The Death of "Total Market"

As I recover from the shock of last nights election results, I sit here thinking about what this means for our country and the global community.

In every election cycle roughly half of the country feels a sense of loss and maybe even anger, but I have never sensed so much fear as I do now.

That fear stems for the fact that there has never been a candidate that inspires as much division as Donald Trump. My hope is that a lot of what drove that division was simply a reality TV style shock marketing strategy and that a different Trump, a more measured Trump, runs our country for the next four years. His acceptance speech was a good first step, at least in my view.

The division runs deep and wide across gender, age, income, education and ethnicity with this last factor cutting the clearest divide. White voters favored trump, while non-white voters overwhelmingly favored Clinton, see data below from CNN’s exit polls.

Having the responsibility of running an independent media company focused on the global millennial multicultural consumer, I didn’t sleep very well. We create content for and reach hundreds of millions of people globally, tens of millions in the US, and if we polled them I’m pretty confident Hillary would win easily. So what does this mean?

The Death of "Total Market"

For one thing, in my eyes, this confirms what I had already suspected: the death of the Total Market approach that many in marketing have been practicing. How are we as a content organization expected to create content that appeals to a total market that is as divided as this? How is a marketer expected to craft a brand message that appeals to all?

For some global warming is a hoax, gender-equality is BS, and a multi-cultural society living together peacefully is anathema, for others it is everyday reality.

More than ever, we need to recognize that there are very diverse consumer segments in our country, and that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to truly connecting and engaging with the so-called “Total Market.”

No matter how you cast your vote, or whether your candidate won or not, the message last night was clear. There is no one single market, no one “total market”.  Language-preferences may shift and acculturation progress, but the distinctions between market segments, and what is important to those markets, are as great as ever.

As a content creator, marketer and leader, it is now more important than ever to talk to every segment, in a way that is personal and resonates with them and their own realities.