Rebranding The Labour Party in Modern Britain

REBRANDING THE LABOUR PARTY IN
MODERN BRITAIN
By: Rowan Emslie // MPP Programme // 2016
Advisor: Andrea Rmmele
April 2016
Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain
Table of Contents
1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
Thesis outline
3. Theoretical Approach
The decline of trust and rise of political dissatisfaction
8
8
The decline of political parties
11
Branding in politics
13
4. Methodology
20
Conceptual approach
20
The Brand Concept Mapping process
22
Methodological differences to the model paper
29
5. Results & Analysis
30
The brand maps
30
General characteristics
32
Measures of centrality
33
Measuring brand equity
36
6. Discussion
40
Assessing political rebranding
40
Implications for the decline of political parties
43
Suggestions for further research
47
7. Conclusion
48
8. Bibliography
50
Statement of Authorship
66
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1. Executive Summary
Political branding is an emerging field that has largely focused on
individual political actors and their ability to manage a brand from
the top-down. This is a problematic approach for three main
reasons.
First, the direct application of brand management techniques and
theories, which emerged from the private sector, to the political
market is decidedly sketchy as there is only a limited number of
characteristics this sectors have in common (Lock & Harris, 1996).
Second, the primacy of individuals, rather than longer term
institutions such as political parties, makes it difficult to assess the
implications for democracy in general terms: the failure and success
of individual politicians is a sign of health in a democracy. Thirdly, a
top-down application of branding fails to recognise the increasingly
networked nature of modern democracies (Castells, 2011) and the
attendant changes to the expectations of the citizenry.
This study, therefore, takes a consumer-oriented methodology and
applies it to political parties. How do voters conceptualize the brand
a mainstream political party? Can a political party rebrand in the
eyes of the voter? Can political branding give any insight into the
wider disaffection of democratic citizens?
I have taken the UK Labour Party - a mainstream political party
undergoing a process of rebranding - as a case study. I apply the
Brand Concept Mapping technique (John et al, 2006) to reveal the
way that changes in the brand of the Labour Party have or have not
occurred in terms of what has registered in the associative memories
of voters.
Perhaps the most surprising finding of this study is that voters
associate historical events, ideas and individuals very closely with
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the Party. They can hold onto associations for years even if they
were not alive or cognisant at the inception of those associations.
Political party brands in general must have deeper and wider scope
than those of individual politicians or the electoral cycle.
Party leaders are consistently the most central association for
political parties, exacerbating a tension between the institution and
the personalised politics of the digital age (Garzia,2011). The role of
individual politicians in reference to political parties in late-modern
democracies is a serious concern for the relevance of political
parties. However, any change process for political parties must
heavily involve party leaders as both the most visible and most
central association for their brand. Party leaders are both a risk and
opportunity for political parties.
Political branding can potentially act as way to combat democratic
disaffection if it is used to rebrand political parties as more inclusive
and more responsive - as institutions whose primary focus is on
representativeness, not on securing parliamentary majorities. The
customer-oriented approach is currently under-researched,
especially in political markets. This paper is a pilot for the
application of branding research to comparative and change
oriented political inquiry.
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2. Introduction
None of the candidates, not even the party favorites, are campaigning on
behalf of their party; most are campaigning to crash it.
Professor Jill Lepore on the US primary elections (2016).
Democracies in the Western world have experienced perhaps

unexpected difficulties since the 'End of History' (Fukuyama, 1993)
and the triumph of liberal democracy in the early 1990s. The
relationship between citizens and politicians has become less
engaged, more distrustful and more antagonistic. Ongoing declines
in trust of political institutions are both a measure of and fuel for
political dissatisfaction (Hetherington, 1998). The threats of
polarization and fragmentation appear to be both real and
widespread, if a little difficult to explain.
An emblematic recent example of this democratic malaise has been
the campaigning successes of previously 'unelectable' or otherwise
anti-establishment political figures. It is a fast growing list. From
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the USA to Jeremy Corbyn
and Nigel Farage in the UK and on to Marine Le Pen, Jaros
aw
Kaczy
ski and Viktor Orbn amongst others in Europe. An array
of non-aligned political actors are gaining favour in democracies at a
similar time. While these figures' routes to prominence, their
interests and their motives are widely varied, their concurrent
successes are indicative of a general malaise in the status quo of
established democracies.
What can be done to remedy this? Current events in Britain may
help to shed some light on the problem.
Politics in Britain has been dominated by a narrower set of
ideologies since the rise of the New Right in the late 1970s and early
1980s. The question is increasingly not
what
the state should do, but
how
it should do it (Clarke & Newman, 1997): when the basic role of
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the state has been decided, major political concerns are more
managerial than they are ideological. As such, branding has emerged
as a major force in politics to better differentiate political parties as
they converge both ideologically and in the eyes of the general
public.
Much attention is given to the idea of branding in politics as a
managerial challenge: from perfecting the art of spin (McNair, 2004;
Brissenden & Moloney, 2005) to constructing clear and targeted
political messaging (Needham, 2005; 2006) to the usage of
symbolism in politics (Bennett, 2004) - there is an enormous
amount of analysis of the ways political parties and political leaders
communicate to the public. All too often, political branding is
conceptualized as a top-down process. Scant attention is given to the
opinions of voters (or, in branding terms, consumers) despite the
issue of steadily increasing dissatisfaction, disillusionment and
mistrust in advanced democracies. By investigating the consumer
perspective of the current rebranding of the Labour Party in the UK,
I aim to relate the study of political branding to the wider narrative
of democratic disaffection.
The most profound re-branding of British politics in the last 30
years came bound to the trend of convergence. New Labour
emerged from the 'Old' when, with Tony Blair as leader, they
formally severed the party's ties with trade unionism, the last
remains of its founding socialist tenets (Page, 2007). This set the
scene for the 'Third Way' to enter British politics, an approach that
saw New Labour pairing progressive social policies with neo-liberal
economic policies and thereby straddling the traditional left-right
cleavage (Giddens, 2013). This rebrand set a pattern of overlap
between Labour and Conservatives seeking to win over moderates
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without breaking from the neo-liberal economic model established

