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DOI: 10.1177/0002716206299149
2007; 611; 176The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Margaret Scammell
Political Brands and Consumer Citizens: The Rebranding of Tony Blair
http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/611/1/176
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176 ANNALS, AAPSS, 611, May 2007
It has become commonplace to speak of political parties
and brands. This article looks at the rise of the brand
and explains how branding has become the cutting edge
of commercial marketing. It examines how the brand
concept and research techniques are used in politics
and focuses in particular on the rebranding of Tony
Blair in the run up to the 2005 U.K. general election.
More broadly, it argues that branding is the new form of
political marketing. If market research, spin, and advertising
were the key signifiers of marketed parties and
candidates in the 1980s and 1990s, “branding” is the
hallmark now. It will argue that the brand concept has
analytical value. It is not simply a convenient and fashionable
term for image. Furthermore, it is a demonstration
that we are moving from a mass media model to a
consumer model of political communication.
Keywords: political communication; political brands;
marketing and elections; Tony Blair
Political parties are the ultimate brands.
—Burkitt (2002)
This article describes how and why branding
is used in politics. It focuses in particular on the
rebranding of Tony Blair in 2005. However,
more broadly, it argues that branding is the new
form of political marketing. If market research,
spin, and advertising were the key signifiers of
marketed parties and candidates in the 1980s
and 1990s, “branding” is the hallmark now. The
article will argue that the brand concept has
analytical value. It is not simply a convenient
and fashionable term for image. Furthermore,
it is a demonstration that we are moving from a
Political Brands
and Consumer
Citizens: The
Rebranding of
Tony Blair
By
MARGARET SCAMMELL
Margaret Scammell is a lecturer in media and communications
at the London School of Economics and Political
Science. She has also been a lecturer at the School of
Politics and Communications at the University of
Liverpool and a research fellow at Joan Shorenstein
Center for Press/Politics at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government, Harvard University. Before joining the
academy, she worked as a journalist for newspapers,
magazines, and television.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716206299149
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mass media model to a consumer model of political communication. Before moving
to the politics, however, it is important to get a firmer grip on the concept of
the brand.
Brands: What Are They?
Our common if loose understanding that brand refers to image and reputation
is more or less right. As consultants Anholt and Hildreth (2004) put it, “A brand
is nothing more . . . than the good name of something.” In marketing, a brand is
defined as “the psychological representation” of a product or organization: its
symbolic rather than tangible use-value. At a basic level, the brand acts as a shortcut
to consumer choice, enabling differentiation between broadly similar products.
Most intriguing for marketers, however, is the way brand image works,
appearing to add a layer of emotional connection that operates over and above
the functional use-value of a product. Thus, in the classic example of brand
power, “two thirds of cola drinkers prefer Pepsi in blind tests, yet two thirds buy
Coke” (Burkitt 2002). Although brands, most famously Coca-Cola, have existed
as household names for more than a century, the brand idea acquired its contemporary
ubiquitous importance over the past twenty years. The term brand is
everywhere now, applied not just to products, companies, organizations, and
celebrities but also to cities, nations, and even private individuals, such that job
seekers, for example, are encouraged to “consider yourself a brand” to impress
interviewers (Whitcomb 2005). There are four main reasons for the contemporary
rise of the brand: first, economic, and the recognition that a respected brand
name translates into financial value; second, promotional, and growing skepticism
about the efficacy of mass advertising in a world of media abundance and
audience fragmentation; third, the perception of increasing consumer power as
the new consumerism of the turn of the century brings together heightened
demands for value-for-money and new concerns for corporate social responsibility;
and fourth, consumer research, which insists on the importance of emotional
engagement in shopping behavior, especially in explanations of repeat purchases.
The economic imperative stemmed from the phenomenal increase in the
value of intangibles over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Intangibles are
equivalent roughly to the gap between companies’ “book values” (such as material
assets, equity, and return on investment) and their stock market valuations.
“The brand is a special intangible that in many businesses is the most important
asset,” according to Jan Lindemann (2004) of Interbrand, a consultancy that
together with the magazine BusinessWeek publishes league tables of top global
brands. The precise financial value of brands is notoriously difficult to measure
by orthodox accounting practices. However, international stock markets recognize
the value of intangibles in takeover claims (sometimes called “acquired
goodwill”) on the balance sheets. It is now beyond dispute that brands contribute
massively to corporate worth. An Interbrand study, conducted in association with
POLITICAL BRANDS AND CONSUMER CITIZENS 177
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JP Morgan, concluded that brands account for more than one-third of shareholder
value, on average, while for some leading brands (for example, Coca-Cola
and McDonald’s) the brand is worth well over 50 percent of stock market value.
