3 valuable marketing lessons from the 2024 election you can apply today
I, like most Americans I know (of any political stripe) am exhausted and tapped out by the 2024 US election. And yet…in all the post-mortems I can’t help but notice the marketing implications.
If you’ve followed me for awhile, you know where my political sympathies lie. I’m a biracial woman born and raised in California with a secondary education, and who went on to become a global citizen living abroad in Europe.
Any political data strategists worth their salt could tell you how I’ve voted in every election with frightening ease and precision.
The above aside, I’m writing this post as a marketer, with a dispassionate interest and analysis of what worked and why for the Trump political (marketing) campaign, and what didn’t for the Harris campaign.
The three lessons:
Branding and messaging is more powerful than SEO, analytics and performance marketing
Visibility and repetition are critical
Asymmetric intimacy media is replacing or has already replaced traditional media like cable news
Many of these marketing aspects reinforce each other and overlap, but I’ll try and treat them as separate and distinct.
Lesson #1: A powerful brand beats data and analytics
Like it or not, Trump has a powerful, easy-to-understand and consistent brand. His messages are:
Make America Great Again
America First
Immigration is bad
I am a winner, and if you go with me, you will be too
I’m not a ‘regular politician’
Through his real estate and licensing empire, and the long running show ‘The Apprentice’ , Trump has built a brand that has had decades to root itself in the American consciousness.
He is a rich guy, a clever businessman, a great negotiator. You can argue until your blue in the face that he inherited his money! That he would have been better off if he had invested his inheritance in a Vanguard fund! That he stiffs people! ad nauseum.
It doesn’t matter. The brand has been established.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, had no brand, except for maybe ‘California liberal’. Like mosts vice presidents, her job was stay out of the spotlight (see next point about visibility).
Political strategists stressed that she needed to ‘define herself quickly’, another way of saying establish a brand. Very hard to do in 100 days.
So the Harris campaign leaned on micro-targeting and analytics. Messages like ‘Freedom’ and ‘We’re Not Going Back’ were rolled out and rolled back in. A grab bag of policies clearly micro targeting specific constituencies designed or imagined were floated.
The people running the Harris campaign are not dummies. However their considerable capabilities with data and analytics about the US electorate were no match for the mighty MAGA brand.
Another reason the Trump brand was so powerful is that voting, like buying, is becoming a means of self-expression rather than a rational decision on a set of policies.
Think about the engineers that used to jump up and down about how much better a Microsoft PC was than an Apple; It’s cheaper! Better features! More control! Nobody cared. Apple is the cooler brand, and everyone wants to be cool.
Wonks, partisans (like me) and political scientists can pull their hair out all they want pointing to this or that policy that helps the working class enacted by Democrats. It doesn’t matter, it’s not about deliverism or a policy platform.
Bill Clinton once quipped ‘Strong and wrong is better than weak and right’. For many, voting was about being a strong winner.
The lesson for you:
Before thinking about SEO or Facebook ads, start by thinking about your brand. Why would someone want to work with you, what are they signalling and expressing by associating themself with you and your brand?
Helpful resources:
Building A Story Brand by Donald Miller, watch (and read) The Brand Gap, my colleague Karina Weber (AKA The Brand Architect) has has a helpful free roadmap: 3 Steps to a Magnetic Brand & A Thriving Business.
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Lesson #2: Visibility (and repetition)
I listened to a lot of focus group podcasts in the run up to the election. Most voters repeated some variation of the following when it came to Harris: Where is she? What is she doing? What has she done as vice president?
Of course, this was a disadvantage for Harris. The job of the vice president is to stay in the background and studiously avoid upstaging the president. Regardless, it speaks to the point that if people don’t see you — a lot — they don’t know what you’re doing and assume that you’re not doing anything remarkable.
I once heard strategist James Carville in his trademark cajun parlance explain how he had to tell politicians to repeat their message and repeat it again until they couldn’t stand it anymore.
