One day students at Pennsylvania\u2019s Wharton Business School will write theses on the brand impact of an association with the presidency of Donald Trump. Some of them will focus on one of the school\u2019s most high profile alumni: his daughter Ivanka.<\/p>\n
Ms Trump was at the centre of the President\u2019s latest ethics controversy, when he launched one of his patented Twitter broadsides at Nordstrom, a fancy retailer which recently dropped the Ivanka Trump brand as a result of its failure to perform.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person \u2013 always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!\u201d he snarled.<\/p>\n
The ethics debate centres on the President intervening with the aim of boosting his daughter\u2019s company. In reality, by further entwining her name with his, he might just have put the final nail in its coffin.<\/p>\n
Ivanka Trump is a very modern business, that relies solely on the image portrayed by its glamorous founder and the willingness among her target market \u2013 young working women \u2013 to buy into her by wearing her name.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately the name is all the business really has and she can\u2019t easily change it. This isn\u2019t like Cosmair becoming L\u2019Oreal USA. Without \u201cIvanka Trump\u201d, there\u2019s nothing there.<\/p>\n
Ms Trump built the brand, and its image, by saying things like: \u201cI\u2019m incredibly proud to play a small role in debunking this caricature of what a working woman looks like, in creating content that\u2019s actionable, that\u2019s tip-orientated, for this young working woman that encourages her to architect a life that she wants to live.\u201d<\/p>\n
No, I\u2019m really not sure what that means either. It feels like she wants to be seen to care about her target market but is struggling to say so, perhaps because the world she lives in is so completely divorced from the world of the average working woman. And perhaps because she knows that, deep down, hers isn\u2019t the mission-led business she likes to claim. It\u2019s just about making a buck.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s just my view, and up until very recently, the strategy has undeniably worked. Those vague statements have imparted a vaguely positive, aspirational quality to clothes and shoes made in China. They have put the brand up alongside other vaguely aspirational names that sell similar clothes and shoes made on the same production lines.<\/p>\n
Until The Donald embarked on a political career and it became obvious that he was the antithesis to all that slightly woolly positivity, even before his despicable comments about women were made public.<\/p>\n
Brand Ivanka\u2019s demographic is made up of a group of people who may very well feel Mr Trump to be their Kryptonite. And if they don\u2019t, their friends probably do.<\/p>\n
With a wide field of alternatives that don\u2019t have the potential to be seen as a faux pas at a working lunch when you wear them, why take the risk of buying Ivanka? Especially now the President has further entwined Ms Trump\u2019s brand with his own.<\/p>\n
Nordstrom\u2019s decision wasn\u2019t made as a comment on that. It was something the President really ought to understand: a cool-headed business choice to remove from the shelves a brand that had stopped selling. Unlike previous businesses that have been made Trump tweet targets, Nordstrom\u2019s shares have done just fine.<\/p>\n
As for Ms Trump, she had, of course, stepped back from the brand and from her previous role at the Trump Organisation, partly because she has taken an ill-defined role in her father\u2019s administration while her husband Jared Kushner has joined his leadership council as a loyal lieutenant.<\/p>\n
Whether there will be anything for her to return to when that role ends is now open to question.<\/p>\n