In cash terms, the figures are truly staggering. Google, the hottest mover in
Interbrand/Businessweek’s 2006 league table, has an estimated brand value of
$12.38 billion. Coca-Cola, still the world’s top brand, was put at $67 billion, while
the number two brand, Microsoft, was valued at $56.9 billion.
The term brand is everywhere now,
applied not just to products, companies,
organizations, and celebrities but also to cities,
nations, and even private individuals.
Recognition of this market power has led to the development of “brand management”
as a specialist function within companies, supplemented by a boom in
brand consultancy as a new branch of marketing expertise. Brand consultancies
are frequently staffed by people previously employed in advertising (Burkitt
2002), who often employ similar qualitative research techniques but who now see
their work as more fundamental, and always prior to any advertising campaigns. It
is increasingly common for former advertisers to talk of the “postadvertising age.”
Al and Laura Ries’s influential book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
(2002) argued that the hard sell of advertising was insufficient for the business of
brand building. Advertising cannot substitute for the longer-term, more wideranging
creation of reputation through sustained public relations. Maurice Saatchi
(2006) went further, enlisting neuroscience to explain the “strange death of modern
advertising.” Constant exposure to a vast array of digital media has effectively
“rewired” the brains of the under-twenty-five-year-olds; they respond faster but
recall less, Saatchi said. This is why teenagers can digitally multitask at rapid
speeds, receive and send a text message, play a game, and download music all in
the space of the typical thirty-second commercial. Neuroscience calls it “continuous
partial attention,” and the result is that “day-after recall scores for television
advertising have collapsed, from 35 percent in the 1960s to 10 percent today.”
A common thread in the marketing literature is that brand image is not, nor
can it be, the simple creation of advertising. The peculiar property of the brand,
as distinct from the product, is that it is not under the sole authorship of the
owner companies. The brand emerges also from customer experience and perception.
Promise, the agency that Labour commissioned to conduct research
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prior to the 2005 General Election, claims that “brands belong to everyone . . .
shaped by millions of conversations which take place every day between a company
and its customers . . . customers and non-customers” (Trevail, 2004).
Ultimately, the brand is “only as good as the grapevine says it is.” The customer
contribution is known as brand equity. Brand equity is effectively a gift that customers
may bestow or withhold; thus, it is a complex source of strength and weakness
for companies. It may add billions to corporate worth; equally, it is acutely
sensitive to competition and highly vulnerable even to small shifts in consumer
perception and behavior.
Brand equity is effectively a gift that
customers may bestow or withhold;
thus, it is a complex source of strength
and weakness for companies.
Thus, the surge of consumer activism of the past decade created new anxieties
and opportunities in the boardrooms. Companies faced a diverse and intensified
range of pressures from both the traditional consumer watchdog wing of
activism, buttressed by mounting attention from the news media (scrutiny of
value-for-money, product quality, and honesty of claims) and from activists,
championed famously by Naomi Klein and Anita Roddick, with demands for
social responsibility and ethical corporate behavior in human and animal rights
and the environment. The climate of heightened consumer activism simultaneously
increased the vulnerability of brands and their potential value. A good
brand name is a tremendous asset as consumers become more demanding, but
equally a reputation built over years may be dismantled virtually overnight by
scandal, evidence of misdeed, or even simply competition from a smarter rival.
Consequently, all aspects of brands, their definition, research, communication,
and methods of economic evaluation, have become increasingly sophisticated as
management invests in brand development and research while consultancies
compete to sell brand-building formulas. On the economic side, statistical models
contend to demonstrate the importance of brand equity, linking financial values
to equity indicators, such as consumer awareness, preference, satisfaction
and scores on specific image attributes and, increasingly, perceived social responsibility.
On the definition and research side, marketers draw on cognitive and
neuropsychology to make sense of consumers’ emotional responses and attachments
to brands. It has led to a burgeoning marketing interest in emotional intelligence
POLITICAL BRANDS AND CONSUMER CITIZENS 179
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180 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
and the ways that reason and emotion work in consumers’ purchase decisions
(Heath 2001; Franzen and Bouwman 2001; Goleman 1996; Woods 2004).
