Why Trump is Better than Putin with Making Marketing Messages Stick
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Marketing your message as a politician is key. This is the reason why Donald Trump was able to get 74 million people to vote for him. Trump knows his message and he's been refining it through every rally. Whether you like it or not, Trump is better at making messages stick than Putin. Join Bill Stierle as he and Tom talk about brand messaging in politics. They go through the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how Putin's narrative differs from Trump's. Learn how Trump crafts his messaging and how to stand up to it.
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Why Trump is Better than Putin with Making Marketing Messages Stick
Bill, there is an awful lot going on in the world, especially with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From a communications perspective, it's very interesting to see the narrative that is being fed to the Russian people on Russian state TV as different from what the rest of the world is seeing. There's a very stark difference between the two. Russian state TV has been ordered they can't call it a war. Journalists are limited in how they can refer to it. They have to call it this special military action unless the state approves of some other narratives.
There's a big difference between most of the rest of the world, certainly the United States, with the freedom of the press. There was this interesting moment that we saw on Russian state TV live broadcast. A worker at that station was standing up and holding a sign in protest saying, "Stop the war. Don't believe the propaganda. The state is lying." I'm paraphrasing but that's what was said. That woman has been arrested but she posted a video about it before doing this protest. This was planned. It's an interesting departure point to talk about communication in this context.
Tom, it's a great example of how we create an impact in communication. Here's a protestor that brings up a sign and is able to get her message out to people that are not getting one side of a message. In America, we get two sides of a message or a counter side to the message. What winds up happening is it's the buyer beware. It's okay for half-truths, lies, partial truths, and perspective truths to be sold so the buyer needs to be aware that that's what it is.
In a controlled media setting, there's one form of truth. You're not allowing the listeners' ears to move too far away from the truth that you're putting in front of them. You're keeping the fence around the cattle, sheep, goats, or whatever animal you want to put in there. All you've got to do is corral those people's ears by whatever barking dog you want to put in there. There are different kinds of dogs, scare tactics, prods, electric shocks, or 3 to 15-year prison sentences for speaking up. Those are all containment items getting canceled as containing things.
You better not say something a little bit controversial because it's going to affect your income. Ask Colin Kaepernick about this one. If you say something, you're trying to figure out what's the best way to use your ability to speak up as an American and be an advocate for this thing regarding police violence. That's the challenge we have in an open society versus Russia in a closed society. Both of them are controlling the limbic brain differently.
It's a weird way to say it. We have this elephant at the back of our brains. We have a little man at the top that's a writer. The messages are coming in. The writer gets confused and the elephant sits down into what they already believe, or the writer or the elephant gets scared about whatever the latest barking dog is. The elephants cannot herd together to do a stampede because you're picking different energies off one at a time. A little bit of what we have as a problem in communication is whatever the latest barking dog is. How long is that barking dog going to last? It's tough.
It is very troubling. In Russia, it's reported that the internet has been clamped down. There has been this order released to all the news outlets about how they can and cannot talk about what's happening in Ukraine. A lot of the social media platforms like Instagram have been shut down in Russia. The lines of communication have been shut off, most of the normal ones.
What we're hearing is that aside from somebody who has access like an employee of Russian state TV getting up and doing something in a live broadcast that no one can stop her from doing for a moment, for 10 or 15 seconds, before somebody drags her off the set. The only other way that we have been hearing or what has been reported as messages that are getting through is through direct text messages from people outside Russia to people inside Russia letting them know what's happening out here, but that's not a widely broadcast means of communication.
It's very difficult to get that to spread out. How big is your text list? 100, 200, 1,000 or 3,000 people receive your text. I have a wonderful marketer. She keeps texting me about the latest program that she does. I know that I'm 1 of 10,000 people at least because that's the focus that she got herself into early on. With all that said, it's the activation of bias to see what we already believe to be true. I'm only seeing what I already believe to be true.
Over the years, Vladimir Putin has been doing a brilliant job of keeping his message, "Europe wants this. The enemies are in the West. Here's a story that proves that point of view. Here's another story that proves that point of view." In bias, there's not much nuance. There's like, "I have a clear enemy over there and a clear hero on my side. I'm in the right because the West is going to attack us."
Meanwhile, the West is doing its best to live by treaties. I'm very clear about when America has gone across those lines too, and has made their set of mistakes and things, and has paid different kinds of consequences that Russia's style is paying for. That is a part of the bias and the experience that I have, that you have, and that the United States has about right, wrong, good and bad.
We struggle with our set of biases. What's the casualty here? The casualty is things like open-mindedness, flexibility, creativity, innovation and change. Those are all the casualties of a Vladimir Putin-style narrative. Donald Trump is better than Vladimir Putin at this because he's using messaging and those kinds of barking dogs to control his thinkers into believing things that aren't fully true. By doing that and by staying at that message that he perceives as a winning formula for him or his Republican Party, they have to be fed that bias.