by Thatcher (Jenkins, 2006).
This broad pattern of a congested centre-ground dominating the
political arena and a Third Way champion can be observed in
several other advanced democracies - most notably in the USA with
Clinton (Studlar, 2003) and with Schroeders
Neue Mitte i
n Germany
(Padgett, 2003) amongst many others (Keman, 2011). However, the
recent rise of the inequality agenda internationally (Piketty, 2014)
has gone some way to undermining the status quo by presenting
complex doubts about the effectiveness of modern capitalism as a
whole. This has taken off in Britain in particular, with dissenting
voices in academia (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009) and major protest
movements like Occupy London (Pickerill & Krinsky, 2012). In some
ways, Jeremy Corbyn's rise to the Labour leadership can be
contextualised by the relevance of this new agenda.
Thesis outline
First, this thesis will examine the literature related to the loss of
political trust in advanced democracies and trace how that affects
the function of political parties, which are taken to be the core of
liberal democracies: as Elmer Schattschneider put it, modern
democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties (1942,
p1). Individual political actors may come and go with little lasting
consequence to the political system. The short-term, electoral focus
of individual politicians is mediated by political parties, whose
long-term survival requires membership. A representative system
fails when the general public no longer feel represented the
political party is, historically, the best delivery mechanism for that
(Galeotti, 2003).
One way of measuring representation is in party membership,
which is in general decline. Citizens are choosing not to join political
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parties how can parties change their minds? To unpack this, I will
explore the research surrounding the branding of political actors
and political parties in particular, including how branding differs in
this context compared to its origins in the private sector.
Next, I will contribute an original study of the ongoing Labour Party
party rebrand under Jeremy Corbyn including an assessment of its
relative successes and failings. Finally, I will compare my study to its
model, a previous study conducted in 2007, and relate my findings
to the wider issue of deteriorating trust in liberal democracies.
3. Theoretical Approach
The decline of trust and rise of political dissatisfaction
There is a wealth of literature on the general decline of political trust
in advanced democracies. This is most persuasive with regards to
the specific decline in confidence of political institutions in
advanced democracies since 1975 (Pharr, Putnam & Dalton, 2000).
The decline manifests itself in terms of decreased confidence in
practically every social institution as communicated through surveys
which have been done by multiple scholars over several decades in
dozens of liberal democracies (Pharr & Putnam, 2000). While the
USA demonstrates the most rapid and consistent declines for the
latter part of the 20th century (King, 2000), Putnam, Pharr & Dalton
noted that across Europe the pattern of declining political support
has apparently accelerated in the past decade (2000, p11).
The notion of long term declining trust in stable democracies is
relatively undisputed, even if it is not the crisis some have claimed
it to be (Norris, 2011). Some scholars contextualise the trust levels in
terms of other forms of government e.g. emerging democracies or
dictatorships and find stable democracies are either on par or
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performing better than their competitors (Mishler & Rose, 2001) but
these finding do not contest the general thesis of decline.
In contrast, the causal mechanisms for such widespread and
long-lasting declines are widely debated.
A respected study of the USA focused on specific shocks the
Vietnam War, Watergate or the Cold War and concluded that the
political malaise cannot be explained by individual events
(Katzenstein, 2000). The perception of corruption of politicians has
been shown to be a key predictor of public dissatisfaction with (Della
Porta, 2000) and distrust of (Pharr, 2000) the government. The
actual performance of politicians is of relatively limited importance
it is how the electorate perceives their behaviour and character
that matters. The change in perception may lie on the demand side
Dalton argues that it is the increase in citizens' expectations and
not decrease in political performance that best explains the decline
(2005). Pre-existing levels of trust can affect perceived quality of
service which, in turn, affects trust. This leads to a difficult
conclusion: causality arguments related to perception have a
problematic cyclical nature (Van de Walle & Bouckaert, 2003).
Crucially, widespread disaffection is agreed to be related to the
perception of political performance, not whether or not liberal
democracy should be replaced by an alternative system of
governance (Newton & Norris, 2000; Peffley & Rohrschneider,
2003). In the eyes of the public, the problem does not lie the system
itself, but the actors and institutions within it.
As this phenomenon cannot be explained through looking at
particular historical events or the actions of individual actors, the
most sensible units of analysis for this topic are the existing
dominant institutions of liberal democracies.
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Probably the most commonly cited explanation for democratic

disaffection comes from Robert Putnam's
Bowling Alone
(2001)
which argued that declining social capital is responsible for lowered
rates of voting, political and social participation and, ultimately, a
decline in democracy. Putnam champions the communitarian
reasoning that a nation requires its citizens to share common ideals
and social ideas and that, without mechanisms to act as a bridge
between individuals from different backgrounds, civil society will
wither, taking democracy along with it.
This has become the dominant frame for understanding democratic
political malaise despite some limitations. Putnam's relative lack of
academic rigour and breezy side-lining of competing explanations
has been widely criticised (Boggs, 2013; Sobel, 2002) as has the
assumption that a strong civil society as measured by social capital
will interact with the polity in either a predictable or
democracy-enhancing manner (McLean et al, 2002). Interactions
between civil society organisations (CSOs) and the State are certainly
important but whether or not they enhance democracy by building
public trust is not clear cut. In fact, a major theory explaining the
existence of CSOs is that of 'government failure' (Steinberg, 2003)
where citizens create organisations to substitute for government
underprovision of collective goods. This is hardly seems like a
recipe for improving citizens' perception of the performance of
political institutions.
An aspect of modern life that Putnam did not properly consider is
the evolving media landscape. His work included a fairly damning
critique of the eroding effect of television on civil society - a charge
that has been disputed at length by Pippa Norris (2000a) - but did
not seriously contend with the impact of the digital revolution.
Dramatic shifts in communication technology in the last two
decades suggests that, while not an initial cause of declining political
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confidence in institutions, the digital revolution has exacerbated the

situation by creating a more divided media landscape (Aarts &
Semetko, 2003; Chadwick, 2013). This division creates networks of
disconnected public spheres that further alienates non-bridged
communities from one another (Norris, 2000b; Castells, 2013). More
recently, other areas of political activity have shifted to the digital
world, such as activism which is now organised using online
platforms instead of street-level organisations and their members
(Bennett, 2012). The ability of modern citizens to act without any
central organising body has been greatly enhanced by digital
communications. This has, in turn, disrupted the power balance in
democratic systems. As Anthony Giddens put it, politics looks
different when you have a supercomputer in your pocket (The
Hertie School of Governance, 2015).
Inglehart's influential observations (2008; 2015) that societies in
advanced democracies have gradually become postmaterialist since
the 1960s shows that the media landscape is by no means solely
responsible for this disruption to the political battlefield. The topics
of political discourse are naturally more settled when the general
public is mostly satisfied with the status quo: for example, major
overhauls of the class system are simply not on the agenda. This
leads us to the discussion of where political parties fit into the new
political landscape.
The decline of political parties

Representative democracy is built on the back of political parties.
This view is echoed by citizens in 13 advanced democracies: on
average, 76% of respondents stated that parties are vital for the
functioning of democracy. Despite this, only 30% of respondents
thought that their political parties care what they think (Dalton &
Weldon, 2005). This is a crucial fissure: the vital cog of
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representative democracy, the political party, is regarded as

unrepresentative.
This goes some way to explaining why party membership figures
are so remarkably low the combined membership of all five major
UK parties was until very recently fewer than 500,000 people (Van
Biezen, Mair & Poguntke, 2012); less than 1% of the population. The
general erosion of the political party is a widespread concern,
affecting both the USA (Coleman, 1996) and Europe (Whiteley, 2011).
This is, furthermore, not a problem that particularly afflicts parties
to the left or to the right there is a decline in faith for political
parties as institutions, rather than their specific ideologies (Klln,
2014). This is related to the findings that, since 1990, the traditional
left-right economic cleavage has subsided in importance
(Deegan-Krause, 2007; Best, 2011), leading to the near ubiquity of
neoliberal market economics in advanced democracies (Fukuyama,
1993). In Britain, the de-alignment of social class from political
parties came specifically as a result of the New Labour rebrand
(Evans & Tilley, 2012).
With the disassociation of electoral outcomes from class or
economic cleavages, individual politicians are now able to build
their brands on much shakier ground:
[Politicians] can campaign on almost nothing beyond personal appeal and

the promise that they will serve us well no matter what issues may arise
(Hardin, 2000, p49).
Parties have increasingly been supplanted in this postmaterialist

landscape by individual politicians. The loss of the ideological
identity that formed the founding logic for various parties has
created what Otto Kirchheimer described as 'catch-all parties' (1966)
parties focused more on the management of the state than on
principled opposition or ideological debate (Krouwel, 2003). Having
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become decoupled from identifiable class or social cleavages, the