James Donius’s influential model (cited in Woods 2004; see Table 1) distinguished
between “boundary conditions” (the basic economic and functional performance
of a brand) and “brand differentiators” (cultural, social, and
psychological associations) in consumer choice. In mature markets, where many
products meet the basic boundary conditions of reliable functionality and acceptable
pricing, consumer choice is decided overwhelmingly by the less tangible
attributes of brand differentiation.
[T]he skill of brand research is to make explicit
that which is normally unexpressed and to
convert it into a prioritized order that can
assist brand development and promotion.
The task of brand research lies in discovering how differentiators operate in
consumers’ perceptions and in finding patterns of differentiation. A common
theme is that, while brand differentiators emerge from multiple and diverse
experiences and psychological associations, they often work at a low level of consumer
attention. Consumer psychology, drawing from cognitive psychology, calls
this low-involvement processing (Heath 2001). Moreover, “many of the encounters
that each of us has with a brand are experienced beneath the radar of conscious
attention. The tiny details that do contribute to brand image such as the
quality of plastic carrier bags, the information on a till receipt . . . sneak into our
brains invisibly” (Gordon, quoted in Burkitt 2002). Hence, the skill of brand
research is to make explicit that which is normally unexpressed and to convert it
into a prioritized order that can assist brand development and promotion.
TABLE 1
WHAT MAKES A BRAND DISTINCTIVE?
Cultural “symbol of our society” Brand differentiators
Social “grew up with it”
Psychological “says something about me”
Economic “value for money” Boundary conditions
Functional “works better”
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Brand research is primarily qualitative, seeking of necessity to delve beneath
the surface evidence of quantitative polling. Burkitt (2002) described two traditions
of consumer qualitative research: first, the behaviorist school, which seeks
explanations through direct observation of consumer behavior rather than
through questioning respondents; and second, the human psychology school,
which is premised on the assumption that people can and do understand their
own motivations, although they may need help (“moderation”) to access and
make explicit “views and values that people have not thought about in a very conscious
way or do not normally admit to.” The latter school is commonly equated
with the focus group, although according to Burkitt, British market researchers
prefer “qualitative research” since the purpose is to encourage respondents to
speak as freely as possible, rather than restrict them to a narrow product focus. It
enlists enabling and projective techniques from counseling and self-development
to uncover respondents’ normally unspoken intuitive associations and hard-toadmit
private feelings. Typical techniques include “mood boards” (collections of
pictures/images that evoke emotional territories, lifestyle, and feeling); “concept
statements,” in which respondents are asked to write down their views before discussing
them; and party-game-type associations, which are probably the best
known among the brand researcher’s bag of tricks. The result is questions such as
“If product X was a car/fruit/football team what kind of car/fruit/football team
would it be?” Beyond this, and as we shall see in the case of Tony Blair, researchers
call upon techniques of psychoanalysis to access respondents’ most privately held
or even repressed opinions.
“Reconnecting the Prime Minister”:
Political Branding in Action
The strategy to “reconnect” Tony Blair with disaffected voters prior to the
2005 U.K. General Election offers a sharp illustration of the centrality of brand
thinking in politics. Labour, although consistently ahead in the polls, approached
the campaign nervously, worried at their ability to mobilize their own supporters
and concerned at the depth of anger toward Blair, especially among women voters.
Moreover, Labour, as the party of government for eight years, was particularly
susceptible to rising public cynicism. Politicians, Philip Gould (2003) said,
were talking to an “empty stadium”; voters felt powerless and ignored and were
looking for a more interactive engagement with politicians. The 2001 contest had
produced the lowest postwar turnout at 59 percent, and Labour strategists feared
that another record low rendered them vulnerable to a hung Parliament or worse
should the Conservatives motivate their base through anti-Blair appeals and
promises of tough immigration policy and lower taxes.
This was the context in which Labour, in January 2005, enlisted the services of
Promise plc, a commercial consultancy specializing in brand building. Promise
detailed its work in an unusually frank paper for a Market Research Society
POLITICAL BRANDS AND CONSUMER CITIZENS 181
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conference (Langmaid, Trevail, and Hayman 2006). The following account and
quotations come from their paper, unless otherwise stated. Promise came to
Labour’s attention in December 2004 through a Financial Times article written
by Charles Trevail, one of the company’s founders. Trevail had argued that
Labour was a “premium brand”—a high-cost, high-service product that, precisely
because it raised consumer expectations to high levels, was especially vulnerable
to credibility problems. Promise runs an annual index tracking the fit between
consumer expectations and experience of leading brands. It had concluded its
2004 survey with the finding that two-thirds of brands failed to live up to their
promises and that “premium brands were especially likely to let customers
down.” This, said Promise, was “the pain of premium”: premium products
offered high quality to customers and their very success brought with it the risk
that consumers may “idealize these brands—they imbue them with lots of positive
qualities they’d like them to have, and which they cannot always live up to.”