Over the years, they have been funneling themselves for their objectives. The only problem is their objectives are against some very primary values called cooperation, collaboration, and the ability to make a good business deal and both sides win. They are not in that space. One way to think about it is that Donald Trump is on one side of this narrative and Vladimir Putin is on the other side. They're both trying to win the messaging war.
That's an interesting thought. Donald Trump at one point called Vladimir Putin a genius and got a lot of attention for that. I would argue that Donald Trump is much more brilliant and skilled at marketing and communication in getting his message out and his sheep to follow him than Vladimir Putin is. Vladimir Putin has certain controls and mechanisms that Donald Trump doesn't have in America. Vladimir Putin has the ability to pull these levers of communication and require state media to report the story he wants them to, to express the bias, and to certainly prevent any counter messages from being communicated officially.
Officially, the control person has to work within certain limitations. A freedom person like Donald Trump has to work within situations and continue to step across the line to see how far they can get a hold of as Donald Trump does. Vladimir Putin is doing the same thing. He's stepping across the line to see how far he can go. He's 20 miles from the Polish border.
All he needed to do is get one of his planes and say, "I was bombing this thing. Your guys came across to get me." It’s not, "My guys did this." Whatever happens on the border with Poland is that incursion, "What are you going to do? Now what?" Bill Maher said one time, "Make me. I'm a liar. Make me have integrity, ethics, morals and values. I'm going to do whatever I want and see it." The guardrails on good behavior and the adult behavior at those levels are not as strong as they used to be years ago.
Vladimir Putin has very few guardrails that are going to impact him. Certainly, the world community is sanctioning him and speaking out against him, but he keeps all that noise outside of his borders at least to a great extent. If at least five million people or more don't get out and protest in the streets against Vladimir Putin in Moscow or in multiple cities around the country, Vladimir Putin is not going to care and be impacted by the noise outside his borders. That's one of the big differences. To me, that's what says that Donald Trump is a much more effective and brilliant marketer than Vladimir Putin because he was able to get 74 million people to vote for him. He doesn't have any of those powers to limit any opposition speech in the United States.
There's the brand damage that happens with Democrats that they have been launching for years, "They're communists. They're socialists," or whatever negative bias messaging on Democrats that you want to put on there. The Democrats, not all of them, get stuck here. They're fighting the brand message instead of establishing their message of, "This is the kind of person I am."
"There's a bunch of other people that are Democrats that might be voting for me that might have other beliefs about this, but as my style of democracy or as a Democrat, this is what I'm fighting for. I'm fighting for these kinds of things, not to ignore the conservative narrative but to include the conservative narrative. Is this thing going to have values to it?"
The word regulation should be something that the Republicans should own. What I mean by that is that it's all about making sure that the money is spent well, that people are protected, and that there's a good amount of protection that goes with your workers, your business and the environment. That's all conservative values. What does that do on the Democrat side? The Republicans go, "It's business. There are too many regulations and taxes."
It's like, "What's going on here?" It's protection and conservative values to protect people. I'm interested in working with people. You can honor that one businessperson that does that or you can honor the people that are voting for you to serve them. It's very tough to see that Donald Trump does have more skill and is better than Vladimir Putin at marketing messages that stick.
These marketing messages stick because he tests them more often. That's what the rallies are for. It's to test marketing messages. His rambling is all about testing to see where he can get the latest chatter. I was reading an article. It's like, "He's rambling. He said this thing." I'm going, "He's not rambling. He's testing.” He's finding out which phrase and waiting for his marketing brain to come up.
That's why he said, "What he has done is brilliant." It’s not, "Vladimir Putin is brilliant.” It’s, “What Vladimir Putin did was brilliant."
He created a limited message that said, "We are saving these Russians that are under attack on the East side of the country because the Ukrainians are bad to these people." They're Russian speakers. This is all about a limited thing. Vladimir Putin is trying to hold that message in because he doesn't want the word war to go on. It's a special military.
It's interesting that Vladimir Putin knows that if he called it a war and if he were unapologetically brutal in saying, "We are Russia. Ukraine should be a part of Russia. We're going in to take it back," his own people would not be happy with that. They would potentially rise up against him. There may be some guardrails somewhere out there among the people. That's why he's using the powers that he has to control the narrative and make sure that it does not come back and bite him in the ass.
There are many in our government in the United States that have criticized President Donald Trump for being too cozy with Vladimir Putin, for giving him too much praise, calling him a genius, and siding with him against our intelligence agencies in all this. That happened through his administration. Even more traditional Republicans who sometimes Donald Trump might call RINOs are baffled at how Donald Trump is portraying that he's cozying up to Vladimir Putin, praising him, and all this stuff.
