The tour of Donald Trump’s Scottish golf courses marked the ninth and tenth venues of the Trump business empire at which the Trump campaign for president convened a traveling press corps — a “big branding tour,’’ one reporter called it.
During a year-long campaign launched in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Trump has staged news conferences at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach and carted TV crews across his own resplendent golfing greens from South Florida to Scotland. Trump has gone so far as to suggest that the sharp devaluation of the British pound following the vote to exit the European Union will be good for business — his, tourism at Trump Turnberry.
Yet the very value of Trump’s name, which is the crux of disputed estimations of the billionaire’s personal net worth, is at risk in the Trump campaign. After a year of antagonizing women and minorities with campaign-rally bluster and rhetorical bullets in the Twitter-sphere, fully six in ten Americans have come to develop a negative view of the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president.
The list of prominent Republicans planning to sit out the party’s national convention in Cleveland next month is growing — including absentees such as Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Advisers to former Republican presidents — Brent Scowcroft, Richard Armitage and Hank Paulson — say they’ll vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. And columnist George Will has quit the GOP.
The roster of companies either withdrawing or reducing financial support for the Republican National Convention includes names as big as Coca-Cola, Apple and Microsoft. They have brand names at stake as well, with Coke cutting its convention support from $660,000 in 2012 to $75,000 this year as it attempts to defuse protests of civil rights activists collecting petitions demanding that Coke and other companies boycott the convention because of Trump’s comments.
Trump has “taken a brand that used to be regarded as kind of opulent, with lots of golden stairways, and he’s entered the sort of rust belt of politics,” says Gregory Payne, chair of communications studies at Emerson College in Boston. “It has cheapened the brand. It’s almost like BMW going into candy bars, or some distinct brand going into something it knows little about, and that devalues the brand.”
Payne, who has long examined political communication, points to Ronald Reagan, a onetime actor and corporate spokesman who, with the help of longtime adviser Michael Deaver, understood the value of courting good will in public relations. “It’s morning again in America,” Reagan’s iconic 1984 reelection ad asserted.
“We used to think of competence and expertise in some areas as being important — in a sense, a brand,” Payne says. “But now we’ve morphed into this Kim Kardashian sort of entertainment environment, where people have a brand for no apparent reason… Reality shows sort of blend in with the news, and that’s where Donald Trump has a distinct advantage in today’s campaign. The Democrats talk about how little money he has in the campaign, but you only need money to get on TV. He’s been on TV because of one thing, and that’s ratings.”
Yet that exposure comes with its own price.
As he announced his campaign for president last year, Trump also spelled out his stated net worth: “Eight billion, seven hundred thirty-seven million, five hundred and forty thousand,” he said for dramatic effect. Today, he says it’s $10 billion.
Forbes Magazine insists he has overestimated his wealth by 100 percent. Forbes places it at $4.5 billion. At Bloomberg News, with a team devoted to analyzing the daily wealth of the world’s richest, they’ve pegged Trump’s at $2.9 billion.
Forbes explains the biggest discrepancy as a question of the value of the Trump brand stamped on everything from country clubs and luxury condominiums to television shows, wine and vodka. Trump has estimated his name’s value at $3 billion or more — the biggest piece of his personal portfolio. Forbes has surveyed nearly two-dozen branding experts. The highest estimate offered was $1.1 billion, the lowest $200 million. Trump has termed these numbers “ridiculous — way off.”
As a measure of how intertwined the Trump brand is with the Trump campaign, it was Trump’s attacks on an Indiana-born federal judge of Mexican descent handling a class-action lawsuit of customers claiming they were defrauded by Trump University that drew the harshest rebukes from Republican leaders as high as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. “He’s a Mexican,” Trump said. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”
Before the first primary votes were cast this year, a consumer survey run by the BAV Consulting division of Young & Rubicam found that, since the start of Trump’s campaign, his brand had suffered losses in confidence among the people who can afford the price of his hotels, country clubs or housing developments.
“In categories such as ‘prestigious,’ ‘upper class’ and ‘glamorous,’ the Trump name has plummeted among high-income consumers,” Politico reported of the survey in January. “Within the same group, it is also losing its connection with the terms ‘leader,’ ‘dynamic’ and ‘innovative.'”
“It’s the kind of change that usually follows a big corporate scandal, like a product recall or financial misconduct,” Politico’s Will Johnson and Michael D’Antonio wrote. “But in Trump’s case it’s a man’s personality that is in play.”
Win or lose, and for whatever he’s worth, Trump will plant his name on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue with the opening of a grand hotel in the remodeled tower of the city’s Old Post Office. Yet he’s fighting in court with star chefs who planned to open restaurants there but pulled out in protest.
Chefs Geoffrey Zakarian and Jose Andres canceled their contract at the development a few blocks from the White House after Trump’s opening campaign comments about Mexico sending criminals and rapists to the United States. In addition to personal objections, they cite a potential loss of customer support.
Trump, suing the chefs for breach of contract, claims his hotel’s brand name is just fine. In court filings citing industry experts, his lawyers offer data from before and after his campaign comments from STR Global’s “STAR Reports” They show that “five of the six Trump-branded hotels in the United States continue to perform well as compared with competitor hotels, and data from the signature restaurants in each of these hotels are performing better in the timeframe.”