Trevail’s argument was spotted by Shaun Woodward, former Conservative communications
director, who had defected and been elected as a Labour MP in
1997. Woodward arranged a meeting between Promise executives and Labour
campaign strategists Philip Gould and Sally Morgan at Number 10 Downing
Street in December 2004. At the meeting, Gould said “they needed a new perspective
on the New Labour brand.”
Promise conducted preliminary research for Labour, involving standard focus
groups of Labour loyalists and former Labour voters who were now undecided.
Although it mainly confirmed what Labour already knew, the party’s campaign
team was impressed, especially with the analysis of respondents’ “relationships
with Blair personally” and how these fed into overall attitudes. Promise was commissioned
to devise a strategy to counteract the Conservatives and crucially to
recommend ways to “reconnect” Tony Blair to the electorate. Thereafter,
Promise focused only on undecideds, particularly groups of women who had previously
voted Labour. The focus was in line with Gould’s surveys, which found
that the hostility to Blair and Labour was especially keen among women and
“might severely damage their showing at the polls.” Promise attempted to isolate
the Blair factor through the numerical scaling it uses in its brand index, asking
respondents to award marks out of ten to parties and leaders on the basis of two
attributes: reputation and delivery. It then asked respondents to score Labour
and Conservatives against their own set of ideal attributes (competence, leadership,
teamwork, integrity, in touch, understand, interactive). “Worryingly for New
Labour, the Tories outperformed them”; and worse for the prime minister, he
scored lower than his own party. Overall, Promise concluded that the New
Labour brand was undermined by constant media attacks, the Iraq war, and the
perception that Blair had lied about weapons of mass destruction. A key finding
was that Blair personally was crucial to brand perceptions and that there was a
marked deterioration over time, from enthusiastic welcome of the young Blair to
resentment and anger at the later tough Blair.
To probe the link between perceptions of Blair and the party brand, Promise
used expressive techniques, including asking respondents to write a letter to
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POLITICAL BRANDS AND CONSUMER CITIZENS 183
Mr. Blair, “to let him know what they thought and more importantly how they
felt,” assuring them that “we would place the content of their letters before him,
as we did.” Promise summarized the emotional experiences of Blair under three
broad headings (see Table 2): “you’ve left me,” “you’ve become too big for your
boots,” and “you need to reflect on what you’ve done and change.” From these
broad emotional themes, they then drew on Gestalt psychology and the “twochair”
exercise, asking a volunteer to act out both parts of a two-way conversation
between herself and Blair. The conversation was reported as follows:
Woman voter to Blair: “I thought you were one of us. A people person. Yet you were
more interested in sucking up to people more famous than yourself. To do that you even
put our boys’ lives at risk in Iraq even though more than a million people had marched
against that war. Why didn’t you listen? Why are you spending so much time away from
us? Why didn’t you come home straight away after the tsunami? How could you stay on
holiday when our people were dying?”
Blair to woman voter: “I’m afraid you’ve only got part of the picture. From where I sit the
war in Iraq was crucial to the cause of world peace. But I understand that it’s difficult to
see the whole thing for you. [Boos from the group!] You put me in charge and I must do
what I think to be the right thing. I am sure that history will prove us right in the end.”
TABLE 2
LETTERS TO BLAIR (FROM UNDECIDED WOMEN VOTERS)
Underlying Emotional
Key Phrases Experience Desires/Wishes/Direction
Theme 1: You’ve left me!
“you should have come home” Abandoned and Put us first
(Tsunami); “your country unimportant Get back in touch
needed you”; “where were you Get more involved with us
when the disaster happened”;
“all the promises you made
that never came to fruition”
Theme 2: Too big for your
boots/celebrity
“a president with Cherie”; His self-importance and Reorder priorities
“globe-trotting holiday makers”; global lifestyle leaves me Get back to basics
“celebrity hero worship feeling inferior/ Get real
(Bush”); “thought you were undervalued
a people’s person, not a
movie star.”
Theme 3: Reflect and change
“take time to think”; “how Not held in mind Think, reflect—are you still
foolish you’ve been”; “you’ve Uncontained the bloke we elected;
lost sight of reality.” Out of control have you moved on to
bigger things?
