Page 171 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

achieve incremental change to fit a change of Prime Minister. In
supermarket terms we want to sell an updated product, not a new
brand’ (quoted in Butler and Kavanagh, 1992, p. 39).
The success of John Major in the election of 1992 (if not
subsequently) indicates that in political image-management, as
in other branches of the style industry, fashions change. The
subsequent rise of Tony Blair, however, and the ‘making over’ of his
party into New Labour (and all that has gone with that in terms of
party organisation and media relations) confirm that the image
managers remain at the heart of the political process.

Political marketing
The individual politician in a liberal democracy is, in theory at least,
the representative of a political party. Even leaders who became as
powerful and charismatic as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair are
ultimately subordinated to the party machine. While Thatcher came
to embody the Conservative Party in a way that few politicians have
ever done, when in the end she was perceived as having become an
electoral liability she was removed from office. The party, then, has
its own identity and character which, like the personal images of its
leaders, can be shaped and moulded. As Bruce notes, ‘all effective
communications strategies contain what is called a positioning
statement, a clear analysis of what the brand (or company, person,
political party, etc.) is for: who it is for, and why anyone should be
interested in choosing it’ (1992, p. 87) [his emphasis].
In designing the strategy, as we noted earlier, marketing and
research consultants must first establish the ‘core values’ of the
party’s target audience, which then become the basis for selling the
organisation as the one best able to defend and reflect those values.
The previous chapter examined the uses of advertising in
political communication. Other techniques available to the image-
maker include the design of party logos and other signifiers of
corporate identity. In the mid-1970s the Conservative Party adopted
its ‘torch’ logo. Ten years later, as part of its overhauling of
communication strategy, Labour abandoned the symbolism of
the red flag (viewed by the leadership as a sign with negative
connotations of bureaucratic, Soviet-style socialism) in favour of
the ‘red rose’, a logo first successfully employed by the French
socialists. Both parties, as already noted, expend great efforts in the
design of conference backdrops, seeking to symbolise with colour
and form their core political values.

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