A colleague of mine who used to do comms for the UK Labour party once told me while I was complaining about marketing a time-specific offer that I needed to promote it until ‘You absolutely want to wretch’.
The lesson for you:
Don’t hide! Find a way to stay visible to your audience and be consistent about it. This doesn’t mean you have to become a creator or influencer constantly publishing on LinkedIn, Substack or Tiktok.
For some people it can be as simple as committing to consistent relationship marketing practice that includes staying in touch over emails, being a guest on relevant podcasts, or being a regular attendee at a handful of networking or community events.
Helpful Resources:
Lesson #3: Asymmetric intimacy and the new media landscape
Authenticity and unscripted humanity are invaluable traits for building trust in our modern media age.
The phenomenon of the AOC-Trump voter is fascinating to me. For those of you not familiar with American politics, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) is a young, charismatic, left-wing superstar in the Democratic party. She is the total opposite of Trump politically.
She can also accurately be described as a political influencer on Instagram. As of this writing she has just over 8 million followers on IG and a little over 700k on TikTok.
She went on her TikTok (from her car!) and directly asked her constituents who voted both for her and Trump, why they did so (stressing that she was curious and that it wasn’t about judgement)
I listened to a focus group of these voters. They all said similar things:
“She’s like that sister that will always defend you…she’s truly a fighter”
“New York realness”
“They’re both outspoken with no filter” (referring to both Trump and AOC)
“I don’t know about the other people, and her I always hear about, she’s a familiar name”
“AOC really tells you what she’s gonna do, rather than Kamala”
These people felt like they knew AOC.
Why? She is on TikTok, she is on Instagram Live. She regularly communicates, off the cuff, directly with voters.
So does Donald Trump. He regularly posts on Truth Social, it’s clear he was the one doing the posting, for better or for worse (I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!).
These two politicians are communicating authentically and directly with their audiences. Neither Trump or AOCs social media feeds are full of anodyne posts in politi-speak; carefully produced by staffers that will not offend, connect with, or inspire anyone.
Voting for both Trump and AOC speaks to how personal affection and an an attraction to ‘realness’ and familiarity can generate wildly incoherent politics.
Much has been made of Harris’s decision not to go on Joe Rogan. We’ll never know if it would have helped or not. What was clear to me was that Harris wasn’t comfortable in these freewheeling, unscripted types of interviews.
Trump shined in them. It didn’t matter if he said anything innaccurate, mean or impolitic. He was authentic. The very act of communicating genuinely removes the ‘regular politician’ stink. and builds trust. The actual content does not matter.
The lesson for you:
Find ways to connect intimately and genuinely with your people. This is the opposite of ‘broadcasting’ posts continually (that’s important too, but it is not about connection). Podcasts are great for this, either as a host or guest.
At an expat conference in Berlin earlier this year, someone I’ve never met came up to me and shyly told me how much they love my podcast. I have a very small, very niche listenership, but they regularly send me unprovoked messages or tell me in person how much they like it (and me!)
Email Newsletters can help too. Just this week I sold a project to a woman who’s daughter is on my mailing list and highly recommended me. I was taken aback and humbled by how enthusiastic excited they both were to work with me. It was if they knew me, and they kind of did!
How are you comfortable communicating in this way? Public speaking? Video? Think: YouTube, Webinars (Ask Me Anything), LinkedIn Lives or small, in person workshops or retreats.
Helpful resources:
The ‘Secret Benefit of Podcasting’ What’s working on Instagram in 2025 or the posts below:
To wrap up, I’ll again emphasize, none of this is to say you need to become a constantly-online influencer or ‘creator’. I’ve tried to provide examples of ways you can take these three lessons and apply them in a way that is compatible with your natural way of marketing.
In fact, if you force yourself to start marketing in a way you are profoundly uncomfortable with, it will backfire.
There are enough ways to build a brand, stay visible and gain trust and intimacy with your community/audience in a non-scripted, non market-y way that you should be able to find a recipe that works for you.