SOURCE: Langmaid, Trevail, and Hayman (2006).
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After group discussion of the imaginary conversation, the woman returned to the
chair tasked to be Blair saying what she would like to hear from him. This is what
she said:
Blair to woman voter: “I understand your feelings and I realize that there are many who
do not agree with me over Iraq. . . . I still believe on balance that we did the right
thing, though I have been shocked to appreciate the depth of frustration among those
who disagree with me. I solemnly promise to spend more time at home in contact with
our own people and to debate these issues more seriously before we launch on such an
endeavor again.”
It was a relatively small difference in Blair’s response, but it produced an extraordinary
reaction, one woman even shouting out, “We love you.” This was the crucial
moment in the strategy to rebrand Blair. The women’s anger toward Blair
stemmed not so much from opposition to the Iraq war, although that was deeply
unpopular, but from perceptions of Blair’s patronizing tone and self-justificatory
response to criticism. Promise researchers had been taken aback by the “degree of
aggression—even hatred” directed at Blair. Moreover, the strength of hostility was
related to the warmth of their welcome to the younger Blair, who had seemed so
“fresh,” “approachable,” “modern, progressive and easy to look at and listen to.”
The task, as Promise saw it, was to integrate
the two Tonys, the young, hopeful Tony and the
older tough Tony, into a new “mature Tony.”
Promise concluded, “There appeared to be almost two completely separate
Mr. Blairs out there in the public’s consciousness. The one, ideal, almost perfect
as a leader and source of hope; the other almost equally mendacious, even wicked
as a source of disillusionment and despair.” Ideal Tony had become Terrible Tony.
Respondents reacted to Blair “with the feelings of jilted lovers: He had become
enthralled by someone else, a figure more powerful than ourselves, the resident
of the White House. . . . Therefore feeling rejected ourselves we must start to
reject him.” The task, as Promise saw it, was to integrate the two Tonys, the
young, hopeful Tony and the older tough Tony, into a new “mature Tony”; and
the two chair exercise suggested that it was possible to do this through communication
style and tone.
Simultaneously with the Blair focus groups, the Promise team worked on a
new brand model for Labour, approaching the issue “as they would any other
large brand,” exploring the environment in which the brand existed, how it was
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promoted, and most important, what it meant to consumers. New Labour had
emerged out of a sophisticated brand strategy, driven by intimate contact with
voters, the party’s customers. But by 2005 it was badly tarnished: “The brand lens
through which people viewed the party had become clouded by the Iraq war and
constant media attacks on the government. . . . The research categorically
stated [that] New Labour had a problem with their leader, but so influential was
he as an icon of the brand, the party also had a problem that reached the very
core of the brand.” The New Labour brand, personified by Blair, had stopped listening,
it was too reliant on him, but without him seemed lightweight, all spin
rather than substance. The Conservatives’ brand, despite being perceived as outdated,
felt “more real”; the Tories had more substantial “brand equity.”
The depth of dissatisfaction on three core attributes, competence, integrity,
and teamwork, “could not be reversed over the twelve-week period before the
election. However, we realized that the brand did have an opportunity to address
issues of integrity and teamwork head-on. . . . We recommended a strategy that
portrayed members of the Cabinet working as a team; something that was very
much lacking for the Tories.” Promise suggested the rebranding of New Labour
as “progressive realists”: passionate, friendly, and inclusive for the benefit of all.
It needed to show strength in depth by promoting a greater range of spokespeople
and competence through highlighting management of the economy. It also
needed to emphasize public services (“this brand is about we, not me”) and communications
that looked “in touch.” For Blair, this meant showing that he understood
why people were angry and that he should drop the much-resented “I know
best” stance in favor of “we can only do this together.”
From “Tough Tony” to “Mature Tony”:
The Masochism Election Strategy
The plan to “reconnect the prime minister” got its first airing two weeks later
(February 2006) with Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party Spring Conference
at Gateshead, in northeast England. To the delight of Promise and Labour campaigners,
sound bites chosen by the media highlighted the new, “mature Tony”
approach: “I understand why some people are angry, not just over Iraq but many
of the difficult decisions we have made, and, as ever, a lot of it is about me,” said
Blair. “So this journey has gone from ‘all things to all people,’ to ‘I know best’ to
‘we can only do this together.’ And I know which I prefer. A partnership. Forward
together. It’s your choice.”