party is reduced to a support function and individual politicians
often the party leader becomes the focus of political attention
(Blondel & Thiebault, 2009; Gariza, 2011), particularly in the media
(Langer, 2007).
In the UK particularly, not only have parties subsided in importance
but the Cabinet has been undermined by several Prime Ministers,
most notably Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, leading to a
transfer of a large amount of Executive power from the Cabinet to
the Prime Minister (Heffernan, 2003; Langer, 2011). As can be seen
in the subsequent branding study of The Labour Party in this paper,
individual politicians may dominate the British public's
conceptualisation of political parties, but those politicians arent
senior Cabinet ministers - its a case of party leader or bust.
With de-ideologized political parties comes a broader swathe of the
public that might be persuaded to vote for you - this was the logic
behind the creation of New Labour (Giddens, 2013). But, without the
signals that come with ideology - bundled information that citizens
can use to assess which part represents their interests - how can
parties communicate effectively? This is where the idea to import
branding into politics comes from: here is a ready-made way of
communicating difference in a congested market without relying on
class or ideological cleavages.
In this regard, the Labour Party is an excellent case study because a)
it was one of the prototypes for building a political party beyond
classic cleavages (Dyrberg, 2009) and b) it is currently and quite
publically undergoing a pushback to this very change (Crines, 2015).
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Branding in politics
Branding developed from the corporate world as a way of
distinguishing products from one another, thereby inducing
consumers to choose particular products. In essence, branding is a
way to convince consumers that meaningful differences exist
between similar products (Keller, 2013). However, branding is now
applied much more widely than this original context. When
discussing brands, one need not be tied to products:
A successful brand is an identifiable product, service, person or place,
augmented in such a way that the buyer or user perceives relevant, unique,
sustainable added values which match their needs more closely (de
Chernatony, 2001, p. 9).
There is some debate over whether or not political parties can be

brought into this discussion. Traditionally, branding concerns the
attempts by some actors corporations to steer other actors
consumers into making a decision between different similar
options products (Keller, 2002). In politics, you have political
parties acting as corporations, voters acting as consumers, and
candidates acting as products: there are certainly some broad
comparisons where market signalling is employed in the political
sphere (Snyder & Ting, 2002). In general, ideas of marketing and
branding as applied to politics are applied to campaigning (Butler et
al, 2007). Beyond that context, some scholars fundamentally
disagree with a 1:1 comparison of political markets and markets for
goods. They argue that candidates are not products or, if they are to
be considered such, they behave unlike any other product and
therefore require a different model of analysis (Butler & Collins,
1994). Lock and Harris discussed the differences at length with
reference to the UK political system (1996). These can summarised
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in a list of seven unique attributes found in electoral choices that are

not found in conventional consumer purchases:
1. All consumers make their decisions on a single day
2. There is no explicit pricing in the political market.
3. Consumers are forced to live with a collective purchase
decision.
4. The first past the post electoral system has no equivalent in
private markets.
5. The complexity of political products is unmatched in the
private market, as is the intractability of purchasing decisions.
6. New brands virtually never enter the market.
7. Market leaders in the political market experience a near
inevitable decline.
A nuanced take on this debate recognises that the disagreement
stems from two separate methods of conceptualising brands (Smith
& French, 2009, p210):
One focuses on brand management (i.e. the application of branding
practices in a given marketplace to develop a brands identity therein). It is
this approach that has attracted the criticism...
The other approach adopts a consumer perspective and focuses on how
consumers learn about and are motivated by brands (i.e. how the image of
the brand forms in consumer memory and subsequently influences
consumer behaviour).
Rather than analysing politics as just another market like soft

drinks or automobiles where brands are a managerial concern,
branding can be understood as the way in which political parties
bundle information for the general public (Smith, 2009). This is the
'consumer perspective' that seeks to evaluate the political brand as it
is understood by voters, not as it is applied by political actors.
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In order to analyse brands, there must be a form of measurement. It

is usually called 'brand equity' the valuation of a brand either in
financial or substantive terms. Brand equity from the consumer
1
perspective is concerned with the latter and defined by Keller

thus:
A brand is said to have positive (negative) customer-based brand equity
when consumers react more (less) favourably to an element of the marketing
mix for the brand than they do to the same marketing mix element when it is
attributed to a fictitiously named or unnamed version of the product or
service (1993, p. 1).
The financial valuation of brands is common in the private sector

literature but unsuited to a political market because (as highlighted
in the list above) it does not contain explicit pricing.
The measurement of the consumer perspective of political brands is
generally done in relation to four dimensions of brand equity: brand
awareness, brand associations, perceived quality and loyalty (Aaker,
1991). This paper focuses on brand associations for reasons I will
discuss in the Methodology section2 .
Economists have long highlighted the difficulties of measurement in
the democratic political market there are too many actors with the
structural incentives to undercut performance, the information
asymmetry with the public is too great and the nature of political
goods too poorly defined for anybody to assess accurately (North,
1990; North, 1994). In this highly complex market, political brands
are vital because they are easy to communicate and easy to consume
just as in the information saturated landscape of the internet,
simplified and symbolic branded communication is used to gain
traction (Bennett & Lagos, 2007). It is also important to highlight
This definition is useful for the comparative purposes of this paper as French and Smith also used it in their 2010
paper.
2
See the Conceptual approach section.

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that, unlike economic markets, new brands are extremely unusual

in Britain, for example, only two parties have won a General
Election in the last 100 years. The rebrand, therefore, is the key area
of study for party focused political branding (Lock & Harris
,
1996).
Political branding is a poorly understood area because the idea of
branding in a political market is a relatively recent development,
particularly from the consumer brand equity perspective (Phipps et
al, 2010).
Figure 1: Example of mainstream political symbolism
[Source: CDU Twitter account]
Focusing on political brands is also increasingly relevant given the

context of the digital communication revolution. The introduction
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of any new communication technology is historically associated

with widespread shifts in power and influence within societies
(Gleick, 2012) and the digital revolution is noted as particularly
influential because of its unprecedented rapidity and breadth no
other communication technology has spread so far so quickly (The
Hertie School of Governance, 2015). The power of logos, soundbites
and memes has never been greater, both in the private and political
sphere.
In recent years, there have been some very prominent examples of
symbolic political communication. There was Obamas Hope
poster in 2008 and Angela Merkels signature hand gesture, the
Merkel-Raute, which was granted the dubious honour of becoming a
political emoticon, <> (see Figure 1) and has been a noted meme in
German politics since 2013 (Thurau, 2013).
Figure 2: Example of activist political symbolism
[Source: Wikimedia commons]
Beyond the political establishment, new political activists such as the

Occupy movement or the internet hacker collective Anonymous
have also developed simple, shareable political symbols - we are the
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99% and the Guy Fawkes mask (see Figure 2) which was originally
taken from fictional protests in the comic book
V For Vendetta
(Lush
& Dobnik, 2011; Kohns, 2013).
Communication online is more individual and fragmentary than the
th
mass media forms that dominated the 20
century (Chaffee &
Metzger, 2001; Sunstein, 2001). There have already been studies of

political campaigning highlighting the shift towards highly
personalised campaign approaches and methods using individual
3
level data to shape messaging (Bimber, 2014; Stromer-Galley, 2014).

In short, the market for politics has become more fragmented while
its core products have become less popular. Is it possible to change
how the general public think about something as entrenched and
unpopular as a political party?
4. Methodology
Conceptual approach
The measurement of consumer based brand equity can be
extremely costly and time consuming. Partly for the sake of
practicality, I have adopted the Brand Concept Mapping (BCM)
process developed by John et al (2006), a way of mapping consumer
based brand equity that is significantly less laborious and more
flexible than other psychoanalytical approaches. In general, brand
mapping is an extremely useful way of showing both how brands are
held in consumers' memories which features come to mind, which
people, which concepts etc and how those brands are related to
other aspects of the market (Keller, 2003).
It should be noted that such developments are mostly US focused but expected to be replicated further afield in
the coming years.

