Editor’s note: Dan Hill is the founder and president of facial coding firm Sensory Logic, Minneapolis.
Who will win the White House, let alone the Republican nomination, is still up in the air. It is clear that this is the year of anti-establishment, insurgent candidacies. In that respect, it reminds me of my work for the PRI party during Mexico’s 2012 presidential election. By watching the faces of 100 voters assembled for that election’s first debate at a research site in Mexico City, I concluded that the socialist candidate, Manuel Lopez Obrador, would surge and that the incumbent PAN party candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota, was flat and not a worthy subject of attacks.
When I delivered the verdict on the emotional dynamics of the race to the PRI party elders in a 4 a.m. – yes, 4 a.m. – debriefing the morning after the debate, they insisted I was “dead wrong,” as I didn’t know the country’s history, issues and didn’t even speak Spanish. But I did know facial coding, having been the person who brought the tool into market research 17 years ago. As it turned out, Obrador surged 8 percent from the pre-debate polls to the final election day tally, while the PAN party candidate dropped 1 percent, leaving the PRI candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto, holding on with a margin that dropped from 21 percent to merely 6 percent. Emotional resonance mattered and Obrador had it.
There are plenty of voter results during this U.S. election season that should give pause to large, traditional companies that still depend on the principles of persuasive marketing backed by conventional market research practices. While I haven’t been studying voters’ faces this election cycle, I have delivered commentary on the candidates for CNN, Reuters and Fast Company, often based on debate performances. Here’s a distillation of what I’ve observed, starting with (as he would say) the huge, disruptive phenomenon of Donald Trump.
In Trump we have a candidacy clearly more emotive than rational in nature. His, “Make America great again” slogan promises more than any of Nike’s implicit messages to individual athletes, as its premise is to make the entire country a competitive winner – specifically those who feel like they’re losing. What does The Donald show? He eschews the traditional, big grin that had the media (but not the voters) so ginned up about Marco Rubio’s chances. Happiness is out and disgust is in. Trump displays an adverse emotion. His signature expression foregrounds disgust, with an O-shaped mouth, flared upper lip and dropped lower lip – it is as if he is trying to protect himself from a national situation turned rancid. Never mind that opponents argue that Trump is the one causing the toxicity. Trump’s supporters find him to be authentic and on target in his statements on how much the country is ailing.
Many Republican candidates were left grasping for votes, including Jeb Bush, who was going by the rule book, offering Traditional Marketing Principles 101. Bush was selling policy – ideas. But even his money could not offset the reality that emotional points matter more than mere talking points. As with other consumers, the easiest way to get voters is to sell them on themselves: their fears, hopes and emotions. Bush’s campaign platforms made a lot of sense but didn’t provide intuitive, processing fluency. Voters are like consumers – they don’t typically think a lot about what they buy. Feelings are quicker, easier and drive behavior to a much heavier extent than the often overly-rational approach of traditional marketing or market research, with its plethora of, “What are you really thinking?” questions as opposed to gut-level verdicts. When will marketers and researchers heed the words of that famous British philosopher, Mick Jagger? “More and more of this useless information, supposed to fire my imagination. I can’t get (no) satisfaction.”
As for the campaigns of Trump’s two remaining, pre-convention opponents, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, they’re also insurgents and the triumph of contrarian personality over policy. Cruz’s slogan is a play on his first name: TRUSTED. Emotions in their most immediate form are quick, ephemeral responses that set into motion deeper, long-term preferences. That’s the tip of the triangle. The two corners of the triangle’s base are the emotionally-oriented factors of personality and values. Emotions characterize us and help form our values as voters and consumers. Neither Cruz nor Kasich are as adept in leveraging the immediacy Trump uses to gain media attention. But their supporters believe they are more substantial. This is rooted in Cruz’s case by his fundamentalist, constitutional perspective and in Kasich’s case by being a warm-hearted, jobs-and-budgets pragmatist.
Trust and consistency are the cards Cruz and Kasich are playing as opposed to Trump’s “let’s-make-the-best-deal” expediency. As to their faces, Cruz shows a kind of unctuous sadness – inner eyebrows raised and narrowed, along with a pinched smile. It’s enough to take me back in time to lazy childhood summer afternoons when I watched Mr. Haney on Green Acres. As for Kasich, he’s got an odd twitch and what I’ve come to call his barbed-wire smile, where tightened lips and a downward curl of his mouth on the lower right side prove more prominent than his earnest attempts at happiness. The guy can’t relax to save his life. Meanwhile, Kasich has no notable campaign slogan. He often sounds more like he’s running for another term as governor of Ohio. His debate-stage answers are replete with information, and his message of hope has the barbed-wired smile to blunt its effectiveness. He’s at risk of being more on-message than on-emotion at times, despite his quirky authenticity.
Their counterparts, the remaining Democratic candidates, are also problematic. First we have the amazingly angry, prophet-wandering-the-desert Bernie Sanders. His official campaign slogan is, “A future to believe in” (a candidate-free, aspirational come-on equal to Trump’s in its own way). And alongside it, “Feel the Bern” could serve as the campaign’s de facto slogan. Sanders is by far the angriest candidate in a year with a lot of hot rhetoric. Note how often his lips press together, even to the point of a bulge forming below the middle of his lower lip. Unless the private e-mail service issue leads to filed charges against Hillary Clinton, Sanders is almost certain to lose to her (as of the moment I’m writing this article). But Sanders’ quality is impassioned conviction, not calculation, and that has carried him longer than anyone would have imagined in terms of votes and money secured. Sanders has hit repeatedly on Wall Street greed, health care costs and college student debt, aligning himself closely to voters. He is selling them on themselves, their fears and hopes, rather than the old model of marketing persuasion that is more product/candidate-centric.
And then there is one female candidate many odds-makers see as most likely to win the White House: Clinton. If Trump embodies disgust, Cruz sadness, Kasich wounded hope and Sanders anger, where does that leave Clinton?
Certainly, anger along with anxious surprise comes across in Clinton’s eyes-wide-open, alert-to-danger expression. In that way, she embodies fortitude. But it’s not that bug-eye look that risks being her signature expression. That would be contempt – the smirks she is prone to exhibiting in response to a question. Cruz may or may not deserve the trust he emphasizes but trustworthiness is certainly the Achilles’ heel of the Clinton campaign. Close behind that liability is whether Clinton is aligned to voters’ concerns and truly cares about people like them – giving Sanders some political oxygen as demonstrated by her more traditional, candidate-centric candidacy and slogan, “Hillary for America.” She’s the most qualified and her supporters argue that she is the rational choice for president. But emotive nimbleness was more Bill’s strength than Hillary’s. Does she exhibit just enough of it to get to the White House against a shell-shocked Republican party? Time will tell.