Promise’s main recommendations appeared in Labour’s campaign war book:
“TB must connect with the electorate . . . and make it clear that he has not
abandoned them”; he should show greater candor, humility, and willingness to listen
(as cited in Kavanagh and Butler 2005, 57). This emerged publicly as the “masochism
strategy,” in which the prime minister increased his appearances on television in
the run-up to the election, deliberately seeking out aggressive interviewers and
POLITICAL BRANDS AND CONSUMER CITIZENS 185
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asking TV shows to find hostile audiences to question him. The strategy, with its
underlying analogy of a rocky marriage, provoked considerable press interest and
no little contempt as the prime minister was subjected to some humbling
encounters. He was repeatedly lambasted over Iraq; while in the most excruciating
confrontations a hospital worker asked the prime minister if he would be prepared
to “wipe someone’s backside for £5 an hour,” and on the popular Saturday
night show Ant and Dec’s Takeaway a child asked him, “My dad says you’re mad.
Are you mad?” As the pro–New Labour commentator Andrew Rawnsley (2005)
noted, much of the press did indeed think that the strategy was madness: “The
traditional campaign playbooks say that leaders should always be displayed
among crowds of cheering supporters affirming their goodness and greatness.
And predictably conventional reporting has depicted these TV trials as evidence
that the wheels are already coming off a ‘humiliated’ Prime Minister’s campaign.”
Nonetheless, the masochism strategy was central to Labour’s campaign, as was
the attempt to showcase a united leadership team. The latter was easier said than
done, requiring a concerted effort from Labour campaigners to heal the muchreported
rift between Labour’s most powerful figures, Blair and Gordon Brown,
the chancellor of the exchequer. Labour’s longest-serving campaigners, Philip
Gould and Alastair Campbell, were convinced that Brown’s inclusion was indispensable
to electoral success. Brown would ensure focus on the party’s key assets,
management of the economy and public services, and without Brown, Blair would
look isolated and vulnerable. As one Labour insider said, “I think Philip and
Alastair were both kept awake at night by the thought that if Gordon did not come
back, Tony would be humiliated” (as cited in Kavanagh and Butler 2005, 58). After
weeks of negotiation, the pair was persuaded to bury their differences, at least for
the duration. The reuniting of the Lennon and McCartney of British politics was
signaled in the party’s first election broadcast (PEB) of the campaign. Directed by
filmmaker Anthony Minghella (The English Patient), the PEB featured Blair and
Brown chatting together about their common values and achievements; it was a
“soft-sell about a ‘partnership that’s worked’ ” (Harrison 2005, 111). Remarkably,
this was the only PEB under Blair’s leadership that had highlighted any Labour
politician other than him. In general, Labour’s advertising and promotional material
was far less Blair-focused than in the previous two elections. Instead, the team
theme continued with Brown repeatedly at Blair’s side on the campaign trail.
Branding: Its Value for Political Campaigners
Branding as a concept and research method has both particular and general
value for campaigners. The particular value is demonstrated in the “reconnection
strategy”; its general usefulness becomes clear in the evolution of political marketing
thinking.
The reconnection strategy was a strikingly different way to deal with the problem
of leader unpopularity. Margaret Thatcher, although widely respected as a
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strong leader, was also deeply disliked by a large minority of the population. The
Conservative solution for her in the 1987 election was a presidential campaign
that highlighted her advantages as an experienced and strong leader but made little
attempt to alter entrenched public perception that she was “out of touch” and
“talked down” to ordinary people. Labour in 1992 had the opposite problem with
then-leader Neil Kinnock, and its remedy was to protect Kinnock as far as possible
from exposure to hostile questioning from the press and public (Scammell
1995). Neither course completely fitted the campaigners’ bill for Blair in 2005. It
would have been impossible to shield him from the scrutiny of the press, much
of which treated the campaign as a referendum on the prime minister (Scammell
and Harrop 2005, 131). The option of protecting him from the public, with a
Thatcher-like presidential campaign, was considered seriously (Langmaid,
Trevail, and Hayman 2006, 6), but it was riskier for Blair than it had been for
Thatcher. First, being seen as in touch was the essence of the New Labour brand
and, until the Iraq war, had been personified by Blair. He personally and the
party generally had more to lose than Thatcher had. Moreover, his closest advisers,
including Gould and Campbell, were concerned to bolster his authority in
the party. The “Tough Tony” was largely responsible for the party’s current image
problems; he should be seen to be spearheading the solutions. Promise’s contribution
was not that it introduced Labour campaigners to brand ideas; rather, it
provided solutions, including language and tone, that resonated with existing
thinking. New Labour itself, as Promise stated, had been widely accepted as a triumph
of branding, indeed marveled at by the business world (Scammell 1999,
737), but campaigners recognized it was vulnerable and in need of constant adaptation.
