McBride, pollack & New Labour

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".
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Branding is based on an outdated and invalid desire to manipulate and control consumers’ unconscious.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.  

Comments

[kinglear]

Ah my favourite, gratuitous boobs. Mind you if that's GO's mad wife give me a nutter any day...

[chris]

It's not Mrs O, but Mrs Draper, aka Kate Garraway. No, I dunno either.

[kinglear]

Actually I knew that.. what she can possibly see in Draper is beyond me.. maybe she's the nutter.

[AN Apple]

Chris, how does this gibe with the cognitive biases you are so persuasive about? Might branding not work by using these biases? Perhaps you could use the salience effect by timing smears to coincide with elections?

[Bob B]

"McBride, however, represents the managerialist tendency in New Labour"

That flatters it IMO. McBride is just another manifestation of the ascendancy of the McStupid tendency, the same hubris which led on to the failures of all those big banks with head offices in Edinburgh. Hadrian had the bright idea all those years ago.

I'll probably be voting SNP at the general election next year if they put up a candidate in the London constituency where I live to give them a good send off, that or for LIP, the London Independence Party.

[nm]

If the brand over time merges with reality, then the Sainsbury campaign may have more value than you give it credit for. The purpose seems to be to get people to try Pollack, and allow the sales figures to merge with the reality of a fine tasting and relatively cheap fish. Can't see that the inference that they are simply trying to get people to buy an inferior product holds water.

[nm]

Bob B. Damian McBride was raised in North London by Irish parents. You are going to have to build that wall quite a bit further south than Hadrian did.

[Bob B]

Where was Gordon Brown born, brought up and educated?

[kinglear]

Bob B - in Fife. The interesting thing is - looked at from the perspective of Glasgow - the Catholic community is very Labourite (most of the City Councillors are Labour and Catholic) so maybe McBride is from that well known west of Scotland/Irish Catholic Labour tendency.As a scurrilous observation lots of them have red hair as well.....
I suppose its very similar to the Asian vote which, in the North of England, tends to be Labour as well.They don't have red hair.

[Guano]

In some of the comment on this story there seems to be a hint that Draper and McBride were trying to win back the 2 million or so voters that Labour has lost because of the invasion of Iraq, ID cards and other substantive issues. If so, that really would be daft. Voters who have been lost because of hard facts are only going to be won back by other hard facts, not by rebranding.

[Bruce Davis]

if you want a good exposition of the relationship between branding and reality, I recommend watching the final scene of the first series of Mad Men. The protagonist describes a 'new' brand positioning which is based on the human desire for memory and nostalgia based on the existential futility of his own life.

Brands come in many forms - good and bad representations of truths, realities, dreams and needs. New Labour subscribes to the idea that brand can replace cultural meaning with 'invented' rational/emotional meaning (my understanding of managerial culture) - successful though some of these brands are, they need to wake up to the fact that lasting meaning is created in the act of consumption and usage not as an 'evidence based' concept in the minds of marketers and policy wonks.