into a big global brand: the safe car. Fear is one of the big reasons American and global drivers buy allegedly safer SUVs (I digress: SUVs are not really safer than smaller cars). Fear keeps the cash register ringing briskly for Smith&Wesson, Colt, Beretta and Glock. Not to mention Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other defense contractors who get billions and billions of taxpayer dollars every year. Ever wonder how much those sophisticated metal and explosive detectors we see at airports cost? Most of them are manufactured by General Electric (old tagline: Bringing ideas to life; new tagline: Imagination at work; ticker symbol: GE). Where’s the fine line separating sheer fear from, say, reasonable caution and a healthy proactive outlook? Hard to say.

-The vicarious life operates in a deep human level.

• Not unlike Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, the Donald Trump cartoon embodies the dreams of many a loser out there: a dashing devil may care filthy rich alpha male.
• He’s a boss, a bully, a blowhard, a loudmouth. He beds hot, young arm candy (or so he claims). He’s from New York: that intimidating, decadent Babylon that so many souls in the flyover states love to hate & hate to love. He rides in limos, helicopters, private jets. He’s a dream come true for many nobodies who can’t help but root for him and applaud his antics from the sidelines. The short, chubby guy who wears a Lebron jersey & $150 Lebron kicks, if only to get a bit of the pixie dust. Living vicariously through The Donald allows many an average Joe out there to forget for a brief second how miserable, irrelevant, anonymous and boring life is for the rest of us. In a warped way, he is a rapper living the high life, Kanye West or Jayz style. Only he’s a white supremacist.
• Which takes us to the next bullet point.

-Race pays.

• When human beings don’t find clear, fulfilling, self-righteous, fool-proof, silver bullet, sloganized explanations to what’s happening around us, we resort to visceral, instinctive impulses.
• Donald Trump purports to be a white supremacist in a rapidly changing country where whites are scared shitless after years of seeing assertive Latinos popping up everywhere and a highly educated snobby mutt in the White House.
• Racism is fear and The Donald voices the deep seated demons of many closeted racists who can’t or won’t overtly express it themselves out of guilt or fear of being indicted for hate speech.
• He doesn’t even has to say it out loud: he telegraphs it with his every move. Want an example: his taste in women. He only procreates with Eastern European Caucasians. American women are not good enough for him because, you know, with American folks there’s always a risk that a drop of non Caucasian DNA might have slipped into their lineage. Mind you, he not only has beef with Hispanics, African Americans and Muslims: a perfunctory Google search would allow any one to pretty much confirm that he also is a closeted anti Semite.

-Keep the media generously supplied with material and content.

• For the 24 hour news cycle, The Donald is manna from heaven, the gift that keeps on giving. The headlines write themselves. Talking heads and pundits can’t get enough from him. Speaking of fear mongering, the whole Trump media juggernaut reminds me of hurricane season in Miami: ratings go up, people are glued to their screens, Home Depot spends a shitload of money advertising survival stuff, supermarket chains inundate us with promotional scare tactics. If you are a media or advertising exec, what’s not to love?

So that’s the façade, the cunningly curated persona he wants us to buy.
Coming up next week: the real real Donald Trump.