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BCM has already been applied to British political parties by French

and Smith (2010), generating comparative results that are extremely
helpful for the purpose of assessing party rebranding. The BCM
process creates a snapshot of consumers' opinion of a brand: by
comparing a snapshot in 2016 to French and Smith's - where the
actual study was done in 2007 - I hope to shed light on the
rebranding of political parties.
My focus on brand associations, rather than the three other
dimensions of brand equity (Table 1), stems in part from French and
Smith's fairly straightforward decision to do the same.
Table 1: Customer-focused dimensions of brand equity

CUSTOMER BASED BRAND
SUMMARY
EQUITY DIMENSIONS
1. Brand Loyalty
Evaluated in terms of both price premium and customer

satisfaction related to a) the previous purchase and b) the
likelihood of subsequent purchase
2. Perceived Quality
The perception of quality as compared to alternatives. Involves

notions of market leadership for instance, is the brand leading
or making ground on the leader?
3. Brand Associations
How is the brand valued? Is it differentiated from its competitors?

How do customers relate it to other ideas and memories?
4. Brand Awareness
The relative salience of the brand in the mind of the customer.

[Adapted from Aaker, 1996]
These four dimensions were developed with the private sector in

mind. Naturally, their application to the political sector is imperfect.
For this paper, some comparisons between the two sectors c
an
be
made. Most clearly, consumers are voters and brands are political
parties - the terms are essentially interchangeable. Brand leaders are
arguably the party in power, even if public opinion turns against
them because leadership is based on market valuation - they won
the most (or, in a first past the post system, the requisite) votes and
are therefore the de facto brand leaders. The slow nature of the
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political market feedback mechanism makes this concept a lot

weaker than in the private sector. Many of the other aspects,
however, cannot be transplanted into the political arena.
Measures of Brand Loyalty are undermined in the political market
because there is no price structure, as noted by Lock and Harris
(1996). It is possible that this could be measured using the equivalent
feedback mechanism for the political market - i.e. voting - but, as
noted by Lock and Harris again, a hallmark of democracies is the
near inevitable loss of loyalty due to the cyclical nature of the
electoral cycle.
Perceived Quality also does not acknowledge the cyclical nature of
democratic politics which leads to the inevitable decline of brand
leaders - quality perception fluctuates according to which party is in
power and how long they have been in power regardless of actual
performance. I have already discussed the problematic measures of
perceived political performance in Section 2 there is a general
downwards trend that is difficult to unpack meaningfully because it
is not clear whether the change has come as a result of alterations in
voter expectations or from declining political performance or some
mixture of the two.
Finally, Brand Awareness has limited application to the study of
major political parties in established democracies as French and
Smith observe, citizens may or maynot not approve of political
parties but they do at least know they exist, particularly in the UK.
This leaves Brand Association as the most fitting measure of
customer based brand equity in the political markets. In particular,
examining notions of brand differentiation is extremely apposite in
the context of narrow, postmaterialist electoral environments (Smith
& Saunders, 1990; Baines et al, 2003).
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The Brand Concept Mapping process

There are three phases to the BCM process: elicitation, mapping,
and aggregation. My study applied these phases to The Labour Party
in 2016 following the election of Jeremy Corbyn in September 2015
and his perhaps symbolic reshaping of the party as reported by the
media (Cassidy, 2015; John, 2015; MacAskill, 2016). As much as
possible, I modelled my research on French and Smith's study to
allow for better comparative analysis. For instance, I also sourced
participants who were students at an English university and the
population sizes for the first two stages are based on theirs: Phase 1,
n=132
; Phase 2,
n=62.
These are not representative samples. French and Smith highlight
that their study is just a pilot for the application of BCM to the
political market, therefore representativeness was not their chief
concern. I used their study as a model because, to my knowledge, it
is the most systematic and replicable brand analysis of New Labour
and therefore the one best suited to historical comparison4.
The first two Phases of the study were carried out between the 26th
and 29th of February 2016.
PHASE 1:
The elicitation phase creates a pool of core brand
associations by surveying participants (
n=136
) using open ended
questions, such as when you think of The Labour Party, what
comes to mind? This produced a total of 591 responses from a
combination of online and in-person surveys. On average,
respondents gave 4.3 associations each. From this, all associations,
and any association variants that could be reasonably bundled (e.g.
'Socialist' and 'Socialism'; 'Workers' and 'Working people'), that were
mentioned by four or more respondents were chosen. This
4
For more discussion on the methodological concerns of this paper, see Suggestions for further research in
Section 6.
22 of 66
produced a list of 22 associations (see Table 2) that were used to help

respondents create individual brand concept maps in Phase 2.
Table 2: Survey responses

WHEN YOU THINK OF THE LABOUR PARTY, WHAT COMES TO MIND?
1.
Benefits
2. NHS
3. Ed Miliband
4. Opposition
5.
Equality
6. Red
7.
EU
8. Rose
9. Fair
10. Socialism
11. Gordon Brown
12. Split
13. Iraq
14. Tony Blair
15. Jeremy Corbyn
16. Trade Unions
17. Left
18. Welfare
19. Liberal
20. Workers
21. New Labour
22. Working Class
PHASE 2:
The mapping phase used a discrete group (
n=62
) of
students from the population used in Phase 1. Using the 22
associations as a prompt, participants were asked to draw out a map
of brand associations related to the Labour Party. I showed them an
example Brand Map (Figure 3) to help explain the process.
They could use any of the 22 associations shown to them and were
fee to add their own. In fact, two associations added during this
phase, Weak and The North, cleared the four participant
threshold of Phase 1. Respondents were asked to relate their
associations not only to the Labour Party but to each other.
Respondents drew out their maps in a sketch pad while I answered
any questions they had.
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Figure 3: Example brand map
Each association pair was given one, two or three lines to indicate
the strength of association (three lines = strongest, one line =
weakest) and they could indicate whether they thought an
association was positive, negative or neutral this final element was
not included in the original BCM outlined by John et al, but added
by French and Smith.
5
PHASE 3:
The aggregation phase condenses all 62 Brand Maps into
a single consensus map thus creating a representative Brand Map for
a particular group of people on a particular topic. This process is
6
moderately complicated and includes six steps.
I have all 62 brand maps filed both digitally and physically.
The French and Smith paper is very light on details so I relied on the in-depth methodological discussion in the
John et al paper.
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Table 3: BCM Measures

