Did Donald really trump Hillary in the PR war?

Hillary Clinton

The New York Times called Hillary Clinton “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.” That view was backed up by an informal survey by PR Week, which found that communications professionals overwhelmingly believed that Clinton would be elected. What do we know!?

Something has been lost in the message and, somehow, the former First Lady and former Secretary of State has lost out to a man with no experience in politics.

She’s faced criticism for losing control of the campaign narrative while Trump was talking about, among other things, stopping Muslims coming to the US, building walls with Mexico and his opponent’s email ‘scandal.’ In September, Phil Bump, writing in the Washington Post, said the election was slipping away from Hillary Clinton for that very reason.

Or does the answer actually lie in her communication style? Katharina Balazs said of Hillary Clinton: “Hillary is not Bill (Clinton), and immediate empathic connection is not her forte. Her weapons lie elsewhere. She has a reputation for having a sharp head and a cool heart. Facts and details pour out of her with ease, and are, characteristically for (a) “logically comprehensive communicator”, structured by order, logic and sequence.

“Her language is clear, and she connects the facts with the concrete, the “how-to”. The downside of her communication style is that she might remind people of the strict school teacher who knew it all and used to humiliate them in class.”

So she’s not averse to a concrete, certain, definitive statement, but does her delivery always get the juices of her supporters going? According to the BBC’s New York correspondent Nick Bryant, “her speeches are often flat and somewhat robotic. Her sound-bites sound like sound-bites – prefabricated and, to some ears, insincere.”

Ultimately, was this a big problem in the race for the White House? A good portion of the voting public in this country, as well as the US, will watch a debate or a speech and vote not on a rational, thought out view, but on a ‘feeling.’

Her strategy in the well-publicised debates involved using plenty of non-verbal communication, which was analysed by David B. Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington, for The Daily Beast.

“Clinton calmly smiled and assuredly made her political points verbally clear,” he concluded. “Her body showed no reactivity to Mr Trump’s comments; she was totally (presidentially?) in control.”

So what happened?

Obviously a huge range of factors have come into play during this sometimes fraught and hard fought contest. Setting the communications strategy right early would have been a big deal for both candidates, but it would never the be all and end all.

Communications and in particular public relations has to be authentic and, as these results show, it has to be delivered with passion and it has to truly connect – not just be heard – by the audiences you’re aiming to actually get to do something.

Does it just come down simply to whether we talk to people’s heads or their hearts? That would assume that everyone who voted for Trump voted in a presidential election without engaging his or her brains. That’s an opinion held by many on this side of the pond if you believe social media, but that can’t be true, can it?

Was it the Mexico wall, was it the Clinton email scandal, was it Trump’s ability to cast himself successfully as the ultimate outsider against the ultimate insider or was Clinton’s “Stronger together” message just not quite as snappy as “Make America great again”? Maybe it was the Clinton campaign’s Mannequin Challenge….who knows?

Either way, Donald Trump is the 45^th President of the United States.