Avoid marketing missteps by pausing, considering your audience, and being authentic to your brand.

BY SYDNEY SLADOVNIK, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT @SYDNEYSLADOVNIK

Illustration: Getty Images

Are your post-election marketing messages putting customers at ease or coming off as considerably tone deaf? That might be the question wrestling the minds of business owners nationwide after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The anticipation and results of the election may have hindered productivity for some workplaces, while others were business as usual.

Whether or not brands should make a post-election marketing campaign depends on how their message reads, according to Michel Pham, Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. For starters, it shouldn’t sound overly political. “Coming across as being somehow partisan probably is not a very safe thing to do at this point,” he says.

Telling customers to “relax” or “calm down” is also controversial for a few reasons. “One is........

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