1ST
Order Associations
Core Associations
BRAND
MENTION
ASSOCIATIONS FREQUENCY
1ST
ORDER
1ST
ORDER
INTERCONNECT
MENTION
MENTION
IONS
FREQUENCY
RATIO
SUBORDINATE SUPERORDINATE
Ed Miliband
32
47
27
84.4%
18
Gordon Brown
36
47
22
61.1%
15
16
Jeremy Corbyn
50
96
37
74.0%
14
55
Left
42
54
28
66.7%
16
20
Tony Blair
51
101
38
74.5%
14
55
Working class
38
57
24
63.2%
15
22
Iraq
40
47
12
30.0%
28
NHS
39
48
26
66.7%
12
11
Trade unions
31
41
14
45.2%
17
13
Welfare
28
44
10
35.7%
18
19
Benefits
25
35
11
44.0%
16
10
Equality
15
22
60.0%
EU
14
17
64.3%
Fair
12
14
33.3%
Liberal
11
32
63.6%
14
10
New Labour
24
32
12
50.0%
14
10
The North
100.0%
Opposition
19
33
13
68.4%
16
Red
27
32
26
96.3%
Rose
55.6%
Socialism
29
32
10
34.5%
17
10
Split
10
20.0%
Weak
10
66.7%
Workers
14
16
21.4%
10
[1st Order Associations bold and underlined, core associations bold]
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1.
Determining core associations

which either:
1.1.
Appear on at least 50% of the maps, or;
1.2.
If they appear on 45-49% of the maps and have more

total interconnections than the lowest number of the
associations chosen in the previous step (41).
2.
Determining first-order associations

which:
2.1.
Have a ratio of first-order mentions to total mentions of

at least 50%, and;
2.2.
Have more superordinate than subordinate

interconnections.
The calculations for the first two steps are summarised in Table 3. I
bundled some associations (such as 'Ed' and 'Ed Miliband' and
'Miliband') to get a more accurate read of the frequencies of mention
across the maps the open ended nature of the survey and map
making sessions naturally led to variations of similar associations.
Some associations were borderline. For example, 'Welfare' was close
to being a 1st order association it lay in the 45-49% frequency with
greater than 41 interconnections, it also had more superordinate
than subordinate connections but did not have the requisite 1st
order ratio to be counted as a 1st order association.
These first two steps identified ten associations for the consensus
map: six 1st order, which are placed directly around the central
node, and four core which have to be mapped in relation to those 1st
order associations according to step 3.
3.
Select core association links

by:
3.1.
Counting frequencies of all distinct association pairs.
3.2.
Find an inflection point on a frequency plot.
3.3.
st
Include all links between core and 1
order associations
that occur over the inflection point.
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Figure 4: Frequency plot
[Note: I removed null values from the X-axis and bounded the scale of the Y-axis to improve legibility]
This stage seeks to eliminate some of the noise from the maps unrepresentative associated pairs that occur only a small number of
times make up a sizeable chunk of the total 752 pairs. To create a
consensus map these low occurring pairs need to be cut away. Out of
286 distinct pairs, 218 pairs occurred on just one map7 , 24 occurred
on two maps, 4 on three maps and so on. These results were plotted
on a frequency plot (Figure 4) to identify the inflection points.
The links found during this stage are summarised in Table 4.
This frequency count is the spike on the right of the graph (i.e.that goes out of the bounds of the y-axis) on
Figure 4.
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Table 4: Links between 1st and Core associations

Ed
Gordon
Miliband
Brown
Iraq Jeremy
Corbyn
NHS Tony
Left
Blair
Trade
unions
Working
Welfare
class
Ed
Miliband
10
27
Gordon
Brown
Iraq
Corbyn
Left
NHS
Tony Blair
10
27
unions
Welfare
Jeremy
Trade
Working
class
[Link frequencies at or above the inflection point highlighted in pink.]
In my frequency plot, inflection points described in the John et al

paper as a sharp increase in frequency counts (2006, p555) come
at both 9 and 3. I chose 3 so I did not lose interesting data from the
pairs that occurred in the 4-8 range. At the higher bound, there
would be only three inter-linked core and 1st order associations
which did not reflect the general complexity of the maps as a whole,
nor would it have produced a particularly useful consensus brand
map. It would have only reflected the highly dispersed range of
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associations the respondents gave, which is a fact worth noting in of

itself.
4.
Select non-core association links

which are:
4.1.
Linked to core associations, and;
4.2.
Above the previously identified inflection point.
While such links have less importance than those between core and
st
1
order associations, it is useful to include them on the map because
a) they are fairly prevalent across all the maps and b) the fact they
are linked to core associations helps to better elucidate the meaning
of those core association - a chain of associations that links Tony
Blair with Gordon Brown and Iraq tells a different story to one that
also includes a Strong Leader association.
There were an additional seven non-core associations added in this
stage.
5.
Select number of lines for links

:
5.1.
6.
The rounded mean average of lines used per association.
Select sign of associations

:
6.1.
The sum for each association where positive = 1, neutral

= 0 and negative = -1.
After completing the two straightforward final stages, I had a

complete consensus map for 2016 (Figure 6).
Methodological differences to the model paper

French and Smith's brand mapping analysis focused on comparing
the Conservative Party with the Labour Party. Comparing the two
mainstream political parties reflects the traditional paradigm of
assessing democratic politics - entrenched political parties on the
left and the right competing to win the trust and support of the
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general public - which was precisely one of the things I sought to

avoid.
I propose to expand the political BCM research by analysing a single
party rebrand and thus reflect on the changing of democratic
politics in a world of diminished traditional cleavages, huge changes
in communication technology and, above all, a deeply dissatisfied
electorate. Therefore, my comparative analysis is between the
different snapshots of the Labour Party's using consensus maps
from 2007 and one from 2016.
Additionally, French and Smith allowed their Phase 2 respondents
to self-select into groups that supported whichever party brand they
were asked to assess - Labour supporters created maps for The
Labour Party and Conservative supporters for the Conservative
Party. This distorts the results - citizens and supporters are clearly
different sets of consumers, despite the authors occasional
conflation of the terms. Seeing the broadly positive, pro-Labour
respondents consensus map in comparison to my generalised map
reveals distortions generated by the original research design.
5. Results & Analysis

The brand maps
First of all, it is worth taking a look at both maps next to one another
(Figure 5 and Figure 6) to get some broad, first-take impressions and
highlight their interesting features. After this I have conducted some
more in-depth analyses.
On the maps, 1st order associations are shown as shaded bubbles
with solid outlines, core associations are non-shaded with solid
outlines and non-core associations are non-shaded with dashed
outlines.
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Figure 5: 2007 Consensus Map
Figure 6: 2016 Consensus Map
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General characteristics
The first and most obvious observation to be made when comparing
the two maps is that the 2016 version exhibits both more
associations and more interconnections. As noted in the
Methodology, the respondents put down an extremely diverse array
of associations and links which is reflected in the considerably more
chaotic structure of the 2016 consensus map.
It is interesting to note that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown retain
their 1st order status six years after the latters resignation as Prime
Minister signalled the end of their time in front line UK politics.
Other nodes common to both maps relate to the working class, the
Iraq war and the NHS.
The structure of the maps isnt too different - 5 1st order associations
in 2007 compared with 6 in 2016; 4 additional core associations on
both - until non-core associations are reached. A lot of the confusion
of the 2016 map comes from these additions. Perhaps another
feature worth noting is the increased primacy of individual
politicians - in 2007, less than half of the 1st order associations were
politicians, in 2016 two-thirds are.
Brown, the party leader at the time of the first study, was not the
most linked association on the consensus map unlike the current
leader on the 2016 version. This shows that not only have individual
politicians become more prominent, the party leader has become
further immeshed in the network of party associations.
The intervening years have narrowed the associations of Tony Blair
who retains negative links to Brown and Iraq but is no longer
associated with Strong leader or Has improved education.
The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has close links to Left,
Socialism and Working class, indicating that he has captured
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different parts of Labours brand than Blair or Brown either in 2007

