by Bill Nowacki

This morning over coffee, Eleanor Clift called me a misogynist. I’m a lot of things: chubby, unshorn, a sucker for panhandlers, and a person more likely to read espn.com than The Economist. But a misogynist? Really?

I half wanted to slap the smug look off her face, but in her selective sociopathy, doing so would have simply proven her point. It wasn’t the first time she’s thrown a haymaker punch at me, so I knew that reciting the innumerable ways in which I’ve supported, championed, deferred to, and collaborated with women was useless. To hear her, I’m also a flat earther, a racist, and a tyrannist [sic].

Wholly offended, the other half of me wanted to forgive her, or at least shrug it off since she doesn’t really know me very well.

In fact, she doesn’t know me at all – we’ve never met.

I’m a Trump supporter. That’s all she needed to know in order to describe and malign me.

It goes without saying, then, that I’m also: a social outcast, angry, an isolationist, a heavy drinker (of beer and sour mash presumably), a Christian wannabe, a corporatist, narcissistic, shallow, stupid, anti-green, and unaware that Maslow defined four other need states beyond the two in which I live – so much rich detail from a single factoid: that I am a Trump supporter.

It’s unfair albeit convenient. And it’s an error that’s made often not just by politicians, but business people, too: Marketers and Brands fumble for simple handles that make it easy to communicate with constituents and audiences. But what they achieve through economies of scale, they loose in resonance.

Increasingly, commercial enterprises are realizing that consumers are each as unique as their individual fingerprints. To win at the wallet, Brands are finding they have to master the science of personalization – speaking in a vernacular and tenor that rings true for the individual, and to the relevant salient features of the product.

Consider 3 people who frequent Yelp, the online crowd-sourced restaurant, entertainment, and business guide. One of the people considers herself a foodie and exploits the site to find exciting new tastes and menus. Another is gluten intolerant and uses Yelp to locate gut-neutral fare. The last is a virtual office employee searching for wifi and a loiterer-friendly atmosphere. All love and value the product but for materially different reasons.

Today, Yelp enjoys the loyalty of 7 million mobile app users (and many more who are tethered). With advice on restaurants, shopping, arts, automotive, beauty, events, health, media, pets, government services, real estate, and religious organizations it’s hard to imagine a single tagline that will inspire them all. Inspiration is, after all, complicated.

They’re Yelpers. I’m a Trumpster. Neither tag is very helpful.

What might be helpful though would be a Big Data dig. (Big Data is a term that describes the digital vapor trail each of us unwittingly leaves in the ether as we bump our way through today’s connected world.)

A digital archaeologist would learn that I have a masters degree and earn in the top 0.5% of the top 1% of Americans. My income hasn’t been flat these past 7 years. I prefer Formula 1 and golf over NASCAR and hockey, and red wine over beer and bourbon. I’m a born again Christian who wears French cuff shirts to work. I voted for Carol Moseley Braun and Paul Simon, both Democrat senators from Illinois. I financially support several families directly – not through a 501(c) organization. My family works with under-privilege Latin families locally to help them get their footing and their bearings. Pistols and assault weapons scare me, but shotguns and rifles do not. I’ve made over 400 international trips and claim friends on every continent on earth (minus the cold one). And I despise comb-overs – if you’re thin on top, cut it short or shave it and shine it.

I’m as hard to classify as a snowflake.

If Eleanor Clift and the rest of the intelligentsia thinks it’s about walls, wellness, wages, and war, like the Yellow Pages they’re destined for irrelevance.