Politics and Branding: Four Ways to Build Trust with Customers in the Trump Era

As more and more consumers hashtag #grabyourwallet and corporations are taking definitive political stands, the classic activist perception, "The political is the personal," feels hauntingly accurate in 2017. Though America feels more politically polarized than ever, it is also not a new development, historically speaking, or a new challenge for companies like yours.

Hollywood faced a similar challenge, as businesses today, when during the McCarthy era, actors, producers, and writers associated with "communist" ideas, or more often -- questioning the status quo -- were blacklisted. The comparison isn't entirely fair because businesses are not facing censorship from the government today. Rather, they are facing the fear of alienating significant portions of their customer base by engaging with controversial ideas. The similarity, however, is that corporations today, like Hollywood elites in the 50s, are key players in shaping the public sphere. And yet, their influence is mitigated by many different forces and players.

As brands like Dippin' Dots (also one of our clients) have recently experienced, every brand needs to be ready to respond - but what does that look like? How can brands safeguard their reputations, engage in dialogue, and reassure their customers that their values are sound?

1) You can't win them all.

This may seem like a bleak point to begin with, but realistic expectations are the bedrock of any successful enterprise. It's impossible to please everyone, and thankfully it's unnecessary. Before making any kind of public statement or taking any kind of a stand, it's important that companies do a combination of market research, shareholder surveys, and soul searching. They need to ask themselves: Who is our target demographic? Who are our biggest champions in the marketplace? Who supports us? Who are we trying to woo? And, the big one -- what are we about?

Once a company understands its past, present, and future audience, it can have a basic sense of the people and lifestyles it represents. And though this group may be diverse, there will undeniably be commonalities, even (and especially) if they're as ordinary as a love for talking on the phone or making pasta or spending time with family.

2) Favor proactive efforts over reactive ones.

There may be inevitable confrontations, or opportunities, depending on how you see it, in which a corporation is forced to take a side. When Uber shut off airport surge pricing while NYC taxi drivers protested President Trump's travel ban, a #DeleteUber campaign went viral. It didn't seem to matter what the company's intentions were, or its rationale. What mattered was that in a moment in which users were particularly sensitive to gestures of solidarity or opportunism, Uber's move to suspend surge pricing became the justification for a public attack on political miscalculation. Though miscalculation may be unavoidable, a company can create a buffer against such attacks through proactive campaigns that allow them to say what they stand for on their own terms.

No one expects corporations to save the world. After all, they're not superheroes. What people do expect, as from any powerful entity, is that there's some ethical dimension to their business practices and community engagement. A robust CSR program can accomplish that, as can choosing a particular cause, whether it is sustainable practices or non-violent communication, and weaving it in through the company culture in concrete ways.

3) Use humor, creativity, and beauty to offer lightness and catharsis in the midst of political heaviness.

When our social media agency helped Dippin' Dots respond to old rants excavated from Press Secretary Sean Spicer's Twitter account, we knew two things -- that we needed to respond, and we didn't want to make it a partisan issue. We helped draft an open letter from the CEO, offering the White House an old-fashioned ice cream social. By letting Dippin' Dots do what it does best -- spread joy and delicious ice cream -- we shifted the focus from antagonism and hostility to playfulness and generosity. In hindsight, it's clear that part of the campaign's popularity was due to the fact that it offered relief from the heaviness of the political uncertainty in a way that was neither avoidant nor confrontational.

4) Make the connection between the identity of the brand and the identity of the buyer.

Especially for Millennials, the connection between a purchase and a "vote" for what the brand stands for are undeniably linked. They may not entirely outweigh considerations of product quality, customer service, or cost, but in a world of almost endless options, a brand's values and advocacies are a critical differentiator. And brands that insist on being "Switzerland" or are too timid to respond to the real world concerns, hopes, and struggles of its customer base will either be deemed irrelevant or assigned views they didn't fully choose.

As originally posted on Inc.

Shama Hyder is Founder & CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, a best-selling author and an internationally renowned keynote speaker. Her most recent book is Momentum (May 2016).