Three Strategies for Thinking About Customers in an Election Year
You can manage customer and market risk while the country goes a bit berserk.
2024 is another season for your business. However, unlike Christmas, Mother’s Day, or back-to-school, it comes every four years. It’s not necessarily an opportunity to increase sales—it’s an opportunity to avoid a significant market dip that strikes on a moment’s notice, causing teams to scramble.
National elections tap into a layer of complexity in your market that becomes more prominent during an election year. It’s the complexity of how customer values shape market worldviews as liberal or conservative. It’s a year when cable news, social media, and politicians want to continuously remind your customers about what they value, which influences how they see the world and what they believe to be true when thinking about their family, community, region, and country. It also influences what they buy.
Putting It On the Table
Liberal and conservative values are always present in your markets and customers, but this year will bring some to the surface more than others. They will shape how they view your business, brand, products, and communications. Discussing these differences can feel risky for many companies because it can feel like opening a can of worms. Even well-known research companies worry about calling out what is in plain sight about the clear differences in how the two groups shop and buy.
For example, YouGov just released a report showing that liberals and conservative customers have different preferences for beer, soft drinks, food, fashion, technology, media, cars, and retail stores—to name just a few. YouGov referred to the two groups as “urban” and “rural,” which is code for liberal and conservative. They likely debated what to call the two groups and settled on “urban” and “rural” because it felt “safe.”
The problem is that when you gloss over the distinctions between the two groups, you don’t learn much - you can’t understand what drives the differences affecting thought styles, evaluation criteria, and purchase behavior. What’s more, when you take a few minutes to learn about both groups from a values perspective, you remove some mystery about “the other side,” whichever side that is, leading to greater human understanding.
Developing a proactive strategy for avoiding problems this year means putting the distinctions between the groups on the table and knowing them better - so you can manage how your business navigates a tricky year vs. having backlash happen to you. You want to manage this rather than have it manage you.
Here are three strategies you can use to adapt to your situation. The result will be greater confidence in achieving your goals this year with less worry about “what customers might think” when evaluating a new marketing campaign or product.
1. Retreat to Shared Values
Liberal and conservative customers have distinct values and shared American values. You can decide to focus on projecting shared values as a priority for the balance of the year and into 2025 to stay out of the fray completely. It seems like an obvious choice, but it may cause a significant change to how a business communicates with its markets, which for larger companies is no small feat.
Shared values are derived from our research into how the rest of the world perceives Americans. We studied dozens of articles and papers written mostly by multinational businesses relocating employees and academic institutions preparing international students for American culture. There is a strong consensus when the world discusses what Americans generally value.
Here are some of the values you can tap into to appeal to both groups:
Ingenuity. As in “good old American ingenuity.” You can apply this value to anything new or different your business brings to the market. It’s distinct from innovation, which appeals more to liberal customers because it’s associated with continuous change. Ingenuity - or the perception of something as “ingenious”- doesn’t emphasize change. Ingenuity emphasizes solving a problem through some type of engineering. Innovation can disrupt, while ingenuity makes things better.
Directness. Americans are known worldwide for not beating around the bush, for better or worse. Your business can adopt a direct, straight-ahead, transparent communication style with your customers to appeal to both groups. This means not trying to be too clever or employing metaphors to communicate benefits. You look your customers and markets in the eyes and talk to them in simple, direct terms.
Friendliness & Informality. Americans may be direct, but they are also known outside the U.S. as quite friendly. Americans often smile when they walk down the street and say hello to complete strangers. It’s one way people in other countries spot an American in their country.
Your business can shape its interactions with customers and the market with friendliness. You just have to avoid having too much self-expression, which research demonstrates is more of a liberal customer value. You want friendliness without exuberance or a desire to stand out. Research also shows that your customers can - with a high degree of accuracy - identify who is liberal or conservative by looking at facial expressions, which may be present throughout your communications. Liberal customers will show greater emotional reactions than conservative customers.
Shared values are safe but may not drive the growth you need as they represent neutrality vs. proactive engagement with the two groups. This leads us to the following two strategies.
2. Employ Dual Moderation
Polarization can be defined as a group of people moving to opposite extremes or one that simply divides into two. Either way, you have a binary relationship between your customers and your market. The good news is that a strong majority of your customers and your market are moderate - as liberals or conservatives. Depending on your preferred data source, moderate liberals and moderate conservatives comprise 65-85% of the adult American population.
