Why Did Donald Trump Win the Election?

I’m going to answer the question.. ‘Why did Donald Trump win the election?’. And my answer is: I have no idea.

Politics aren’t my thing. But I knew that calling this episode why did Donald Trump Win the Election would likely get you to read this

And I was right, wasn’t I?

But it’s not a trick.. I am going to talk about one reason why I THINK Donald Trump did win the election. I just don’t know everything about it (or much about it) nor do I know or really care how the US political system works in full (I don’t lose sleep over it, put it that way).

And like always, I’ll be relating it back to marketing and how you can use the same principle for your business to attract more customers, get more sales and ultimately grow your business.

So if you want to know how to do that, using a technique President Elect Donald Trump himself used.. Stay tuned.

There are a couple of handfuls or fundamental, key, very important and irrefutable laws to marketing.

Good marketing means more customers and more business.

If you’re in business, or you want to start your own business.. Something you will quickly learn is that sales and customers don’t just magically appear, as much as we want them too.

In the early days it might be as simple as starting your business fan page on Facebook, and inviting all your friends to ‘like it’. And a few days later a friend of a friend posts and asks something on Facebook that says:

“Does anyone know someone they would recommend to teach my daughter how to play piano?”

And your friend remembers.. “YES! Yes I do”, and they refer you to their friend and there you go, you have your first paying student. Because in this scenario you’re a Piano Tutor who just started their own Piano Tutor Facebook business page.

This is a familiar story, it happens all across the world in all different industries. But what happens when.. the friends run out?

What happens when, everyone you know has referred everyone they know who would be a good match for your business?

That’s when the easy sales just suddenly stop and you’ll wish you knew a thing (or four) about marketing.
So today, I’m going to talk about one of these things. Just one. And when I say it, you’ll quickly realise that yes it’s a tactic that Donald Trump used to get the attention of millions of voters, and millions more around the world who aren’t even living or voting in the US.

Anyone who knows anything about marketing will encourage you to be POLARISING, and that’s the quick marketing trick of today..

Be Polarising.

If you were alive during Donald Trump’s run for election, unfortunately, there was a 98% chance that you got daily updates about some of the crazy and ‘headline making’ things Donald Trump said, here are just a few of them:

• He called Mexicans rapists (then said, some he assumes are good people).

• I’m going to build a great, great wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it.

• I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.

These are just three of the hundred plus one liners that ran across even OUR TV and Internet screens in Australia, during Donald Trump’s election.

I’m not sharing my views here on US politics. I’m not saying I agree or share his beliefs, but I am saying that when someone says something really ‘out there’ like he did, and still wins the race and still becomes the elected President of the United States, you need to take a moment to think about that.

It could be natural to assume that someone running for the presidency needs to stay neutral. Much like Australian politicians seemingly try and do. Not giving a hard or fast opinion on anything. Always leaving their options and answers open. Have you noticed that?

When a politician is asked a question they answer the question, without actually answering it?

Now compare that to some of the things you’ve heard Donald Trump say, did he tiptoe around a lot of topics?
If you are chasing votes in an election, or if you are chasing sales in a business.. It pays to be polarising. But I don’t mean, be a jerk for no reason.

And being polarising doesn’t mean you have to be negative about everything.

If this is new to you, if you haven’t heard this concept before let me break it down for you in a simplified way.
Imagine you own a Hamburger shop, and you put a sign out the front that says “Pretty Good Hamburgers Here”.

If 100 people walked past your Hamburger shop, how many would read the sign and then walk in to buy a Hamburger? Some maybe? 5? 10?

Now imagine something else, imagine you still own the same Hamburger shop but tomorrow you prepare a new sign that says: “ Juicy, Fat, Delicious Burgers. 100% NOT VEGETARIAN”.

How would this second sign compare to the first sign?

Would it get more of a reaction? Would it sell more Hamburgers for every 100 people that walked past and read the sign? I think it would.

Would you also get the odd vegetarian coming into the shop to complain about the sign? Maybe.. Would that be good or bad for your Hamburger business?

If you said bad for business, I’d disagree. And of course, we’re only talking hypotheticals here. But was saying crazy and outrageous things bad for Donald Trump? No, he still won.

Yes a lot more people probably hated him, but those that agreed with him, loved him for saying it. And that’s the lesson about being polarising.

You don’t need 100% of the votes. You just need 51% of the votes to win. And the goal of course is to win, and not to get 100% of the votes, or the sales, or the orders, or whatever you’re target is. Because 100% isn’t possible.

A Hamburger shop is not going to have a loyal following amongst vegetarians, so why would they play both sides of the fence and try and keep EVERYONE happy? Why not just keep the meat lovers happy, if you owned a meat selling hamburger shop – aren’t they they the most important people for YOUR HAMBURGER BUSINESS?  The Souvenir shop across the road won’t be going out of their way to attract meat eaters, because it doesn’t make sense. But a Hamburger shop…?

The beauty of this is, a vegan cafe can use the exact same technique to attract it’s fellow vegetarians and vegans. A sign out the front of their cafe could read: “Delicious Meals Without Slaughtering Animals”. After reading this, how could someone in their target market not choose to eat there? If not today, sometime in the very near future a vegetarian who saw the sign would be LIKELY to come back and at least try it out. Because the cafe owners stand for what they stand for.

The vegan cafe owners have polarised the market. They’ve built an invisible one way road to being their customer. If you’re not on that road, you probably were never going to eat there anyway.