It occurred to me, wouldn't it be quite interesting to see a savvy US journalist who wants to interview Donald Trump and pitch him the idea of talking about Vladimir Putin and bringing out his message about Vladimir Putin and what he thinks about him? You could feed into Donald Trump's need for acknowledgment, self-worth, and all this by asking him questions.
Take him down the road of, "You're a much more brilliant marketer than Vladimir Putin. Here's why." Have that be completely truthful but you would feed into Donald Trump's ego. He would be loving you and he would be wanting to talk more about it. You could lead him down a path pretty easily into being transparent about how he uses communication to manipulate the sheep and get them to follow him, corral them, and get them to walk out a plank of admitting what he does.
It might sound like this from communication because our show has got to land on some solution about how to get out of this. The way to take care of a carnival barker or somebody that's selling, marketing, and promoting all the time is to repeat back what the carnival barker is saying and acknowledge what the carnival barker is saying as true.
It would sound like, "Donald Trump, it's amazing how skillful you are at marketing messages and how much you're better than Vladimir Putin because you're doing it in a free society whereas his only strategy is doing it in a controlled society where he has to keep his messages. I admire that about you. It is something that I see that you're skilled about."
Donald Trump is going to speak. He will go, "That's one of the things that happen. You've got to be able to connect to the people." He's going to ramble and look for a sentence that's going to meet his need for respect and recognition. That's what he does to puff himself up as the decision-maker. You go back and feed him another spoon of food, "I respect the way you've run your campaign that all of these millions of people voted for you. Isn't what you've done magical? You are such a great messenger."
He says, "My message connects, resonates with the people, and gets people in. These are all the people that believe that. Look at that. There are so many people. Joe Biden has hardly any people at his rallies." It's because he didn't need to have people in his rallies. Let's stay after the solution. The solution then is, "Could you share with us some of the ways that you're a better messenger than Vladimir Putin?"
He says, "The thing I do and look at is this. People say, admire, and recognize that about me." All of a sudden, he's on the plank of self-recognition and acknowledgment ahead of the truth. It's self-identity ahead of the truth. All of a sudden, he is the frontman of his own circus. That's the thing that people get. He's running a circus. Look at all the people he had in his cabinet. There was a circus over there. All these crazy people are the circus. It's all the misfits.
You could get Donald Trump to peel back his own curtain behind what he does. It would be a way to reveal the truth of how Donald Trump operates and communicates. It might get a lot of people to open their eyes to realize they have been the rats being led out of the town by the Pied Piper.
It's very hard for the follower to be weaned off of that level of dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin, and the up and down that he keeps them on because there's the up of enraged, and then the bitterness and the exasperation about the other side, "I feel better because at least this guy speaks a message that's familiar to my beliefs, biases and fallacies about what he's going to do for me."
That's regrettably where it sits. It's hard to see where the Republican Party is going to go because they don't have another messenger that's strong. Nikki Haley is not strong. Ted Cruz is not strong. He's a prosecutor. Every time I listened to him do a speech, I'm going, "He's an attorney. He's prosecuting and trying to make and score points to get the other person to say something. That person is on the stand. He's using his attorney skills and beating up the witness."
That's what he's doing. He's beating up the witness. Who's the jury? That's the voters. You're interested in getting the voters to vote for you by beating up the witness. That's why Donald Trump can get elected ahead of Ted Cruz because Donald Trump is the marketer guy. He's not the attorney guy. It's weird. They're politicians but they're not statesmen.
A statesman is somebody that says what you need to do to get elected and then serve the people. That's a statesman. A politician says what you need to do and then says more to move up the chain even if you're stepping over and running over your constituents. It's like, "Who are those people? I just need to get them to vote for me next time around so I don't get voted out." That's the politician through and through.
It will be interesting. As the war goes on and as we figure out how to stick the landing here, we've got to get our message to break the spell or curse of this messaging. It's one of the things that we're finding as a society hard to do. We're doing that. We can talk more about that as the war goes on because there's plenty of messaging that's taking place.
It's going to be very interesting. There's some interesting messaging going on too from Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. That's another thing that might be interesting to talk about in the future. He's being held as quite a great example of a leader and what leadership looks like. It's all because of his communication in the midst of this war.
He has been measured and adult-like, but adult-like is when you don't like your parents when they give you honest messages, "You have to pay for your bills, grow up, and do the dishes." You don't want to listen to the parent but he's the parent in this one.
He may be. Bill, thanks so much. I appreciate the discussion. It's very thought-provoking.
Thanks, everybody.
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