or this year. French and Smith note that current and former party
leaders tend to be paired (p468) - Corbyns separation from Ed
Miliband indicates another break from the past. However, links to
Split and Opposition are similarly close and new links - these are
less appealing than the Strong leader seen in 2007. Similarly,
Corbyns link to New Labour suggests a sense of confusion about
the recent history of the Labour Party particularly when coupled
with the lack of a clean break from Blair, Iraq and Brown.
Measures of centrality
Analysing the consensus brand map would be incomplete without
applying quantitative methods. In an unweighted network analysis
of this kind, centrality is used to better assess which associations are
considered the most important by respondents (Borgatti, 2005).
I applied three measures of centrality used by French and Smith8 to
the final 17 associations that made it to the consensus map. These
measures were:
1. Degree centrality.The number of associations linked to each
association (Freeman, 1978).
a. Where
n
is the number of associations in the consensus
map,
a
= 1 if associations
i
and
k
are directly connected
ik
in the consensus map and 0 otherwise.
The formulae for these calculations can be found in the Appendix of French and Smiths paper (2010, p476-477).
33 of 66
2. Betweenness centrality.What proportion of shortest paths link

through each association (Freeman, 1978).
a. Where
b
= g
is the number of shortest paths

ijk
ij(k)/g
ij.gij
connecting associations
i
and
j
in the consensus map and
g
is the number of the shortest paths that pass
ij(k)

through association
k
.
3. Closeness centrality.How close associations are to other
associations in the map (Sabidussi, 1966).
a. Where
d
is the number of links in the shortest path
ik
linking associations
i
and
k
.
In 2007, French and Smith found that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown
and Party for the working class were the three most important
associations on the map, with Tony Blair the most central of all.
They found this last result peculiar but, considering he had been
Prime Minister for ten years and only resigned a few months before
their study, I would say it was unsurprising. The relative ubiquity of
Tony Blair in 2016 is probably more surprising.
French and Smith came to their centrality conclusions by finding
broad agreement between each of the three measures.
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The results of the centrality measures9 calculations for the 2016

consensus map are shown in Table 5.
Table 5: Centrality Values

MEASURES OF CENTRALITY
Degree
Betweenness
Closeness
Jeremy Corbyn
7.000
47.667
0.033
Working class
4.000
47.000
0.032
Left
5.000
26.833
0.029
Trade Unions
3.000
17.667
0.026
New Labour
2.000
4.000
0.025
Tony Blair
4.000
16.000
0.024
Socialism
2.000
0.000
0.024
Welfare
3.000
28.000
0.024
Gordon Brown
2.000
0.000
0.023
Split
1.000
0.000
0.022
Opposition
1.000
0.000
0.022
Ed Miliband
1.000
0.000
0.022
Liberal
1.000
0.000
0.020
Workers
1.000
0.000
0.019
Iraq
1.000
0.000
0.018
NHS
1.000
0.000
0.018
Benefits
1.000
0.000
0.018
(Key:
Highest scores
,
2nd highest scores
,
3rd highest scores
)
These results show that, once again, two of the most central
associations are the party leader and a connection to the Working
Class. Despite Blairs high number of mentions across the 62
individual brand maps, his centrality to the brand has waned - and
I have omitted The Labour Party from these results as its centrality is, by design, the highest.
35 of 66
Browns even more so - having been replaced by Left, although the

inclusion of Left as third most central association is less clearcut
than the first two. The fact that Corbyn ranks first by all three
measures indicates just how strongly the party leader dominates
voters conceptualization of political parties.
Measuring brand equity

Centrality measures are useful for analysing specific nodes in a BCM
but ignore the implications of the network as a whole. An
investigation into brand equity must also include measures of the
entire associative network.
Krishnan (1996) operationalised Kellers aforementioned definition
of brand equity (1993) as measured via brand associations.
Krishnans operationalisation focuses on strength, valence (as the
measure for favourability) and uniqueness10.
Strength.
Brands with more associations are, as a general rule of
thumb, stronger. The more nodes in an association network, the
more routes a person has to conceptualizing or simply
remembering a brand. There is a danger that more convoluted
association networks can produce interference (Meyers-Levy, 1989)
- i.e. consumers follow association links that lead them away from
the desired brand - but this is not considered a major concern for
well-established, highly recognised brands such as political parties.
As noted before, the number of nodes on the 2016 map is clearly
higher than on the 2007 map. However, as can be seen in Table 6,
the major increase is in non-core associations - the number of close
associations on both maps is very similar. These additional
associations are best analysed in terms of favourability: the Labour
Partys brand can only be said to have been strengthened if these
10
These are also the three operational categories used by French and Smith.
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new non-core associations are positive additions. What is clear is

that the core and 1st order associations may have changed from
2007 but the overall strength of these close associations has not
significantly increased.
Table 6: Associations by type

TYPEOFASSOCIATION
2007
2016
1st Order
Core
Non-core
Total
11
17
Favourability
. The overall valence of the network is a good start.
French and Smith follow Krishnans (1996) lead and calculate using
the following formula: (number of positive association - number of
negative associations)/total number of associations. This gives a
score of 0.63 for the 2007 map and a score of 0.29 for the 2016 map.
This is clearly a major difference but it is probably most reflective of
the fact that the 2007 study was created using only self-identified
Labour supporters. As I mentioned earlier, the opinions of
supporters may be of interest - particularly to campaign managers but they are not a true indication of how the brand is understood by
voters.
Valence is, however, only a partial measure of favourability.
Showing the associations in binary terms does not show the
distribution of scores, which are shown on Figure 7. The least
favourable association is Iraq at -27, the most favourable is
Welfare with +13, and the median is +1. Its clear that most scores
fall in the 0 to +5 range but the extreme negativity connected to the
legacy of the Iraq war drags the overall score down. This graph
37 of 66
shows that, without looking at the actual weights of scores, you lose a
lot of information. For instance, policy advisors for the Labour Party
can much better recognise that distancing the party brand from the
Iraq War should be a priority when the distribution of scores is
included as a measure of favourability.
It is interesting to note that the majority of the 1st order associations
are negative (4 out of 6) but that, overall, there are far more positive
associations on the map (11 out of 17). The bottom cluster of the map
that includes Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Iraq and New Labour
represents a considerable amount of the negativity surrounding the
Labour Party. Of the non-core associations, only 1 of 7 is negative, so
the increased strength of the network as noted above should be
regarded as a beneficial development for the Party. Labour under
Corbyn has become easier to access (i.e. conceptualize) and that ease
comes via positive associations.
Figure 7: Distribution of net favourability scores
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Of the three most important associations indicated by the centrality

measures, only Jeremy Corbyn has a negative favourability.
Because of the importance of the party leader, this should be a real
concern to Labour advisors. However, when compared to the other
individuals on the map, Corbyns score (-3) is closer to the median
than Ed Miliband (-5), Gordon Brown (-9) and especially Tony Blair
(-12). This is an important lesson: while politicians are more and
more central to political brands, they are by no means popular.
Uniqueness
. For French and Smith, this was a measure of how much
overlap they found between rival parties brands. Perhaps
surprisingly, given the prevailing narrative of middle-ground party
overlap in advanced democracies, they found that 86% of
Conservative brand associations did not appear on the Labour
consensus map and 73% vice versa.
For the purposes of assessing rebranding, looking at how many new
associations have come into the 2016 map indicates changes to the
perceived identity of the Labour Party.
5 of 17 associations overlap with the 2007 edition, meaning the 2016
map has 71% unique associations, which looks promising for Corbyn
and his team but there are some caveats. First of all, some of these
new associations simply do not apply in 2007 - neither Ed Miliband
nor Jeremy Corbyn were national figures and the Party was not in
Opposition at the time. These are changes that cannot be attributed
to any concerted rebranding effort. Second, many of the new
associations are, in fact, older associations that pre-date the Blair and
Brown era of New Labour - for instance, Trade unions, Socialism,
Workers. These Old Labour associations may have been dormant
and well known to the population, with Corbyn simply reactivating
them rather than bringing in genuinely new elements to the Labour
brand.
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However, as a measure of differentiation, these older associations

