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Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

by TerrencHazeltin Posted on September 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is breaking every rule in the “how to be a candidate” handbook—and maybe that’s his secret.

Unlike the often-stodgy conventional political campaign, Trump’s presidential bid resembles the rollout of a consumer brand. The reality TV star and real estate mogul has a keen knack for self-promotion and an entertaining product to peddle (his unfiltered self), and this is letting him get away with things his opponents can only dream of.

For instance, one key rule of running for president is that you should never, ever put on a hat—or any headwear. You will look goofy and unpresidential. (Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis?) But when Trump arrived to inspect the Mexican border last month, he strolled off his plane wearing an ill-fitting plain white cap, adorned with the words “Make America Great Again.” And he’s worn the hat pretty much everywhere since, sometimes exchanging it for a red version. Arguably, Trump could not make a public appearance outdoors without a cap—it’s unclear how his complexly coiffed mane might react to weather—but the image was as unstylish as any presidential candidate has managed recently. And yet, it works. As Slate put it in an article devoted entirely to Trump’s hat, “Juxtapose almost anything with Trump’s sour puss, and you’ve got yourself an indelible image.”

Despite the conventional wisdom that hats are a nightmare for a politician’s image, last week, at a focus group of Trump supporters run by GOP pollster Frank Luntz, the hat was a high point.

“We know his goal is to make America great again,” a woman in Luntz’s focus group said. “It’s on his hat. And we see it every time it’s on TV. Everything that he’s doing, there’s no doubt why he’s doing it: It’s to make America great again.”

Luntz gushed over the results of the session, claiming the level of avowed support for Trump articulated by the participants stunned him. “Like, my legs are shaking,” he told reporters afterward.

It was a small sample size, and maybe it’s not just the hat. There’s also the catchphrase. “Make America Great Again” is compelling in a way that other candidates’ slogans aren’t, says Tom Bassett, CEO at Bassett & Partners, a San Francisco brand and design strategy firm. Getting consumers to remember a product’s slogan is extremely difficult. Only a handful of brands ever achieve a level of awareness where the line can be recalled with ease. Bassett, who has overseen international ad campaigns for Nike, Apple, and Yahoo, thinks the phrase has an unusual resonance—a nostalgia for American success.

The message is simple and easy to process, Bassett says: “People are a little fearful and they’re looking for someone with a really firm hand to say, ‘We’re going to make it, we’re going to be great again!’ versus anything too intellectual.” He adds, “‘Make America Great Again’ has a sense of mission to it; it’s clear to the reader/viewer,” Bassett says. “Maybe there is something about the clarity of his mission that makes it easier for people to respond to him.”

He points out that this is not the case with the slogans of other candidates. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is using the catchphrase “Unintimidated.” (Merriam-Webster’s dictionary does not list “unintimidated” as an actual word, and it drives spell-checks crazy.) His campaign book is called Unintimidated. The super-PAC supporting him is called Unintimidated PAC. Last week, Walker made a major foreign-policy speech entitled “America Unintimidated,” and when he is unsure how to answer a question or is heckled, he frequently announces he is “unintimidated.”

But for all the synergistic branding effort, Walker is polling in the mid- to high single digits in most polls. (Trump is over 30 percent.)

Jeb Bush, meanwhile, has methodically built his campaign around the phrase “Right to Rise,” which is also the name of his super-PAC. But it isn’t a natural turn of phrase, and even Bush has to conspicuously shoehorn it into speeches.

Bassett asks, are “‘unintimidated’ or ‘right to rise’ a mission statement people can sign up for?”

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Donald Trump Is Breaking Every Rule of Political Branding and Getting Away With It

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"

by LutherCKAF Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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There are few things more symbolic of our climate dysfunction than the strange idea that if only we gave the problem a different name, we’d be able to deal with it. Nonetheless, for years there have been intimations that we should cease saying “global warming” and instead say “climate change”—albeit for wildly different reasons.

The case for this phrase change dates at least back to an infamous 2002 memo by conservative strategist Frank Luntz, who argued that “while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Luntz was giving this advice in the context of also advising Republicans to highlight the “lack of scientific certainty” about climate change. In a study published in 2011, however, researchers at the University of Michigan actually found that Republicans seem to be more willing to accept the reality of the problem when the “climate change” label was used.

Most recently, however—and as Media Matters documents in the helpful video below—conservatives have seized on the bizarre idea that the environmental movement is now saying “climate change” because it can explain anything, including “decades of global cooling,” as one Fox News host claimed. In other words, the accusation is that this a sneaky way to cover up the reality that global warming is a sham.

Here at Climate Desk, we’ve used the terms pretty much interchangeably. So have scientists. From a scientific perspective, after all, both phrases have validity. There’s no doubt that the single clearest indicator of what carbon dioxide emissions are doing to our planet is a global warming trend. At the same time, though, this trend results in much more than just warming. From changes in rainfall patterns to potential jet stream alterations, the term “climate change” certainly captures a broader range of consequences. In fact, NASA argues, on this basis, that it’s the preferable term.

But which term should we use from a public opinion perspective? What’s the better frame? Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who is currently serving as the Gallup scholar for the environment, has just published a comprehensive polling analysis suggesting that basically, it’s a wash. “The public responds to global warming and climate change in a similar fashion,” writes Dunlap. For instance: When you show people a list of environmental problems and ask if they personally worry about each one “a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all,” 34 percent say they worry a great deal about global warming, and 35 percent say the same about climate change.

The more pertinent issue, though, is whether ideological groups respond differently to different phrasings. Dunlap looked at that too. Breaking responses down by ideology, he found that only 16 percent of Republicans say they worry a great deal about “global warming”…and only 17 percent say the same for “climate change.” In the other three possible response categories—a fair amount, only a little, not at all—the results were also quite similar, as you can see in the table below.

Gallup.

In sum, 36 percent of Republicans worried a great deal or a fair amount about “global warming,” and 39 percent worried a great deal or a fair amount about “climate change.” By contrast, 83 percent of Democrats worried either a great deal or a fair amount about both “global warming” and “climate change.”

“While there are slight differences in the degree of partisan and ideological divergence in responses to global warming versus climate change,” Dunlap concludes in his paper, “they are not statistically significant, and modest compared with the huge gaps in views of both terms held by Americans at the two ends of the political spectrum.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t a time, perhaps as recently as mid-2009 (when the data were collected for the Michigan study cited above), when conservatives were indeed more open to taking the problem seriously if it was labeled “climate change” rather than “global warming.” But if so, those days are long gone. Dunlap suggests that this is because conservatives have gotten just as used to dismissing “climate change” as they are to dismissing “global warming.” Certainly, the name bestowed upon their favorite pseudo-scandal, late 2009’s “ClimateGate,” didn’t help matters.

Nor does the right’s cynical new idea that the climate crowd shifted to saying “climate change” in order to paper over a supposed lack of warming. “In recent years a popular meme on skeptic and conservative blogs is that climate scientists and climate policy advocates have shifted to climate change because it refers to abnormally cold as well as warm weather and is thus harder to dispute—even though climate scientists have used both terms from the late 1980s onward,” comments Dunlap by email. “The result is that in conservative circles climate change has become as politicized as global warming, and the two terms now seem synonymous.”

So, in sum: If you thought clever word-smithing was going to save the planet, forget about it. It doesn’t matter what you call it: It’s getting a lot hotter.

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"