I AM WORRIED about David Cameron. I fear he will have too much policy. I am concerned that there will be too much substance and not enough style.
In 1975 Volkswagen introduced the Rabbit on the American market. And it was good. It was economical, it didn’t break down and its hatchback design was an improvement on its rivals. “The best car in the world for under $3,500,” bragged the company in full-page advertisements. It probably was. But sales were disappointing.
In his book How Brands Become Icons, Douglas Holt explains why. The traditional view of branding was that it was necessary to identify a unique selling proposition — Crest toothpaste has distinctive cavity-fighting ingredients, Dove soap is gentle on the skin because it contains one quarter cleansing cream — and then tirelessly communicate this benefit to consumers. Holt calls this “mind-share branding”, trying to imprint a view of the brand’s unique benefits on the minds of consumers. Yet, Holt says, for many brands this approach is not enough. He dubs these “identity brands”.
An identity brand — Coke, Nike, Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s — is valued not so much for what it does as for how it makes consumers feel about themselves. One of the earliest identity brand adverts was L’Oréal’s slogan “Because I’m worth it”. The brand is bought largely to help the purchaser to define their identity. Volkswagen recovered when it stopped selling itself on its maintenance record and started selling itself as the provider of the sort of car that a creative individual would drive.
To promote an identity brand you tell a story, one that resonates with people, one that they want to be part of. Corona turned itself into the party beer with adverts that told stories of people drinking it on the beach at spring break. Mind-share branding works differently: it works by pounding on about the benefits of the product. But Holt believes that this is suitable only for “low-involvement” goods or business-to-business services.
Political parties, in fact political causes, are classic identity brands. Voters make choices in order to make statements about themselves, to establish their own identity, as much as they do because of anything the parties offer them. When people announce their voting behaviour, they often say “I’m a Tory” or “I’m Labour, me”. What was the slogan of the antiwar movement a couple of years back? Not “this war is wrong”, or “this war is expensive”, or “there are no weapons of mass destruction”. It was this: “Not in my name.” The ultimate identity slogan.
Most pundits, however, think of parties as mind-share brands. So here we all are in Bournemouth asking the Tories where the USP is, where the policies are, as if it were policies, benefits, the technical qualities of the brand and its products that determines elections. They don’t.
Naturally (this is the media we are talking about, after all, and high mindedness is our USP), there is a more high-minded case for policymaking. To start off with, policymaking tells us what parties are going to do in government, doesn’t it? It informs voters what to expect, doesn’t it? Well, actually, no, not really.
Let’s take the most often-cited case — tax cuts. If a party that might govern for a decade or more, lets you know what is going to be in its first budget, how well informed are you? If they set some targets for the NHS and a planned reorganisation of regional health authorities, how much do you really know about the way they will run the health service?
Between 2001 and 2005 Tony Blair committed this country to two major wars. Were they in his manifesto? Of course not: how could they have been?
Policymaking, then, is a bit of a con. Manifestos pretend to be an entire programme for government when in reality even the most detailed of them only cover a few items. Voters don’t make judgments based on these programmes and they shouldn’t either.
What matters is not such bogus “substance”, it is the governing style of the prospective rulers. Are they strong or weak? Interferers or liberals? Atlanticists or Europhiles? Moderates or extremists? Localisers or centralisers? Tax cutters or big spenders? Tied to vested interests or independent of them? Free traders or protectionists? In touch or out of touch? These are the sort of questions voters should ask.
Big emblematic policies — favouring the continuation of the NHS, supporting school vouchers, opposing the Euro and so on — can help, to a certain extent, to provide answers to such questions. Much more than that they can’t do.
But even if a manifesto doesn’t tell you what sort of government you are going to get, at least it is useful for the party taking office. Erm, no again.
I used to be director of the Conservative Party policy unit. There were four of us. The Government probably has as many people assigned to the development of policy on the export of carpets. We did not remotely have the ability to determine sensible policy on the myriad of detailed issues we would be facing in government. We couldn’t costs things properly or make the right trade-offs. But that didn’t stop us trying.
Labour has spent much of the past five years undoing stupid things it committed itself to in opposition and then did in its first five years. The problem with politicians, you see, is not that they don’t do what they say they will, but the opposite — they try to do what they said they would do, even after realising it wasn’t a good plan.
So if policies don’t win elections, inform voters or help with governing, why do the media keep asking for them, and why do politicians keep offering them? Simple. To keep us all entertained.
Let’s review yesterday’s papers, shall we? Full pages on a stray remark about autism at a fringe meeting, reports of a tax revolt that wasn’t happening, a Tory donor questioned by police and a huge story in the Daily Mail informing us that a new family tax policy was about to be announced. The Mail provided us with costings and everything, which was clever of them considering that the policy doesn’t, as far as I can discover, exist.
Why did these stories appear? Partly to fill the space normally occupied by policy announcements — crackdowns on internet porn, a five-point plan on dental hygiene, you know the sort of stuff — that are carefully handed out to newspapers to make sure everybody is usefully occupied. Without it the space gets filled one way or another. And some media outlets decide that they will make up their own policies if none is given to them.
The Conservative Party conference has been rich in useful information about the sort of prime minister Mr Cameron will be. He declared from the platform, for instance, that he belongs to the centre, an extraordinary, unprecedented remark for a modern Conservative leader to make.
But soon all those policy groups will report and we’ll be done for. We’ll stop learning all this useful style stuff and “substance” will rule the day. Let’s hope David Cameron puts it off as long as possible.
