Keeping brands where they belong
By Sandy Belford, Strategy Director at Principals
Words, they come and go. They evolve, they change and sometimes lose their original meaning altogether.
It’s easy to get into a strop about it. Grumpy old men fighting against the tide of linguistic change has become a publishing category in its own right. It’s hard not to sympathise as words (like familiar friends) lose meaning and become transformed into… something altogether different.
To fight it is clearly fruitless and the roll call of words that have fallen in my generation alone is long and filled with some previously useful and very evocative words.
‘Awesome’ is long gone, transformed from ‘inducing fear’ (I am thinking Cyclone Yasi, the Japanese tsunami, The Matterhorn, a raging bull elephant, the Charge of the Light Brigade…) into ‘marginally better than alright’.
‘I am good’ as a common response to ‘how are you?’ is now an everyday replacement for ‘I am fine’, although each time I use it, I hear my friend Ralph curtly telling me “whether you are good or not is a matter of opinion and not for you to say”. Infer, as a synonym for deduce is now effectively a synonym for imply. We’ve bid farewell to the original meaning. We might even, to use another bugbear of some language sticklers, ‘farewell’ it.
The ‘brand’ word is evolving and changing. It’s creeping into places it never used to be seen and two particular uses have caught my attention. One is personal and the second political.
Let’s get personal first.
In Saturday 2nd July’s Sydney Morning Herald (Styled by mother – children taught to build online brand), I read:
“Parents must teach their children as young as eight how to craft a ‘personal brand’ as social media sites threaten to record the worst of adolescent behaviour, says mother and brand manager, Sharon Williams”.
Now there are two issues here. There’s the need to advise children on the implications of posting information that might come back to bite them later in life. No issues whatsoever there. And all power to Ms Williams for championing it.
The issue that leapt off the page for me was the idea of an eight year old having a ‘personal brand’. And the idea of equating all of the, let’s face it, contrived, commercial, conceptual thinking of what goes into a brand to the life of a child? Children as brands? I don’t think so. I am not a parent, just a disinterested (and there’s another lost word; check it out) observer. But I like to think of children as growing and developing, exploring, become one thing, becoming another, not according to some master plan, as a personal brand almost implies, but according to their own interests and the opportunities that life throws at them. As individuals. Children are surely not brands.
And so to the political.
In The Australian,18 June, 2011, Kristina Keneally and Ben Keneally argued (ALP needs to reignite the light on the hill) for a complete review of everything the Labor Party stands for. “The Labor Party’s problem is not its internal processes: it is its brand appeal”, they said.
In the course of the article, they used the brand word no fewer than 14 times, invoking virtually every tenet of commercial brand marketing – Labor’s brand appeal, brand position, its brand promise, brand values and its brand proposition…
Political parties have been using the principles of branding for years, mainly in the field of communications and, most specifically, campaign themes. ‘Kevin07’ did the job in 2007. ‘Yes we can’, worked for Obama in 2008. Julia Gillard’s ‘Moving Forward’, wasn’t quite as memorable. And if you followed British politics in the 70s and 80s, how could you forget Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Labour isn’t working’, whatever you might think of her party and politics?
But the Keneallys are going much further than saying that Labor needs a new campaign theme. They are questioning what the Labor Party brand stands for and how that should be brought to life in everything that a political party does – ”the policies, recruitment plans, communication tools, internal processes and personal behaviours and ethics that will reinforce this commitment”.
It’s an interesting idea. They are suggesting that one can manage a political party in the same way that one manages a commercial brand. And I have two questions about that. Firstly, can we? And secondly does it help in any way at all to think of a political party as a brand?
On the first question, I need to state an interest. I am a branding consultant and I would have to say that, were a political party to knock on our door and ask for advice, I don’t think I could resist the temptation to try, whether or not I think that any political party is or isn’t a brand. I would take the opportunity to apply the principles of branding to politics. But when it came to applying that thinking, would I use the brand word? I am not so sure.
I am sure that all political parties should be answering the fundamental questions of branding – what do we stand for (our brand values), what is it that we offer to our audiences (our brand proposition), how do we wish to seen in the minds of our audiences (our brand positioning) and what is the guiding thought that drives our organisation (our brand essence).
And then they have to answer the really big one – how do we ensure that, every time someone comes in touch with us (at every customer touchpoint, to evoke the language of branding), they see, feel and experience a consistent and compelling message about Labor, the Liberals… whoever.
But does it really help to invoke the language of branding? I spend every working day thinking of and working with brands. But when it comes to the personal and the political, I think twice.
Invoking the language of branding in politics and even more in our personal lives is missing the point. We are not contrived creations to be managed and manipulated. We are individuals with characteristics and personalities, failings. You get the picture. I want people to think of themselves as individuals, not brands.
Branding is about managing assets and resources for commercial ends – and let’s keep it to that.
Invoking the language of branding is certainly attention grabbing. And it makes for great headlines. But it’s trying to make something (childhood, politics – human situations we all identify with) into something they are not – things to be managed and controlled. Let’s leave celebrities to manage their lives as if they are a business. But not, please, our children.
And finally, in the case of politics, let’s invoke one last mantra from the world of branding. What, in all this, is the language of the consumer, the voter? Do they think of politicians and parties as brands and does it help them or your cause to talk of politics in the same context as branding? I think not. They’ll wonder what on earth you are talking about.
By all means use brand thinking, wherever it is useful. But please let’s talk to each other like human beings, not commercial brand managers.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) - 7th July 2011
