By David Jenkin

Brendan Seery, editor of media and marketing at Saturday Star and founder of PR Boot Camp:

The lesson of the Trump victory should be stark for marketers. Many of them are like the political pundits who got it so wrong in America. They ignored the golden rule: You are NOT the target market.

Real people – the real consumers who buy your products – are not the people you drink or dance with, nor the people you hang out with on Twitter. Because the feelings of the Trump supporters – Middle America, if you will – were so at odds with their own, the analysts ridiculed or ignored them.

Advertising's the same: walk a mile in your customer's shoes, but even before you put those shoes on, leave your prejudice at the door.

Sylvia Schutte, managing director of Stratitude:

He had a simple, clear message: “Make America Great Again”, which was more easily understood than Hillary’s message. He kept it simple and stayed on message. No matter what was asked, he wasn’t thrown off track and managed to make questions fall back on his main message points. 

He was consistent: his “Make America Great Again” goes back as early as 2012 and he kept using and repeating it in everything he did – every speech, interview, on social media and on his website.

He was newsworthy: he was controversial and ensured he stayed in the news – whether it was about Muslims, Mexico or what he thought of people who supported Hillary. Whenever he opened his mouth, it was covered and discussed everywhere – earning him loads of free PR.

He worked PR: he relied less on advertising and more on PR by generating stories of his own and getting free publicity across all the networks and on social media.

Tamra Capstick-Dale, managing director of Corporate Image:

I’ve met quite a few people in the last week or so who’ve told me they foresaw Donald Trump winning the election. I don’t believe a word of it. But other than the need for pollsters both in the US and the UK to go back to the drawing board or consider another career, we might also reflect on exactly what happened, why, and why it’s important.

Political scientists certainly more skilled than I have spoken to the “forgotten middle” striking back, analysed the results in race or gender terms, or simply talked fairly eloquently about the power of personality. I think a lot of that is true. But what has more amused than bemused me, is the sense that so many people believed exactly what they were told by a very clearly bipartisan media, populated by people mostly of exactly the same view.

Too many Americans went through the electoral cycle in an intellectual echo chamber. So convinced were they of their cause, their righteousness, their utter self-belief, that they allowed no intellectual space for disagreement, even of the silent kind. This, of course, is tantamount to believing your own PR, or, in blunter South African terms, blowing smoke up your own backside.

We see this in the bias that’s easily detectable in the daily media here at home, and in the lack of any questioning of holy cows. There are certain subjects in the media that are simply not discussed. They are taboo. They are taken as read. This is where the dangerous precedent lies, and where the lessons for us reveal themselves. We’ve stopped having honest conversations. 

We are finding ourselves either on the shouting side, which simultaneously roars, sometimes with violence, for the freedom to be heard, yet at the same time, brooks no dissent, as if freedom is uni-directional; or, we are on the silent side, that figures it just isn’t worth it to be insulted or threatened simply for having a view.

There are multiple lessons which readers can deduce for themselves, whichever side of the political spectrum they happen to sit. But one lesson should be common to us all: we need to do more talking and more listening. We need to learn when to talk and when to shut up and hear the other side.

We need to encourage people to speak to their fears, not silence them with pejorative, belittling interruption. We need to set aside our closely held beliefs and take the time to understand each other without rebuke or insult. We need to have the maturity to find common ground on the things that bind us, and debate the means to achieve them. The alternative is simply too awful to contemplate.

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*Image courtesy of Gage Skidmore