This week Australia elected a new Prime Minister. Kevin Rudd has now replaced John Howard after an 11 year elect as the head of Australian politics.
I’m not going to comment on who should lead Australia or whether Australia’s election decision was right or wrong. But what I am going to talk about is how big a part, ‘BRAND’ played in this 2007 election.
Both political camps, Howard’s Liberal and Rudd’s Labor parties, made use of the media as the front line in their campaigns. But it clearly showed that Labor had the upper hand with their media strategy.
Labor looked at their campaign from a branding point of view. They promoted to sell their product. The product in this case being Kevin Rudd himself.
While the Liberals seemed to apply a ‘don’t vote for them’ mentality, Labor applied a ‘What we are going to do for you’ style solution.
The Liberal messages were negative. Labor’s were positive. People are attached to the positive and repelled by negative. People also want to hear the ‘What’s in it for me?’ statements.
There were also a few notable advertising slip ups based on this principle. One Liberal ad tried to convince us to vote Liberal to avoid the return of unions. But the methods used fell well short. Let me point out a few errors.
- ‘We’re coming back’ was the message repeated throughout the advertisement. The comment was voiced by a jovial unionist happy about the idea of ‘Coming Back’. This put a positive spin to the statement, which in turn, effected negatively on the Liberals.
- The ad then used the original backing sound which included unionist cheers. Again, this added more positive spin to the ‘We’re coming back’ statement. The sound was later changed to jeers in the last week of the campaign but was too little, too late, to repair the damage.
The Labor party then came up with a slogan. Slogans can often appear cheesy or cliché, but they do work. Why would huge brands like Coke, MacDonalds and Nike use them if they didn’t.
Good slogans stick in the mind. Millions of voters often don’t know who they are going to vote for until they have pencil and voting form in hand. A slogan running through their thoughts can often push them to vote for the person who just came to mind.
Of course, both parties had various sub slogans. But it was the ‘KEVIN 07′ slogan, seen across the nation, on tshirts and television, that really stuck in the minds of voters.
But is doesn’t say anything about the candidate?
True, but it is a call to action. That’s the true trigger in this situation. Relating the name to the action to vote. It’s the trigger you want released with those undecided voters standing at a polling booth scratching their heads.
Were there real issues involved in this campaign? Sure there were.
Couldn’t they, combined with candidate history, be the real reason for the victory? Of course, and it probably is.
But what we saw last weekend was a landslide. Not only that, but Kevin Rudd has only been leader of the Labor party for little over 12 months. Without a brand style campaign, the country would never have had the chance to learn who Kevin Rudd was and what he stood for.
We can safely say that the advertising, brand development and positive media saturation played a major part in the Labor victory. Brand Design has now changed the landscape of Australian Politics.
This is only a brief discussion on how ‘brand’ played a major part in recent Australian politics. The issue could be reviewed in far greater detail.
So if you’d like to hear more or if you have a different point of view, drop me a comment on the blog or contact me via email. I’d be interested to hear your point of view.
