Branding

Stumbling and Mumbling

There’s a link between two of the most absurd stories of the last few days - Sainsbury’s attempt to get us to call pollack Colin (pronounced co-lan), and McBride/Draper's efforts to smear the Tories. Both are/were exercises in branding. They are efforts by managers to change perceptions. Sainsbury’s want to change the image of pollack from "ugly thing" to "tasty alternative to cod", and McBride wanted to change our perception of George Osborne from "mature, experienced astute economist and self-made man who’s well-equipped to be Chancellor" (I might have missed something) to "bloke with a mad wife".51245785qn9
However, both efforts might be just managerialist hubris. A new book by Jonathan Salem Baskin - Branding Only Works on Cattle - argues that branding just doesn’t work:
Branding is based on an outdated and invalid desire to manipulate and control consumers’ unconscious. It looks good and feels good to the people who produce it, but it has little to no effect on consumer behaviour…It is the conceit that marketers can convince [consumers] of things that aren’t substantiated by fact or the reality of experience.
What matters, says Baskin, isn’t brand image or awareness or subconscious brand images, but hard fact, and real experience. He quotes a guy from Lenovo:
A brand, over time, will converge with reality. So you manage the brand by managing reality.
A brand name that’s not backed by a quality product or service will fail, however much is invested in “building the brand”: think of Consignia or Dasani. Sainsburys might be able to tempt people to buy pollack once, by generating publicity and displaying it more prominently in its shops. But folk will only buy it a second time if it tastes nice. Branding, ultimately, is trumped by hard fact.
In this context, McBride represents the comic excrescence of the tragedy of New Labour. The New Labour “project” was an attempt to transform a (declining) mass party whose members connected with voters every day in the workplace, social clubs and streets into a centralized top-down organization who connected with the public in the way that advertisers do - by manipulating brand images.
What New Labour forgot, or never knew, was exactly what Lenovo guy knows - that a brand converges with reality. Real votes depend upon people’s actual lived experience: are we getting value for our taxes? Is the country better governed than in 1997? These are questions that are posed day-in, day-out by, in schools, hospitals and our dealing with the police, by real individuals.
McBride, however, represents the managerialist tendency in New Labour - the belief that these real experiences can be over-ridden by top-down exercises in re-branding.
In this sense, he is not an “isolated case”. He is a pustule that is a symptom of a disease - that genuine politics has been infected by managerialism

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