by Peter Goddard

“We need a new brand.”

It’s a question marketers often dread from a customer. This is because, nine times out of ten, what they are really asking for is a new logo, a strapline and a colour scheme.

This is not a brand. Marty Neumeier in The Brand Gap defines a brand as “A person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company,” which is as good a definition as any.

Because the brand is, in fact, this relationship with the customer, it is vastly more likely to be the defined by a customer’s experience with your organisation than by your “look and feel”.

Of course, your logo is part of this. If your brand is your personality, your logos and straplines can be likened to your clothing. An outfit may be useful for forming a first impression, but eventually you will be judged by your actions.

This is something clearly understood by Steve Hilton, the nearest politics currently has to a new master of the dark arts since Peter Mandelson’s glide back into the shadows.

Hilton managed to turn around the popular view of the Conservatives as the nasty party and re-invent David Cameron as an electable prime minister. Whether it was hugging a hoodie, doing aid work in Africa or talking about “voting blue and going green”, something worked.

Enough voters changed their gut feeling about this Tory leader to put David Cameron in number ten.

When Hilton started making his changes, Labour was dismissive. It was just public relations trickery. Underneath the lick of ad man’s paint, they were still the same old Tories.

And since the election, the government’s record in office does indeed seem to have borne out what Labour was saying.

An austerity drive, for which we are all supposedly in it together, does not sit well with the offer of a new yacht to an old lady on her 60^th year in the job.

Taking a hatchet to public sector spending may make sense to a world-view where the private and voluntary sectors hold the key to efficiency and the delivery of a better Britain. But when the hand that wields the axe pauses only to hurl fistfuls of tenners at a financial sector viewed as venal and unrepentant, the fairness narrative collapses.

And when the party that changed its logo to a tree to demonstrate its commitment to the environment, slashes funding for solar energy by 70%, its green credentials go up in a puff of polluting smoke too.

Even Tories have joined in hating on Hilton.

For some it’s old-school Tory horror of a man sans tie going shoeless in the office – dangerously continental or, even worse, American. But for most, Hilton has become a caricature of a “blue sky” thinker or perhaps more accurately, a random idea generator, with the emphasis on random.

There is an emerging consensus in politics that Steve Hilton and his talents are doing more damage to the government than good.

The lesson Labour seems to be taking from this is that the party has no need of a Hiltonesque box of shiny tricks. The emphasis needs to be on substance not style. Branding is bad and advertising types best left on screen in Mad Men not in the real world of politics.

But as with much conventional wisdom this is totally wrong. It’s an analysis that fundamentally misunderstands what Steve Hilton is and what branding means.

If you look at the ideas popping out of the Hilton brains trust, there is nothing random about his thinking. His ideas feed a clear narrative of liberating businesses to be successful, and for business success to be predicated on an ability to contribute to society.

He was explicit about it in his pre-Cameron marketing consultancy, Good Business, writing “We have always believed that the most responsible businesses are those that embed their values throughout the company, in a way that aligns closely with business goals, rather than those that treat it as an add-on.”

In the Labour party, we might not sign-up to his beliefs or the policies to deliver them (though there is little in his personal agenda that could not have been spoken by Tony Blair), but there is clear method and little madness.

Steve Hilton’s problem is that his client has happily taken on board the pictures and slogans that were offered, but forgotten to improve the most important aspect of brand – the customer experience.

The failure here is not his, but the Tories’. They have failed to take the brand that he created, and that the voters chose, and bring it to reality in government. The voters have now experienced Hilton’s Tories, and found them not as caring, compassionate or green as promised.

This kind of mismatch between the brochure and the experience is toxic to any rebranding effort, and where Steve Hilton has failed it is because of the Tories failure to translate talk into action.

For Labour, the true lesson from Steve Hilton’s experience is the opposite of what many commentators are concluding. There doesn’t need to be less branding but more – it needs to flow through everything the party does.

Labour used to have a brand – New Labour. This defined the visuals, the words and the policies of the party. Critically, it was based on a policy outlook that then informed the linguistic and visual identity of the brand.

The public’s experience of the last years of Labour in government, combined with trajectory of the current leadership has well and truly junked this brand.

In itself, this is no bad thing. Brands need to be refreshed and updated to reflect their times and often this is best driven with an irreversible break.

But nothing has replaced New Labour. Where there was once a clear brand, understood by the public, there is now a vacuum.

And as in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Regardless of what the Labour party might intend, in the absence of a clear identity, the public will revert to what they know.

Same old Labour.

It’s a condition Steve Hilton would recognise it from his early experience with David Cameron. The marketing challenge faced by Labour today is remarkably similar to what Cameron had to contend with when he assumed the leadership of his party.

Now more than ever, Labour needs someone who understands what branding means and how to apply it wholeheartedly to the party in what they say, how they look, the policies they present and even how they behave internally as an organisation.

Those are big shoes to fill (figuratively speaking – actual shoes are strictly optional), but they need to be filled soon if the party is to stop being defined by stereotypes long past their sell-by date and start looking like a future government.

Peter Goddard is a sales and marketing consultant

Tags: branding, Labour Party, Peter Goddard, Steve Hilton

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