Sure, there are a lot of political “Independents,” and the group is growing, but research shows that this group is split between liberal and conservative with a slight tilt toward liberal. This group consistently acts one way or the other when it comes to behavior as liberal or conservative - they generally don’t switch sides. This is proven in research detailed in the book Independent Politics, which points out that one big reason people declare themselves politically independent is that they are too embarrassed to be labeled as a Democrat or Republican. In his work at 538.com, Nate Silver has also researched this group's voting behavior and found remarkable consistency in how this group votes, depending on whether they are liberal or conservative.
Morning Consult recently issued a study measuring the “far left” and the “far right” across many countries worldwide. In the United States, the two groups add up to just 18% (10% for the far right and 8% for the far left). It’s not a perfect measure for your market, but it indicates that most of those you are likely selling to are moderate. Of course, it only takes a few voices from the more polarized customers to influence others, but this can be avoided.
This strategy calls for invoking values from both sides—in moderation—to give everyone something to relate to. By utilizing this strategy, you can potentially engage better with both markets than using shared values while communicating that your business is for both sides. It can sound like a delicate balancing act, but it just takes a proactive effort to remove judgment and measure the balance.
Values for both groups are described in detail in many past issues of this newsletter, and you can scan the headlines to identify them, each with links to the research. Here are a couple of examples of how you can “pair” sets of values when thinking about products, your brand, and communications:
Innovation and Stability. Liberal customers are predisposed to trying new products, while conservative customers are predisposed to maintain what they have - until a new product becomes proven. Your business can invoke innovation but mix the idea with how innovation provides for stability vs. disruption.
Exploration and Familiarity. This is similar to the first pair. Far-flung exploration will appeal more to liberal customers, while familiarity will appeal more to conservative customers. You can blend the two by thinking about how you can explore the familiar rather than venture into something wildly unknown. Or you can explore something with a clear frame of reference.
Social Status and Hierarchical Status. Social status is about setting a customer apart from a crowd through distinction, which appeals more to liberal customers. Hollywood celebrities, most influencers, and experts are perceived to have social status among liberal customers. Hierarchical status for conservative customers is not necessarily about invoking greater superiority. It’s more about preserving perceived status relative to others. You can mix both of these ideas - but you want to be very careful about having Hollywood celebrity spokespeople. You’d be surprised just how big an adverse reaction you can create among conservative customers.
What’s important with this strategy is to have an intentional mix, which yields a moderate result for your business, brand, products, and communications. Want to push it a little further? That’s the following strategy.
3. Amplify One Segment in Non-Polarizing Manner
This strategy is only for those who know they have a dominant segment in their customer database and market as liberal or conservative. Measuring this is pretty straightforward - many database software programs can report on it, or you can look at the skews of your customers as urban vs. rural.
Few businesses evaluate their customer skew despite how easy it can be. The marketers at Bud Light clearly did not know their customers skewed quite strongly conservative before they lost so much market share. Target seems unaware of projecting a more liberal brand vision on a retail footprint that skews slightly conservative. And the marketers at McDonald’s don’t seem to be aware of the conservative skew of their franchise owners. All three have experienced backlash from the conservative side of the market.
A strong skew toward one group would be having a customer base of two-thirds or more liberal or conservative. If that is your measure, emphasizing one group over the other has lower risk—even during an election year. Ikea can project a quite progressive image because a strong majority of its retail footprint is near urban liberal centers. What’s critical is to steer clear of politics of any kind and avoid clear signals that you are taking sides in the election. Avoid taking a stance on divisive issues, backing a particular candidate, or making company donations.
For some businesses, these guidelines may not be acceptable. They may want to make their values crystal clear as liberal or conservative. That’s fine as long as you understand the risks with your customers and know how your customer base skews. Without measures, the risks escalate.
According to research on how the two groups form trust, the risks with each group are different. For liberal customers, trust accelerates when like-minded values exist, but trust is neutral if conservative values are present. For conservative customers, trust does not accelerate with the presence of conservative values, but the presence of liberal values decreases trust. So, there is only an upside with more liberal customers, while there is only a downside with conservative customers. Said another way, the risk is greater with conservative customers.
However you decide to approach this year, I’d urge you to take a look at who is buying from you today to determine which group is bigger. Also, see what research exists that may tell you the worldview skew of your market. From there, you can employ one of the three strategies or develop one that is more suitable for your organization. The objective is to make 2024 a great year for you - and avoid issues along the way.