But if you’re a vegetarian, and you see that sign to that invisible one way road.. That’s the turn off you’ve been looking for all day! That sign will cry out to you louder than any other restaurant or cafe along your path.
Is this making sense?

To polarise just means to divide into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs.
The last thing you want is people to be so-so about your business or your product. It’s much better to have them make a decision. Meaning, are they with you? Or definitely NOT with you.

You can and should find out the answer to that question within your marketing. Don’t just put a sign up that says “pretty good hamburgers” , or “healthy cafe”. Put a sign up that says exactly what you’re all about and what type of customer you’re looking for.

And a sign out the front of the shop is just an example. I’m just trying to give you an example that you can relate to.

The sign out the front of the shop is the same thing as your Facebook Ad, or your emails. It’s the same thing as your website, and every communication your business has with the outside world.

Being polarising like this will give you another opportunity to make sure that your advertising dollars are not wasted on people who may or may not be your customers.

With Facebook Ads, as you may or may not know, to put it simply you get charged $1 – $2 every time someone clicks on your Ad.. so you’d want to make sure only people who are most likely going to be your customers click on that ad.

And to achieve this, you can try your ad to be more polarising.

Let’s call it the Donald Trump effect, or maybe… let’s not.

It’s nothing new. And Trump definitely did not invent it. He or someone else in his camp just knows it and used it in their campaign to their advantage.

Being polarising is spoken about, written about in every good marketing book or round table you get the chance to sit at.

If you look around the celebrity pool, you’ll see that some of the biggest names have polarised. I’ll list off a few names here and now but before I do, please remember that you don’t need to like any of these people. And when you hear these names you’re probably going to either have a love / or hate relationship with them.
And that’s exactly the point. That’s a big part of the reason they have created a strong following, and a strong anti-following.

I think the term anti-following is something I just invented, but what I mean is: when you have a large group of people who are against you so much, that they still tune into everything you say and still argue against your opinions amongst their own friends, on their own Facebook pages, in their own lunch rooms at their own offices, these people are also promoting you…because not everyone agrees with, or even likes the people who are trying to bring you down, or bad mouth you.

Have you ever heard someone you know DIDN’T like the new movie that you were considering watching this weekend. And when you heard that THEY didn’t like it, you thought to yourself.. Well, maybe that means i’ll like it!

Your anti-followers just add fuel to your message, and they can’t help it. They feel compelled to talk about you and even though it’s negative, not everyone receives it as negative. Half the people will agree with YOUR SIDE, and not with the angle they are telling the story from.

See how that works?

Now compare all this to someone who sits on the fence, and stays neutral all the time. Who is going to get more followers and create more of a buzz?

Ok, back to the few celebrities who do this.. Here they are:

• Anthony Mundine – Famous Australian boxer, if you don’t know who he is.
• Kyle Sandilands – The #1 Radio Host in Australia. Also known as the #1 Shock Jock because he polarisers listeners every single day. If he does it intentionally or not, doesn’t matter. The effect is still the same.

Now think about some singers and performers..

• Lady Gaga. Are her out there costumes and songs supporting gay relationships neutral? Or are they strong? They are one sided points of view of course.
• Kanye West. Does he say some crazy stuff that gets headlines? Does that help him sell records? Yes, because the people who agree with what he says, buy his records. And the people who hate him and tell the whole world they hate him… also help to sell his records because they are helping spread HIS message, which will ultimately be heard more people that agree with him, and like him.

There are a lot of different ways you can be polarising in your business. With your products, with your advertising, etc.

And like I said before, you don’t need to aim to be a jerk about everything. There are more ways to polarise your audience than just being rude or saying crazy stuff, JUST to get attention.

I’ll give you a softer version of being polarising in business.

I offer an Advanced Facebook Ads course, and it’s not cheap. That is a form of polarising in itself. But the reason it’s not cheap is because I only offer the course as part of a bigger deal, where the business owner who invests in the course also gets access to my private group where they can ask me questions directly, and I dedicate time to this group every day to help these people out.

Because I know just selling them the course by itself is not going to be the best help possible, they will likely have “but what if..?” questions. And “if this happens, what do I do then..?” – and there is only so many scenarios I or anyone can cover in a course.

So my polarisation here is yes I have a course on Facebook Ads, no it’s not cheap, because when you get it you’re also getting the OTHER half which I believe is really required for you to achieve good results with Facebook Ads. That second half is ongoing support from me directly, when you have 100 follow up questions over the next 2 months. And I only sell the course along with that access to my private, closed group.

This will polarise some people.

Some people will say they only want the course, and to sell it to them cheaper in that case. I say no. Because I know they are going to have in depth follow up questions, and for me to allocate the required time to help them costs time and money.

In reality I’m doing them a favour. So I’m not trying to polarise, but the setup of my facebook ads course is actually polarising by default.

Does that make sense?

It’s also going to attract the type of people I want to work with. These are business owners who have two and a half thousand dollars to invest in the course (that price may change in the future so don’t quote me on that).
The result of this polarisation will also mean I am unlikely to have people invest in the course who really deep down can’t afford it. Again, this is not on purpose, this is more of a convenient result of the course and package I chose to put together.

Does all that make sense? I hope so. If you’re hearing this thought about polaristion in marketing for the first time, I understand this may open a new door for you. So don’t worry about walking through that door right away, just stand there, lean forward, look through it and ask yourself over the next few days is there something to this polarisation thing?

I think you’ll start to see more and more examples of it from here on in.

Do you have your own example? Share it in the comments below.