How Presidential Elections Shape Customer Strategy

Customers now have different views of the future, affecting what they buy.

Over the past ninety days, customer attitudes toward your business have changed. Some are more willing to buy, and others aren’t. This shift in attitude is a new source of growth for 2025, which only requires thinking about markets and customers as having two distinct segments: liberal and conservative.

According to new research from the University of Michigan, your conservative customers are now more optimistic about the future with stronger consumer sentiment, a mindset that will fuel greater spending in 2025. Likewise, your liberal customers are more pessimistic, potentially fueling moderation in spending. This follows a clear pattern of consumer sentiment for both groups, driven by who runs the country.

So, how do you apply this to your business?

The first step is understanding the breakdown between liberal and conservative segments in your customer database. Depending on your solution for storing customer data, you may be able to run a simple report to get the answer.

If running a report is impossible, you can look for geographic skews in your customer database using urbanicity. If your customers live in more densely populated areas, they are most likely more liberal. Suburban customers will be mixed, while exurban and rural customers will likely be conservative. You can also look at skews by state to get an idea of which group skews bigger for your products.

In reviewing customer reports showing the breakdown between liberals and conservatives, I have yet to see one that was evenly split. One group is always larger than the other, and sometimes, this is a surprise, revealing a business opportunity.

Once you understand the balance between conservative and liberal customers, you can determine which group holds more potential. You can even segment your marketing and communications efforts to leverage this big shift in customer outlook. Even if your dominant segment is liberal customers, you can still target the conservative market to determine if it’s a better segment in 2025.

Marketing communications are never “neutral”—they tend to align with one group more than the other. Putting the question on the table and examining the data can help you make decisions and drive growth this year.

Here are three examples of how you can drive growth in 2025 with this change in your market.

Test Into The Rising Tide

It’s rare in business to identify a new market “tailwind” or “rising tide” where selling products becomes easier. That’s now the case for conservative customers in 2025 if you create an intentional strategy to target them. The good news is that simple geography provides an efficient method for reaching this segment, which is available as a targeting methodology with just about any marketing medium.

You can evaluate performance differences between the two groups, depending on the media channels you use. Keep in mind that research also shows that conservative customers can be a bit harder to acquire because they don’t switch brands and try new products as much as liberal customers. So, conservative customer acquisition costs tend to be higher. But once you have them, they will stick with your business longer, showing higher lifetime value than liberal customers. It requires balancing acquisition cost (liberal customers tend to cost less to acquire) vs. lifetime value (conservative customers tend to be worth more).

With digital media - social platforms, Google, or CTV - you can create distinct campaigns to make performance measures easy. You can also test with the media you own, such as email lists, to see what potential this type of segmentation holds for you. You will see differences if you align the content with each of the two groups, which is the next step.

The Right Values Unlock Performance

Aligning your communications more tightly with both groups will improve marketing performance regardless of the year. In 2025, this will be especially important with conservative customers to take advantage of the rising tide of sentiment.

This means considering each group's distinct values when making a purchase decision. Both are huge markets with enormous opportunities, with the national market split down the middle. If liberal and conservative customers each represented a country, they would tie for the tenth largest in the world. Moreover, they both have equal spending power (liberal customers have higher incomes, but conservative customers have significantly lower costs of living).

You can find many distinctions between value sets for liberal and conservative customers in previous issues of this newsletter or the book Red and Blue Customers. But here are some foundational themes:

Conservative customers gravitate to brands and products that tend to be domestic, promote reliability and stability, offer certainty about the future, and have design cues that tend to be hierarchical and well-ordered. Liberal customers gravitate to brands and products from outside the U.S., promote innovation, express social status, and have design cues that are more abstract, unified, and “modern.”

In our research at Lifemind, we found that conservative customers are about twice as likely to be influenced by a business person, someone in the military, or an NFL quarterback than an NBA player, actor, or singer. The reverse is true for liberal customers. So, who you choose to speak for your brand and products can greatly influence which segment will respond.

Is It Innovation That Disrupts Or Ingenuity?

How you frame a new product affects its appeal to each of the two groups. Liberal customers are more willing to experiment with new, untested brands and products that promise change, while conservative customers aren’t. So what does this mean for new innovative products if liberal consumer sentiment declines?

The answer lies in how you present a new product as either an innovative disruption or an ingenious solution. While innovation and disruption may not play well with conservative customers, the idea of ingenuity will. In our research at Lifemind, we identified a set of shared values that both groups appreciate. Ingenuity is one of them, as in “good old American ingenuity.” So when you go to market with a new product, you want to frame it as a really smart solution to a problem (ingenuity) vs. something that disrupts or forces a change of habit.

The Biggest Barrier May Be Internal Resistance

Our research at Lifemind, in partnership with OpenSecrets.org, reveals that 67% of marketing professionals are liberal, while 68% of sales professionals are conservative. When liberal managers predominantly staff a marketing department, it can feel uncomfortable to bend communications to fit a more conservative audience. Likewise, the same holds for conservative salespeople selling to a liberal audience.

The solution is to make your marketing decisions based on the data you have about your customers and your market. Now you’re adding a new dimension: worldview as liberal or conservative. You will always have both. It’s just a matter of which group is larger and represents a growth opportunity.

The solution is to also consider the values of each group - not the politics. There’s nothing controversial about marketing a product as reliable and stable to a conservative customer as it would be marketing a product as having breakthrough innovation to a liberal customer.

The opportunity is in front of you. Not everyone will approach their customers and markets in this manner in 2025. However, those who do will discover lower acquisition costs and higher customer value at a time when finding new, effective growth levers may be difficult. It all starts with some simple tests.