could be extremely valuable: they hark back to a Labour Party that is
not solely focused on the median voters of Middle England (White
& De Chernatony, 2002). The Labour Party in 2016 have taken on
some values that are non-centrist, making it easier for voters to
assess the brand in comparison to its major competitor.
6. Discussion
Assessing political rebranding
It is important to reassert that the consensus map produced for this
paper is a snapshot of a particular topic at a particular point of time.
The timing of the study gives it particular interest because it allows
closer analysis of how voters see The Labour Party as it is in the
process of rebranding.
Rebranding can be a complex change process. In the private sector,
it can take two broad forms: the revolutionary, which is best
exemplified by a change in brand name and identity; or the
evolutionary, which can take the form of a modified slogan (Stuart &
Muzellec, 2004). While it is not impossible for the former to transfer
to the political market, it is most likely that political scientists would
be more interested in the evolution of political brands - although
some marketing scholars would argue that a rebrand only occurs
when there has been a name change (Muzellec & Lambkin, 2006).
In some way, changing the party leader can act as a similar
revolutionary rebrand in politics. The leader is, as seen above,
usually the most important aspect of a party brand in the eyes of the
public - when the party leader changes, voter conceptualization of
the party has at least the potential to change radically.
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On the other hand, entrenched political actors can also be said to

rebrand. For example, in 2005 Tony Blair sought to create a new
personal image for the General Election, one that combined the
idealized, youthful Blair of 1997 with the tougher and more
experienced version that had already served two terms as Prime
Minister (Scammell, 2007). Despite the overall popularity of the
Labour government in comparison with the Conservative
opposition, the general level of cynicism in the electorate concerned
Blairs team because they thought they might have an issue with
mobilisation and, thus, give their opponents an opportunity to
compete in the election. In general, modern political parties are
branded and, I would argue, rebranded using their leader as a proxy
(Speed et al, 2015) - the biggest changes between the 2007 and 2016
maps are all focused around Corbyn.
Of course, this and similar studies of brand management in party
politics only tell a part of the story. The extent to which a political
party's brand is driven by top-down or ideological concerns in the
postmaterialist age should be disputed (Reeves et al, 2006; Green &
Hobolt, 2008). As echoed by the indicators for trust in political
institutions, perception is vital when it comes to political brands;
measuring perception is an inherently customer or, in this case,
voter oriented exercise.
One of the key findings of this study is that old leaders and concepts
are probably more entrenched into the brand associations of
political parties than one might expect. This is a good example of
why top-down brand management approaches may fail - they do
not appreciate the breadth nor depth of associations held by voters.
In the original paper, French and Smith noted that Thatcher
retained a very central position in the Conservative supporters
consensus map 17 years after she left office (p470). This is a similar
finding to the still central Blair, Brown axis in the 2016 map. In both
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cases, the respondents were infants when many of these individuals

were front line political figures. Remarkably, current 1st year
students in the UK could have been born after
Tony Blair first came
to power. The longevity of brand associations is not an intuitive

finding. For political parties, focusing on top-down brand
management will not only fail to combat or otherwise deal with with
these deep lying associations they will most likely fail to identify
them at all.
It is vital that political parties not get completely caught up in the
leader or issues of the day, no matter how important they might
seem at the time, because voters simply do not conceptualize the
party in the same way. These maps show a combination of older
issues and events, different political actors and general ideas; they
are not particularly reflective of current events despite being
specifically designed as snapshots. The institutional value of the
political party is that it holds long-term ideals and schemes while
political actors become ever more short term focused. Happily, this
appears to be reflected in the voters conceptualization.
The need for rebranding can be heightened during electoral
campaigns. As Blair acknowledged in 2005, a disaffected and cynical
electorate makes voter mobilization extremely tricky, which leaves
campaigns more vulnerable because of the decreased accuracy of
polls (Silver, 2014; Wang, 2014). Strong polling results can quickly
disappear when people dont actually turnout to vote.
Obamas much vaunted campaign innovations in 2008 and 2012
strongly focused on mobilisation - changing peoples minds is much
less crucial in increasingly common low-turnout elections (Bohl,
2009; Kreiss & Howard, 2010; Bimber, 2014). Further, the effects of
digital media and big data on voters is most evident in terms of
mobilization rather than persuasion (Bond et al, 2012; Issenberg,
42 of 66
2012). These digital media tools that have helped bolster

mobilization are, crucially, very tied to candidates - the online,
personalised media space demands candidate centred campaigns,
which has an inbuilt tension with party politics (Enli & Skogerb,
2013).
But not every political actor needs to think like a campaign
manager. Thinking about mobilization in terms of party branding or
rebranding widens the frame. More sophisticated campaign
strategies from the professionalised era of campaigns have not
historically been linked with any positive trends of political trust or
interest in the general public (Scammell, 2003; Dermody &
Hanmer-Lloyd, 2005). It seems unlikely that the advent of Big Data
driven campaigning would be any different (Hersh, 2015). Parties
and political actors can use branding approaches, like BCMs, to deal
with
why
voters are disaffected with political institutions rather than
coming up with new and expensive ways to work around the
symptoms of disaffection.
Implications for the decline of political parties

The general trend of political communication in the digital age is
towards greater responsiveness, partly because voters simply
demand more interaction (Xenos & Foot, 2008). The hope for digital
communication tools is that they might lead to a more participatory
political process but this ideal has been sidelined somewhat by the
focus on their application in electoral campaigns - which are
naturally outcome focused - instead of political communication as a
whole (Lilleker & Jackson, 2010). Political parties face a challenge to
react to the demands of the new digital media landscape, something
that they have been unable to adapt to so far. There is no guarantee
that such development will be beneficial, as McLuhan predicted with
startling clarity back in 1964:
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Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and
create problems of human involvement and organisation for which there is
no precedent. We may yet yearn for the simple days of the automobile and
the superhighway. (p114, 2001)
Perhaps these problems require a wholescale rebrand for practically

all political parties in advanced democracies - Labour included - lest
they face being ever more dominated by individual personalities,
particularly party leaders, who can adapt more quickly to the
changed media environment. Even worse, networked organisations
made possible through online communication have sprung up as an
alternative way to organise political participation (Bimber et al,
2009; Shirky, 2011). These are routes into the political process that
bypass and fundamentally undermine political parties as they focus
on a direct rather than representative model of democracy
(Coleman, 2005). Party rebranding, therefore, isnt simply a question
of improving electoral strategy but of institutional relevance in a
vastly changed political arena.
Individual politicians - be they party leaders like Jeremy Corbyn or
celebrity politicians (Street, 2004) like Donald Trump - can ride
waves of popularity. Since he became party leader, Corbyn has
overseen the biggest rise in Party membership for almost a decade
(Syal, 2016), which suggests that these waves can be beneficial for the
party as a whole. As this study shows, the way consumers
conceptualise parties is heavily centred on the most prominent
politicians of that party. These individuals can even come and go
and still be closely associated with the party as far as voters are
concerned. Another complication is the way in which those
individuals are portrayed in the mainstream media11 - a sphere in
which Corbyn has been consistently decried as unelectable
(Myerscough, 2015) - and the associated effects of the classic opinion
11
As opposed to the digital media landscape discussed earlier.

