Aim For The Heart

As a political junkie, I have continued to follow the presidential primaries with amusement, bemusement, astonishment, and even a bit of admiration.

Admiration because in defiance of all the pundits and the perceived wisdom of the political parties and their minions, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have captured the hearts of the voters, if not of those who thought they could control the process.

Billionaire kingmakers, money-laden political action committees, and party leaders are completely out of the picture in both campaigns. In both cases these people are busy on the sidelines, frantically doing all they can do to defeat Trump and Sanders. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are left befuddled, wondering whatever happened to the inevitability of facing each other in November.

My admiration is mixed with a bit of dismay, disbelief, and cringing at a lot of what the candidates are saying. as they gather up their hoards of followers. And gathering them up, they certainly are.

Here is what I admire about the Trump and Sanders campaigns. They’ve been and continue to be masters at identifying their customers and providing a product and message that drives right past facts, figures, and even reality to grab the hearts of their targets. As they well know, it’s the emotional connection that captures people’s attention and makes the sale.

Both campaigns are built on asserting their outsider status. They claim that this status allows them to understand the fear, anger, sense of loss, and feeling of powerlessness regular people hold. Powerful emotions that completely overwhelm rational thought. Each candidate channels these emotions in different ways and each of course offers different remedies to fix the issues that led to these feelings. But oddly enough, both brand themselves the same way, as real people telling the unvarnished truth, beholden to none of the usual power brokers and powerful people who grab all the wealth, control everything, and run over all the real people. Real people just like you.

Trump and Sanders tell us they’re not like those other guys who caused the problems. You can trust them to fix your and the country’s problems and make America great again.

Many companies can learn something from this strategy. The Sanders and Trump campaigns figured out that there is a large contingent of potential voters being ignored by their competition. They figured out the nature of these people, their demographics, geographics, and psychographics as well as what they worry about and want to buy. Then they figured out how to build and deliver messages that would directly and emotionally fill their needs. And aimed these messages directly at their hearts.

It seems to be working quite nicely for Trump and Sanders while scaring the daylights out of the competition. Their method will work just as well for your business. Figure out exactly who your customers are, what you can provide that no one else can, and what the emotional triggers are that will bind them to you. (Admittedly, you do have one difficulty politicians don’t have…you can’t offer empty promises but have to actually deliver what you promise.)

Target well, stay true to your message, connect to your customers’ emotions, and deliver what you say. Not so difficult and yet few do it well. Need a more practical business model of this than Bernie or Donald? Look at Apple.