As digital marketing consultant Shane Barker sees it, messages like this are integral to the Biden brand: “Some people [think], oh that’s cool—he seems to be very down to earth. He seems to care about families.”
But the beleaguered finances of many of those families have left the president open to the charge that “Bidenomics”—shorthand for an economic policy that includes heavy government spending—is to blame. Such perceptions threaten to undermine the empathy that Brand Biden depends on so much.
“He’s going to have to adjust carefully, showing empathy without undermining his competence economically,” said brand strategist and Fox News commentator Eric Schiffer. “That’s a difficult dance.”
Have Trump’s convictions changed his brand?
But Biden’s not alone on the dancefloor. Events of the last several years have complicated Trump’s efforts to maintain his political brand.
The multiple cases brought against the former president—alleging everything from election interference to mishandling classified documents—have driven him to the sort of unbridled public fury that’s at odds with his efforts to anchor his brand in confidence and control.
“As Trump rages, swing voters often see him as angry and more focused on revenge than the problems they are facing,” Margolis said. “For many, he has become exhausting.”
In that context, it’s easy to assume that Trump’s May 30th conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records would harm the Trump brand more than anything.
But observers say that it hasn’t—and probably won’t.
Everything bad that happens to Trump in the conventional world is like living an opposite day in [his] world.
—Ron Bonjean, Republican spokesman
That’s because the Trump brand seems possessed of an unprecedented power to reframe accusations—at least for his base—mysteriously transforming negatives into positives.
“His trial is likely going to pay off in dividends for him,” said veteran Republican spokesman Ron Bonjean, who most recently served as Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s communications strategist.
“Everything bad that happens to Trump in the conventional world is like living an opposite day in [his] world,” Bonjean continued. “Anything bad that would end a conventional politician’s career, Trump ends up benefiting from.”
“There’s very little that can be done to change his brand with his base,” said Kate deGruyter, senior director of centrist think tank Third Way. But, she added, “There are consistently 15% to 25% of the Republican electorate that has voted for candidates other than Donald Trump. Can he bring some of that crowd of anti-Trump folks back into the fold? The verdict makes that job harder.”
How politicians became brands in the first place
Of the experts who weighed in for this story, not one paused over the notion of a politician as a brand. But where did that idea originate? Is this yet another dubious gift of social media?
No. It’s been around since the dawn of television.
Beginning with Dwight Eisenhower’s election in 1952, “presidential candidates hired Madison Avenue admen to run their campaigns to sell candidates to the American public,” Torres-Spelliscy said. The Eisenhower campaign’s decision to buy 30-second ads on TV led to accusations by Democratic opponent Adali Stevenson that presidential candidates were being sold like Corn Flakes.
And cigarettes. Around this same time, the Tobacco Blending Co. of Louisville, KY, began producing packs of smokes featuring the faces of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. “The number of packs we sold was a better indication of how the election would turn out than the polls,” a company spokesman said at the time.
