How Not to Market a Brand
It’s election time in the United Kingdom.
This is the third general election in four years – 2015, 2017, 2019. There have been European elections – 2014 & 2019. In addition, in 2016, there have been elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Plus a plethora of local elections and the odd by-election. And during this period two divisive referenda: one on Scottish independence in 2014 and the other on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union in 2016.
It almost seems like the UK enjoys voting! The fact is I have met no one who is looking forward to this election. This is in large part down to the at times lackluster and then at other times bitter campaigns fought by all the parties.
It is an election that has seen all political parties bleed support. A mixture of apathy and repulsion are driving increasing numbers of voters into the “none of the above” camp.
This is nowhere more evident than in the public response to the party leaders. Boris Johnson is the leader of the Conservatives. He is widely distrusted. That’s putting it politely. Most people, even those who are voting for him, accept that he is economical with the truth. His political opponents put it more bluntly: he is a liar. He comes across at times incapable of answering questions. Instead, he resorts to an entertaining but wholly self-scripted monologue about whatever his policy is or whatever his well-worn slogan is at the time, for example, “get Brexit done!”
France’s Le Monde had this to say of the UK’s current Prime Minister:
“No longer the clown, the prime minister has started to show his true face,” it said. “Brutal; hungry for power; fleeing the public and awkward questions; disregarding parliament; brandishing a nationalism and an arrogance worthy of Trump.”
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is no better. Less a man who does, to tell the truth as one who has but one note to his repertoire. Corbyn is a throwback to the 1970s. He is the type of socialist that used to haunt universities and unemployment queues back then. Corbyn parrots the usual and now repetitive Marxist lines on any subject under the sun, lines as old as they are predictable. While Johnson comes across as untrustworthy, Corbyn appears merely dim.
During the last general election in 2017, Corbyn defied his critics and the odds stacked against him and his party. The magic of that campaign has deserted him during the 2019 general election. He looks like a man going through the motions. After all, he is 70 years old.
This is how the British left leaning newspaper The Guardian’s John Crace summed it up when observing Corbyn on the stump this week with a friendly crowd.
“At times Corbyn yelled so loud that he almost lost his voice. But he just wasn’t getting much back. In the past these gigs had been mutual love-ins. Now he was pouring his heart and soul into his act and getting next to nothing back. The chemistry just wasn’t there. People just weren’t feeling it in the way they once had. They had come for a glimmer of hope. They left with the scars of a raging against the dying of the light.”
Like a rock act going through the motions, and now too old to care, this seems to be the Corbyn Tribute Act now playing the hits from 2017.
Then there is the Liberal Democrats. The party’s leader is new: Jo Swinson. She had favorable ratings when the election campaign started. The more the public saw of her the more that rating plummeted. Now, on the eve of the poll, she is as despised as the other two leaders. In short, she comes across as an over excited supply teacher, one that is newly qualified and prone to wagging her finger at her pupils as she lectures them. She is as unattractive to the electorate as her party has increasingly become irrelevant to the wider debate.
But we can’t help being who we are after all, people get that, what they have little time for is when politicians live in fantasyland. Swinson kept insisting she was a real contender to be the next UK prime minister. This is something the LibDems go through every election. But it turned out that Swinson actually believed it.
“I can be the next prime minister,” she insisted. “Why so ambitious? Because we can be and we have to be.” Now, here we have ambition – and delusion. I’d like to score the winning goal for Germany in a World Cup Final but no matter how much I close my eyes and wish it isn’t going to happen. The minute the electorate realized that this was the game she was playing – deluded fantasy stuff – her ratings and her party ratings went through the floor.
The real star of the political scene is the Scottish National Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon. She is a wily performer in front of television screens. Her approval ratings are consistently high – and even so in England, where the SNP do not stand. She appears grown up and well briefed in a way that the other leaders do not. And this is even if there is a gaping hole in the SNP project – how to pay for independence?
Labour, Tory, Liberal and SNP – these are all brands. They are brands in the same way as your company brand or even your personal one. This election campaign is a study in how not to perform. Learn from it!
You can build a brand or you can harm it. With the exception of the SNP, during the UK’s 2019 general election campaign the main political parties have all tarnished their “brands”. Outlandish promises with not a funding plan in sight, mixed with the lowest forms of vitriol that passed for any real campaigning, and with not one policy in sight, you had the makings of an election campaign that felt like a long and painful collective constipation for this increasingly disunited kingdom.