The general thrust of Promise’s recommendations, to demonstrate that
the party was still in touch and listening, had informed Labour’s 2003 mass consultation
exercise, The Big Conversation, while Blair in the same year argued for
a “rebranding” of the “progressive political project” (Blair 2003).
The general value of branding to campaigners is both conceptual and practical.
It provides a conceptual framework to distinguish and fathom links between
the functional perceptions of parties and leaders (the “boundary conditions”),
such as economic management, policy commitments and the competence to
deliver, and the emotional attractions (“boundary differentiators”), such as “one
of us,” authenticity, approachability, and attractiveness to the ear and eye. It brings
together the emotional and intellectual, rational and irrational (“sometimes disturbingly
irrational” [Burkitt 2002, 9]), the big and tiny details that feed into
overall brand images. Branding is underpinned by the insight that these images
are highly vulnerable, constantly changing, and rarely under complete control.
The near-permanence of change has become a Gould mantra and the foundation
of one of his key criticisms of political science analysis: that it is so “static”; it can
explain admirably a moment in time but cannot capture the “messy unpredictable
and often random nature of politics as it happens” (Gould 2002). Thus,
“reassurance” was a key task of the brand in 1997, as Labour’s research demonstrated
that target voters were unconvinced that New Labour really was new (and
would not go back to the old ways of special interests, tax raising and a too close
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relationship with trade unions). However, by 2001, reassurance had turned into
perceptions of caution and excessive concern with opinion polls, and so Labour
had to refresh the brand, be prepared to show bold leadership, be “less nervous
of unpopularity,” be far less concerned with the press “and, dare I say it, opinion
polls” (Gould 2002). By 2005, new New Labour needed to change tack again and
reestablish “Tough Tony” as the listening, caring, in-touch leader that target voters
thought he was when they first elected him.
The general value of branding to campaigners
is both conceptual and practical.
Arguably, branding is now the permanent campaign. The original model of the
permanent campaign, as first used by President Carter’s strategist Pat Caddell
(Blumenthal, 1982), was characterized inter alia by continuous polling, intense
news management, and constant attention to media images. This model, says
Gould (2002), “has had its day.” It may once have been an understandable reaction
to a “relentlessly intrusive media” and, he admitted, it had characterized the
early years of the first New Labour government. However, spin and news management
were not only insufficient to maintain political leadership; they ultimately
“contaminated” the Labour brand and undermined public trust. In a similar vein,
Needham (2005) argued that the brand concept, rather than the permanent campaign,
is the more useful to understand communication in the governments
of Blair and Bill Clinton. The permanent campaign focuses on the instruments of
media politics; the brand concept uncovers the underlying strategic concerns of
efforts to maintain voter loyalty through communication designed to provide reassurance,
uniqueness (clear differentiation from rivals), consistency of values, and
emotional connection with voters’ values and visions of the good life.
The practical attraction of branding for campaigners is its familiarity. Branding
emerged from marketing concepts and methods that have been employed in politics
on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1970s. Its emphasis on image is a more
developed version of service marketing’s key concern for reputation, based on
record and credible promises, which for politicians is pretty much the only thing
of substance that they can offer to voters before election. Its qualitative research
techniques, designed to tap into emotional connection, are essentially an extension
of the type of methods long used in political advertising research. However,
the crucial added value of branding is that it provides a conceptual structure to
link advertising insight into all aspects of the brand, positioning, development,
and promotion; and unlike advertising, it is not wedded to a particular form of
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communication. Paradoxically given the shared methods, the marketing turn to
branding has coincided with shaken faith in advertising itself as capable of
encompassing all the details, big and small, that create brand image. And Philip
Gould is one of those former advertisers who now claim we are living in a postadvertising
world.