44 of 66
leader model (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). In this environment, parties

are playing second fiddle to their prominent politicians and have to
mediate their access to the public via both those politicians and the
media industry. Is it possible for political parties to manage their
own brand? Perhaps the late-modern period of networked
democracy (Bang, 2009; Bang & Esmark, 2009) has been
accompanied by a shift that does away with the underlying need for
political parties and any rebranding is merely a doomed attempt to
stay relevant.
But the danger of letting parties fall by the wayside is too great.
Firstly, the longevity of political parties means that parties hold
together vital information for voters - long term issues and
approaches, historical events and individuals - that cannot be carried
by the media or individual politicians alone (Smith & Speed, 2011).
Secondly, there is no other form of democracy that has worked as
well and for as long as party-focused representative democracy.
Other systems that do not include these institutionalised dispersions
of power and feedback loops from citizens to the elites fail again and
again (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012). A new digitally mediated
system
may
work but who, with any degree of certainty, can say
how?
Thankfully, there is evidence that parties in the UK are not being
abandoned wholesale, merely changed. The political system has
become increasingly multi-party to reflect the diminished
institutional relevance of Labour and the Conservatives (Dunleavy,
2005). This change is mirrored by a more diverse media
environment. The fragmentation of the electorate would seem to
call for better political branding - rather than simply better
messaging - because this process allows parties to reassess their own
45 of 66
identities in the eyes of the public: when an old system is changing,

parties must figure out where they stand in the new one.
Parties in the UK can no longer focus on building parliamentary
majorities, as they have done historically (Marsh, 2011), but on
identifying ideological concerns in the electorate that are not being
properly represented in government. Parties route to greater
relevance in the postmaterialist, late-modern, networked landscape
is to focus as much as possible on bottom-up approaches that are
inclusive, not a top-down managerial model that further alienates a
cynical public who can make their opinions felt via other channels.
Earlier, I criticised the campaign focus of political communication
literature for doing little to deal with the widespread disaffection of
voters in advanced democracies. The essential argument is that
better electoral campaigns does not lead to better governmental
performance, just more professionalised and anodyne political
dialogue that then leads to voter cynicism (Simon, 2002; Hay, 2008).
Political branding may have similar connotations, particularly
branding approaches that focus on brand management. The
understanding of political branding within the context of
democratic disaffection is core to this study - unless political
branding is consumer-oriented, it risks exacerbating the problem of
legitimacy for democracy as a whole, not just political parties (Marsh
& Fawcett, 2011).
I include this as a serious caveat while highlighting the potential
usefulness of political branding approaches. If political branding
does not lead political parties to be more responsive, more inclusive,
and more voter-oriented then it is simply making matters worse.
46 of 66
Suggestions for further research

First and foremost, this study (as well as its model) has significant
reliability and validity concerns. The sample size was too small and
selected from a specific and rather narrow population that is not
representative of the UK as a whole. It is useful insofar as it pilots the
historical comparison of political parties using the BCM
methodology and in that it attempts to bridge the political branding
debate with the notion of disaffected democracies - is is not useful in
terms of the robustness of its findings. A large-scale research project
on similar lines would offer the latter.
I have also omitted the kind of reliability and validity checks that
John et al (2006) propose in their original BCM methodology. These
were not included for two reasons: first, feasibility and space
limitations; second, French and Smith did not include any such
measures in their paper so doing a split-half reliability check or
nomological validity check on the 2016 consensus map would not
reveal any change related or comparative information. A follow up
to this paper may seek out the original findings of French and Smith
combined with the findings from this paper so as to make an
evaluation on the internal reliability and validity of the BCM
methodology as applied to the political market.
My introduction of additional association favourability analysis rather than relying on simple valence - is also worth testing on a) a
wider variety of (potentially non-political) goods and b) on different
groups of respondents. How do different subsets of the electorate
regard the favourability of a set of consensus associations? Are there
true consensus favourability scores at all? Do these favourability
score significantly vary over time? There are a host of unanswered
questions to do with this measure, particularly in political markets.
47 of 66
Finally, there is a second dimension of comparative analysis that

could easily be applied to expand the use of BCMs in the political
market - a parallel study of changes to the Conservative Partys
consensus map. Are the changes indicated in this study a result of
conscious brand management or simply inevitable drift? How
controlled is the rebranding process in political parties - does it
require radical new leaders or are new leaders enough? Is it more
pronounced in opposition than in government? Comparing two
parties over the same period of time could help answer these
questions.
7. Conclusion
It is often quipped that a week is a long time in politics. From
analysing how voters understand and conceptualise the central
institution of representative democracy - political parties - it would
seem that this is a misguided notion.
Branding in politics should not be sidetracked by either managerial
nor campaign focused concerns. The application of the BCM
methodology reveals fascinating insights for campaigners and party
advisors, but it also provides a bottom-up perspective on nature of
the political market as a whole. The longevity of political parties is
not some obscure or mysterious topic of interest only to political
scientists, it is directly reflected in how voters think about them.
Party rebranding may well be necessary for many traditional parties
in advanced democracies as they struggle with low memberships
and low public confidence. There is no clear path for success in this
regard. But the institutional value of the party comes from its ability
to communicate information that is not explicitly tied to the
election cycle. Because of this, parties have the potential to play a
48 of 66
key role in the problems surrounding the disaffection of

democracies.
This paper pilots a branding focused form of comparative study that
reflects the wider debate over the nature and effectiveness of
democratic systems in the late-modern, postmaterialist and
networked world of the early 21st century.
49 of 66
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Statement of Authorship
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All ideas and language of others are acknowledged in the text. All
references and verbatim extracts are properly quoted and all other
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REBRANDING THE LABOUR PARTY IN

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

The decline of political parties

The Brand Concept Mapping process

Methodological differences to the model paper

5. Results & Analysis

The brand maps

Measuring brand equity

Assessing political rebranding

Implications for the decline of political parties

Suggestions for further research

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Democracies in the Western world have experienced perhaps

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

without breaking from the neo-liberal economic model established

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Probably the most commonly cited explanation for democratic

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

confidence in institutions, the digital revolution has exacerbated the

The decline of political parties

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

representative democracy, the political party, is regarded as

[Politicians] can campaign on almost nothing beyond personal appeal and

Parties have increasingly been supplanted in this postmaterialist

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

become decoupled from identifiable class or social cleavages, the

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

There is some debate over whether or not political parties can be

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

in a list of seven unique attributes found in electoral choices that are

Rather than analysing politics as just another market like soft

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

In order to analyse brands, there must be a form of measurement. It

perspective is concerned with the latter and defined by Keller

The financial valuation of brands is common in the private sector

See the Conceptual approach section.

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

that, unlike economic markets, new brands are extremely unusual

Figure 1: Example of mainstream political symbolism

[Source: CDU Twitter account]

Focusing on political brands is also increasingly relevant given the

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

of any new communication technology is historically associated

Figure 2: Example of activist political symbolism

[Source: Wikimedia commons]

Beyond the political establishment, new political activists such as the

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

Metzger, 2001; Sunstein, 2001). There have already been studies of

level data to shape messaging (Bimber, 2014; Stromer-Galley, 2014).

the coming years.

Rowan Emslie // Rebranding the Labour Party in modern Britain

BCM has already been applied to British political parties by French

Table 1: Customer-focused dimensions of brand equity

Evaluated in terms of both price premium and customer

The perception of quality as compared to alternatives. Involves

How is the brand valued? Is it differentiated from its competitors?

The relative salience of the brand in the mind of the customer.

These four dimensions were developed with the private sector in