What’s in a brand? A rose by any other brand would smell as sweet. But brands are so much more than names, and we now use the term outside the commercial sphere to describe human behaviour more generally.
What’s in a brand? A rose by any other brand would smell as sweet. But brands are so much more than names, and we now use the term outside the commercial sphere to describe human behaviour more generally.
This reworking of Shakespeare is occasioned by a chance comment by political analyst and old Rhodian, Prince Mashile, who at the behest of the Rhodes Business School addressed an audience at Rhodes this week.
Analysing the election results, he remarked on the strength of “the ANC brand”.
Indeed, ANC brand loyalty, if we persist in using marketing terminology to understand politics, was proved in this election. Outside the Western Cape and Gauteng, the ANC had mass support, giving it a little over 62% of the vote overall.
More than 11-million people in the country voted for the ANC, as opposed to the around 4-million of the official opposition (22%) and the around 1-million supporters of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters.
What does having a strong brand mean, however? Branding is sometimes confused with marketing and advertising, but in my experience a brand means a number of things to a consumer, among them a promise of consistency. When you buy a can of Castle Lager you expect it to taste like every other Castle Lager you’ve ever had. In Mozambique during Frelimo’s Marxist rule in the 1980s the bottles of unbranded, State-provided beer varied wildly in taste and even, it was said, alcohol content.
The meaning of a brand also lies in its promise of a range of qualities. These may not be easy to pin down. Quality itself is a profound word. The writer of the hit book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig, created an entire metaphysics of quality. Among his observations was that the idea of quality distinguished capitalism from communism, whose approach to production of goods was characterised by quantity.
What qualities the ANC represents are well known and are symbolised in its struggle heroes. For many, it represents throwing off the shackles of colonialism and apartheid, and its green, gold and black flag a new era of dignity and prosperity for black people in a multiracial state.
The second-best brand, the DA’s blue and white with rainbow logo, broadly represents liberalism, a market economy, non-racial equality, modernism and rationality.
As a branding exercise, the EFF most closely resembles the launch of a new mass-consumer product. Its use of the revolutionary symbolism, particularly the colour red, is a stroke of genius. Another political campaign in the distant past used colour to brand itself well: the suffragettes used the colour purple.
The EFF logo needs work, however. It’s much too busy and too small for accurate print reproduction. And it looks like it belongs to an offshoot of the PAC, which is one brand that is on its way out. Brands do die. Mazawattee Tea is often mentioned as an example. Cope may be the political version of Mazawattee.
The ANC weathered the corruption scandals that beset the leader and the party; the DA came second but still struggles to establish itself as a party with credible black leaders; the EFF’s showing came despite the conspicuous consumption by its leader, contradicting the revolutionary fervour of its slogans, but it was boosted by massive free publicity accorded by our national news media, which find Julius Malema’s catchy sound bites an easy source of news.
You might think the details of the party manifestos would be more important than the images they project, but – except for the ANC – parties can promise anything, knowing they will not have to implement.
All the parties, for example, promised policies that would create jobs. Only one party, the ANC, can feasibly enable job creation.
But aside from enlarging the state and the temporary jobs of the Expanded Public Works Programme and the Community Work Programme, the ANC cannot create jobs itself. It needs the private sector to do so and that means faster economic growth.
At the same time, the ANC also needs to show evidence that it is pursuing policies that redistribute wealth. Redistribution doesn’t necessarily rule out growth, but some of the measures that the ANC envisages, defensible in the party’s own terms or not, send the wrong signal to investors.
One difference between company brands and political parties: there is some transparency in who controls big companies. There is no transparency about who funds political parties, and most of them agree on at least this one thing: they don’t want transparency. But we should know who funds political parties and who controls companies, especially – but not only – companies whose services have political implications, such as firms in the mass media market.
Shakespeare wrote before brands existed, you might think. But the big brands of his time were aristocratic houses, whose coats of arms, the logos of the past, remind us of the power of symbols.