Political Branding: A Consumer Model
of Political Communication
It is not possible here to explore all the consequences of consumer politics,
still less all the normative questions that naturally arise. However, here are a few
preliminary conclusions:
Consumer model of political communication. The mass-media dominated,
agenda-setting, advertising-driven model of political campaigning, while far from
dead, is in decline. Media-centered explanations are decreasingly able to encompass
the strategic logic and promotional changes of either election campaigns or
government communication. Branding is both a cause and effect of the shift
toward a thoroughly consumerized paradigm of political communication. This is
evident not just in campaigns and the rebranding of Blair, but also in U.K. government
communications over the past fifteen years. Brand research and promotion
is now commonplace for government departments (Needham 2003, 17),
while the Government Information and Communication Service has for some
time been considering ways to develop a corporate brand image for government
itself.1
It is a progression of the process of the remodeling of the governmentcitizen
relationship along consumer lines that has been a marked feature of
“modernization” on both sides of the Atlantic since the early 1990s (Cohen 2003;
Hilton 2001; Needham 2003; Scammell 2003).
Branding is both a cause and effect of the shift
toward a thoroughly consumerized paradigm
of political communication.
There is a perfect circle in the brand approach: campaigners research citizens
as though they were consumers, and their research tells them that citizens’ attitudes
toward politics are profoundly shaped by their experience as consumers.
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This is made clear in Gould’s 2003 brand environment analysis titled “The Empty
Stadium: The World Turned Upside Down,” in which he argued for a new campaign
paradigm. The analysis posited a fundamental mismatch between people’s
experience as confident consumers and insecure citizens. Affluence and choice
had empowered people as consumers, but globalization, threats of terrorism, and
environmental erosion had led to insecure citizens. Individuals’ greater control as
consumers exacerbated their sense of loss of control as citizens. Conventional
politics was blamed for the rising climate of insecurity and social fracture, while
being considered irrelevant to a “new consumer world of empowerment, selfactualization,”
and personal values. Consumer power had led to a paradigm shift
within marketing, from “interruption marketing” (unasked for, unwelcome) to
“permission marketing” (anticipated, relevant, personal). All interruption marketing
was resisted, said Gould, but political communication was the most resisted
of all. Political campaigns must follow marketing and develop more personal,
interactive messages: “if we play the game as we have always done,” the stadium
will continue to empty.
Brand connection. A driving concern of branded politics is connection. Gould
says of his work that it is all about connection; he represents the “voice of the
electorate” in Labour strategy meetings. Recent moves toward a more personal
and interactive communication (including, e.g., Howard Dean’s fabled opensource
campaign) suggest a positive role for consumer politics. However, it is also
true that the voice Gould represents is not the electorate but a small part of it,
primarily the soft supporters and undecideds that constitute target voters. Party
members, hard-core supporters, and those who say they are unlikely to vote are
rarely the subject of focus groups (Burkitt 2002). Political brand equity, in other
words, is largely defined by the undecideds. It means almost inevitably that political
brand equity has shallow roots and is easily buffeted. This is a striking difference
from commercial branding where much of the effort is directed at retaining
the loyalty of existing customers.
Hard and soft politics. Branding theoretically should include both the hard
politics (policies, issues, record of performance) and the soft (emotional connection,
values, likeability). It does not necessarily lead to a wholesale flight from
hard, “proper” politics, the perennial complaint against political marketing.
However, the example of the reconnection strategy shows how branding may
muddy these waters. It dealt with the hardest of hard issues, the decision to go to
war, and resulted in a strategy that compelled Blair to account for his actions
before fierce public scrutiny. Yet at the core of the strategy was the softest of politics:
that merely by appearance, communication style, and tone, he could draw
much of the sting of public anger. A generous reading of the reconnection strategy
might be that it displayed a refreshing attention to the emotional intelligence
of voters. A more damning verdict is that branding is yet another step on the road
to Politics Lost. Journalist Joe Klein’s decades-spanning acquaintance with U.S.
elections and political consultants led him unequivocally to that conclusion. For
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Klein, no one was more cynically nonpolitical than George W. Bush’s strategist
Karl Rove, for whom there were only three basic questions that matter to voters:
Is the candidate a strong leader? Can I trust him? Does he care about people like
me? The hard politics of specific issues were only useful as sticks to beat opponents
or as illustrations of candidate brand values (Klein 2006, 144-45).
However, branding is not easily categorized as a force for either good or ill. It
does not, any more than any other marketing technique in politics, supply singleroute
solutions. Its research results, like any other, must be interpreted and negotiated
by the relevant political actors. Its application, as for any commercial brand,
will be shaped by consideration of the environment, the structural, social, and cultural
factors that affect people’s choices. Much like the citizen-consumer debate
itself, it is double edged, offering new potential and creating new anxieties.
[B]randing is not easily categorized as a force
for either good or ill.
Note
1. James Humphreys, formerly head of the Strategic Communication Unit, initiated the “government
brand” communication effort.
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