In the mid 1980s, the British marketing fraternity stood at a crossroads.
For decades, the Procter and Gamble (P&G) model had dominated. They believed in selling the best product designed through market research to meet consumer needs. It’s an approach which treats people as rational, well-informed utility-maximisers. We use advertising to announce and explain the benefits, simply and concisely with hard facts. It’s not art. It’s science.
In the 1980s new brands emerged adopting new and different approaches. Lever Brothers championed it. Their brand, Persil, competed with P&G’s Ariel. The product was not great at removing stains or whitening whites but Lever had a better understanding of what people really valued. Their advertising wasn’t about product performance but about how it felt to be a busy mum, caring for your family. Brands like this succeeded, despite being functionally inferior.
Increasingly we talked about the USP ‘unique selling proposition’ being replaced by the ESP ‘emotional selling proposition’.
For other brands, competing with an established brand leader meant getting creative with new, sometimes less tangible, benefits. If Cadbury owns ‘creaminess’ maybe there’s a gap for Mars with a chocolate that’s the crumbliest. Or the most exotic. Or the most filling. Or the least filling. Almost anything really.
Take Radion Automatic washing powder. It was launched in the mid 1980s by Lever Brothers to take on P&G’s Bold. Its proposition was that it removed the odours other washing powders left behind. Here was a new brand looking to grow the market by solving a problem which nobody had ever encountered. It was pretty successful for about a decade, peaking at about 7% market share
This is what marketers call brand positioning. Owning a distinct, ownable space in the market.
It’s essential for packaged goods like detergent.
But (and I think you know where I’m going with this….) not a great way to formulate government policy.
So my heart sinks when I hear the term ‘wedge issues’. It represents almost everything that is wrong with British politics right now.
The current PM, Rishi Sunak, wants us to support him for reversing the “tax on meat” and the “seven bins for recycling” – two things which do not exist and never did. Problems nobody has ever experienced. Supposed bias in the BBC? Not an issue unless you’re some kind of culture warrior or one of their competitors. Gender reassignment? Affects virtually nobody. Nigel Farage’s bank account? Don’t get me started.
I know defeating imaginary enemies has been a mainstay in political rhetoric since before the Nazis, and it featured high among the tactics of previous PMs, Theresa May and Liz Truss. But this is something different. It’s actually driving mainstream policy formulation.
Sunak identified opposing ULEZ (ultra low emissions zone) as a potential ‘wedge issue’ after it seemed polarising in a recent bye-election campaign. As a result he has shifted policy away from various measures essential for Britain’s decarbonising commitments. ULEZ is an issue which affects hardly anybody – at most a couple of percent of car drivers in a few places in the country. On the other hand decarbonising the economy is the single biggest long term issue facing the next ten, twenty, thirty governments. Even the second worst Prime Minister in our history, Boris Johnson, decried this shift as foolhardy. Hmm.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s coming up to a general election and campaigning now takes priority over everything. But this goes beyond the short term. It has become the norm.
Government policy is now created with virtually no regard for the actual issues it purports to address.
The worst example of this is also the highest profile – immigration. At no point in the acres of news coverage about the government’s Rwanda scheme, is there any serious consideration of the problem we are supposedly trying to address.
The Tories immigration policy is Radion Automatic. Even if it achieved what it was intended for (which it won’t) it solves a problem that nobody has ever experienced. Because there isn’t one. Nobody is out of a job because of illegal immigration. Nobody is unable to find affordable housing because of asylum seekers. Nobody is unable to see a Doctor because of illegal immigrants. These are all convenient myths which are staggeringly widely believed and which hardly anyone seems interested in refuting.
Is immigration a problem? No, immigration is the essential mechanism by which we prevent the UK economy collapsing under an ageing population and unsupportable dependancy ratio.
According to a recent YouGov poll 45% of Brits believe most immigrants enter the UK illegally. It’s actually more like 1%. Probably less.
Yet ‘Stop the Boats’ is top government priority and the ‘Rwanda policy’ is the headline in every news bulletin.
In a population so badly informed, maybe it’s understandable that political parties are selling us policies like detergent or chocolate bars.
The tone and content of political coverage has followed with tragic inevitability. Nobody is talking about th content or impact of public policy. It’s as though we’ve all become too clever by half all of a sudden and we’re no longer satisfied with the content. We have to be analysing the motives and rationale behind each nuance. We’ve stopped talking about public policy and focused exclusively on political tactics. Which means the actual policies themselves escape any kind of meaningful scrutiny. hence we get nonsense like ‘stop the boats’.
And here’s a big problem. We can blame the right wing press and online misinformation to an extent. But there is also a new generation of political commentators who have emerged seemingly with a brief to hold the government to account. These are the folks we should be turning to for some context and good sense.
Brilliant and well-connected podcasters like Alastair Campbell and Emily Maitlis are often outspoken in their criticism of the Tories. And yet, much as I admire and enjoy The rest is Politics, The News Agents etc, they are often complicit in perpetuating an irrelevant agenda, which does little for ordinary people.
It’s ironic because Campbell’s book ‘But what can I do’ is all about reconnecting ordinary people and addressing political disillusionment.
I really want these people to help move us towards a better informed politics with a bit more truth and genuine debate.
Ian Dunt has expressed it well (and suitably angrily) in his blog Striking 13:
“Beneath all this, there is the journalistic failure. The entirety of this year has been spent following the trials and tribulations of the prime minister and his Cabinet. Who is up and who is down? Will Braverman challenge the leadership? Can Sunak manage the perpetual grievance culture on his backbenches? Is he being criticised by his predecessors? But how much did we read about the actual reasons that HS2 was formulated, or the consequences of scrapping it, or the breakdown in productivity in the asylum system that leads to the use of hotels?
Sunak is able to operate with extreme superficiality in his policy-making because the national political narrative also operates at that level. There’s little assessment of why something works or why it doesn’t, what the consequence of its reform would be, or whether it’s a sensible idea. It’s like trying to design a nutritious diet based on the froth in a cappuccino.
Sunak is not something that has been inflicted on our political culture. He is an encapsulation of it: empty, vacuous, superficial, lacking in coherence or consistency, inward-looking and redundant.”
Ian Dunt Striking 13 review of 2023
Many years ago, I made a presentation to a room full of PR executives (yes I know, I was young and we all need to earn a living). I said:
“Politics is a sub-set of the PR industry now”
It wasn’t an original thought. I got it from Matthew Parris, in a speech he gave at The RSA. I was also recalling the exhortations of the old socialist stalwart Tony Benn. He would get exasperated by chat about personalities and speculation on who was up and who was down. “But what about the policies” he would exclaim.
I had never really thought through the implications of politics as PR fodder. Now I see.
Public policy reimagined as marketing positioning. It’s very ugly.
Bring back Proctor & Gamble. At least Ariel did actually get your clothes clean.
The Aspidistra 