The classic definition of a brand is that it is everything people see, hear, think, sense and feel about a product, service or organisation. In the commercial world, brands exist to maximise profits. The most successful brands are cosseted with endless managerial love and buckets of cash from finance directors. Staying on top means employing very bright people and investing a great deal of money. The job of the bright people is to ensure the values of the brand endure, even as its benefits, features and personality change to account for new threats from the competition and changes in fashion, economics, technology and culture. The job of the finance director’s investment is to pay for brand promotion to ensure the money keeps rolling in. Brand strategy in business has the simple objective of driving profits, using the alchemy of a bond of trust between producer and consumer.
For close on 50 years, the UK’s political parties have sought the advice of professionals from the country’s leading advertising, marketing and public relations industries. These are the people who know about brands and how to build and refresh them. They are masters of understanding consumer perceptions, what motivates people, how to shift public opinion and crucially, how to persuade people to buy a product, adopt an idea or take an action.
In 1978, the then little-known advertising agency Saatchi&Saatchi was hired by the Conservative Party. The Tories had chosen Margaret Thatcher as their new leader. She had a radical agenda for Britain. The party’s brief to the agency asked it to create a campaign to position the Labour Party and government as presiding over a Britain in decline, ravaged by industrial unrest, failing local authorities and over-powerful trades unions.
Game-changing political communication
The agency’s first product – a poster seen all over the UK – has gone down in political and advertising industry history as a game-changing piece of communication. It showed an apparently endless, snaking, queue of people, running the entire length of the poster. At the front of the queue were the words “Unemployment Office.” Above the people, in full black capitals, it said “LABOUR ISN’T WORKING”. In very much smaller type on the right-hand bottom corner was the legend, “Britain’s better off with the Conservatives.”
The poster set the agenda for the 1979 general election that brought Mrs Thatcher to power. From the moment it became public (and combined with brilliant picture opportunity stunts and whirlwind tours by Thatcher across the UK) the Conservatives captured the political high ground. The future prime minister was seen as dynamic, full of drive, energy and commitment to her policies and philosophy. She was positioned as the new broom who would pull Britain back from a downward spiral. Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was increasingly perceived by voters as out of touch, weak, old-fashioned and ‘in the pockets’ of the trades unions bosses.
Thatcher sweeps into No.10
Margaret Thatcher swept into No.10 Downing St on 3 May 1979. She would win three general elections, each one with Saatchi&Saatchi in charge of the party’s communications strategies. It would become the world’s biggest advertising and communications group. It had a direct line to Mrs Thatcher and used the success of that relationship to build the business globally. The Saatchi brothers were the first in Europe to integrate political advertising with media relations and public relations techniques. Thatcher’s favourite at the agency was Tim Bell. Rumoured to be the creator of the ‘Labour isn’t working’ line, Bell later built his own agency on the back of being known as ‘Mrs Thatcher’s favourite ad man’.
What Bell and Saatchi&Saatchi did was make Margaret Thatcher the brand. Everything revolved around her. She was the first British politician to campaign like an American presidential candidate. Messaging was made simple, public appearances choreographed with detailed precision and speeches honed to produce headline-winning soundbites. Research revealed that many thought her voice hectoring and scolding. Experts were brought in to soften her cut-glass accent and knock off her harder vocal edges. She relied on the ad men and spin doctors to protect and enhance her public image, through good times and bad, while she radically changed the UK.
Margaret Thatcher was not a brand in the classical sense of the word. Her success was primarily founded on the tight management of her personality, so it became easier for her to persuade the voters that she had the recipe for success.
The professional advisers convinced Thatcher there was little to be gained for trying to persuade those implacably opposed to her and her policies. The central canon, they argued, was to build brand loyalty among those who had bought into the Thatcher vision. It was a strategy ruthlessly adhered to and given consistent support by the press barons, Murdoch and Rothermere. The Sun joined The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph in being the Tory party’s ever-dependable media.
The middle class and the ‘aspiring’ working class were corralled into the Thatcher orbit. The marketing tool of categorising households by socio-economic measures classed typical Thatcher-voting people as ‘Worcester Woman’, ‘Essex Man’ and ‘Mondeo Man’. Editorial copy was written to appeal to the perceptions, ambitions and attitudes of those groups. Market research didn’t drive policy. It drove communications strategy.
Political enemies (including those in her own party) concerned with the impact of Thatcher’s economic policies on the North of England, Wales and Scotland were simply ignored.
Ever-changing moods and a fickle press
The Thatcher revolution used marketing communications strategies and tactics tried and proven in the business world. But political parties and political movements differ greatly from commercial brands. A commercial brand required to react to competitive threats and significant marketplace changes need ask no one’s consent to change how a brand behaves. It might be a tweak to a logo or a changed tagline. It might be a radical change in pricing strategy or a fundamental change in positioning. Whatever is done is decided at the top of the business and then actioned.
Political parties and governments are driven by national and international events over which they rarely have any meaningful control. The public mood is ever-changing. Cabinets and parliamentary parties have factions that undermine unity. Party members in the country can become disheartened and troublesome to the leadership. Blind ambition from senior colleagues can knock a prime minister off course. The press is fickle and sometimes malicious. International affairs can infiltrate the national dialogue and change the course of political history. Politics is really nothing like the calm of the marketing director’s office.
Political brand building far easier 40 years ago
In the Britain of the 1970s and 80s, applying classic brand and communications methods to politics was a far easier proposition than now. Then, there was no internet. No social media. Mobile phones were expensive and rudimentary. Just four TV channels served the UK. Only a handful of commercial radio stations existed and none of the ‘shock jock’ variety. The biggest political players in mass communication were mainly Tory-supporting newspapers. The national press had a combined circulation of over 12 million.
Fleet Street still has power in UK politics, but it is a waning force. In 1992, 53% of UK adults read at least one national newspaper. By 2006 that had fallen to 45%. In 2023, a study by the media regulator, Ofcom, put the figure at 26%.
The Ofcom survey also recognised the range of news and opinion sources the digital age has brought us. Traditional TV channels are still the biggest source of the nation’s news, reaching some 70% of people, but that figure is down 9% on the previous few years. Online accounted for 68%, social media 47% and radio 41%. We now constantly move between platforms. Social media is frequently the home of ‘silo influence’, where people listen mainly to others who share their beliefs about how the world should be.
All of this makes audience targeting more complicated, time consuming and harder to manage than ever in the past. The news agenda now moves with such rapidity that messaging can be out of date within minutes.
Such profound change in the media landscape is mirrored in the decline in party political activism. Political activists are the vital foot soldiers who carry messages into communities. They know their patch and they know large numbers of local people. They matter far more than is often appreciated, because people are many more times likely to believe someone they know than a distant political leader, newspaper columnist, radio pundit or poster on a bill board.
According to a 2022 report by the House of Commons Library, there are around 850k members of the main UK political parties.
In 1984, some 4% of the electorate were politically active. In 2013 it was 0.08% (a historic low). By 2022 it had gone up to 1.5%. Overall, the number of political activists in the population has fallen by around 60% over the past 40 years. That’s a huge fall in the human resource available to carry party messages to the nation’s doorsteps.
The national picture today is of the falling influence of a fragmented media. Multiple sources of news and opinion reach the electorate in ways politicians struggle to conquer. A long decline in party membership and activism has loosened the ties between communities and national political leaders.
Declining trust in political institutions and media
There are two other elements that make it increasingly hard for political parties to employ long-established brand management and communications thinking, processes and tactics.
First is the non-stop news cycle. It is a media environment no longer exclusively owned by press barons and monolithic broadcasters. Everyone is a journalist now. For every political development, be it policy, personality or scandal, there are millions of citizens pumping out an opinion. It is the 21st-century Tower of Babel, a form of communications chaos. That is not a comfortable environment for brands. They prefer order, predictability, structure and recognisable behavioural parameters.
The origin of brands is to be found in the contamination of foodstuffs by unscrupulous businesses. Substances like sawdust, chalk and, in the most notorious cases, arsenic, were found in food. Honest businesses sought ways to differentiate their safe and properly made products from the dangerous and dodgy. Thus, brands were born. Names like Fortum & Mason, H J Heinz, Cadbury Brothers, Keillors of Dundee, Baxters of Speyside. Brands trusted to this day.
Media brands are not doing so well. The global PR company Edelman, produces an annual “Trust Barometer.” Its 2023 figures saw the biggest decline recorded in trust in the UK media. The British media was the least trusted out of the 28 countries surveyed. Only 31% rated UK media as trustworthy, down 6% from the previous year.
The UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) carried out a ‘trust in government’ survey in 2023. Only 24% of people trusted the House of Commons or House of Lords. Political parties did far worse. Only 12% of people surveyed had any trust in them. The numbers were broadly the same for the devolved administrations.
Five prime ministers in six years
Brands, remember, are based on trust. If the voter doesn’t sufficiently trust political parties, the institutions of government or the media that not so long ago had a monopoly of conveying news and views to the masses, that leaves little room for the brand-building of political parties. It won’t be measured, creative and sustainable brand communications that we will see around the forthcoming general election. It will be short-term thinking, tactical opportunism, personal attacks on the integrity and trustworthiness of political opponents and countless streams of digital bots burrowing into the mobile phones of carefully selected demographics.
Of course, there will be billboards, party political broadcasts, leaflets through letterboxes, canvassers at the door and the odd hustings. So far, there is not the slightest sign from any of the parties of anything that remotely looks like the type of coherent, focussed and coordinated campaigns that brought Margaret Thatcher, and later Tony Blair, to power.
Thatcher was in charge from 1979 to 1990. Blair from 1997 to 2008. In between, John Major graced No.10 from 1990 to 1997. Three prime ministers in 25 years. Since 2016, the UK has had five prime ministers. Brands are just like people. They like stability. You tinker with a successful brand at your peril. Tinkering with the peoples’ trust is also a perilous activity.
Brand owners and managers are not infallible. Brands die for many reasons. The most common is that owners make mistakes that see the brand lose consumer confidence.
Margaret Thatcher was the longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century. She lost office when her own Cabinet colleagues turned on her. They could see that she had made too many mistakes, that the lustre had worn, and that Brand Thatcher was rapidly losing the trust of the electorate. There was nothing the ad men could do. When the consumer has lost trust the brand is dead.
Now, there’s a lesson for our times.
Listen to an interview with Martin Roche here.
For more information on UK newspaper circulation visit The Audit Bureau of Circulation
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