Budgie smugglers and Bob Hawke may help sell Mad Monk, declares the Australian, citing commentary from a number of advertising agencies and branding people.
From authenticity through to larrikin, it seems our branding experts have a range of branding options that might enable one of Australia’s most colourful characters in politics to ascend to the holy throne of Australian Prime Ministership.
“What he stands for is a kind of authenticity. There is so much spin and weasel words in politics, but he comes across as the guy who is prepared to run things up the flagpole,” says one.
“Abbott’s often criticised ability to speak his mind regardless of the consequences might prove to be the element that sets him apart,” says another.
In actual fact, Tony Abbott is a marketers dream.
But to get to that conclusion, we need to first revisit some basics in marketing strategy.
Let’s first be clear about challenger brands and what a challenger brand strategy is. Challenger brands attack. They do not defend.
Defense is the job of the market leader and in the case of the political arena, the market leader is the elected Government of the day.
A great part of the dismal performance of the Coalition Government since 2007 can be attributed to the very fact that it hasn’t behaved like a challenger brand.
When it should have attacked ferociously, it lacked bite, courage or cut-through with its brand message.
With messages that Australians should be reminded about every day – such as the enormous debt incurred – it lacked relentless grit.
Of course, the story is even worse in the case of the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme, where it actually agreed with Rudd’s ALP strategy, thereby owning the legislation as much as the Government.
If it turned out to be a dud, which the IMF amongst others think it will, the Coalition had nowhere to go.
They can hardly use flawed legislation against the Government when they helped the Government pass it in the first place.
The ensuing chaos in Canberra was a defining moment for the Coalition’s strategy.
Malcolm Turnbull was removed from his leadership position and a high risk-taker installed in his place.
Since then, members of the Coalition Party have talked openly to the media about a grassroots revolt amongst loyal Liberal supporters. Quite right for voters to complain, too.
Loyal customers will only tolerate so much shoddy performance before they tell you, in no uncertain terms, that they are about to take their business elsewhere.
Of course, the real problem with an Opposition Party being the same as a Government is that you remove purchase choice.
That’s terrific if you’re the elected Government hoping for more than a single term before being booted unceremoniously out of office, but it’s not so flash if you are an Opposition wanting to be taken seriously, with ambition to be re-elected into Government.
Regardless of whether he is a good, principled man and successful in business, Malcolm Turnbull failed to resonate with ordinary voters.
Polls showed an ever diminishing return on the Liberal Party’s investment in him as their leader.
The simple truth is that if customers don’t want to do buy from you, you will go out of business.
The Liberal Party, for all its attempts to appear supportive of its former leader would have done better to have taken the polls at face value and changed strategy from me-too to a true challenger brand. (In fact, history tells us that me-too in politics doesn’t work, just ask Kim Beasley.)
Or it could have listened to the likes of Wilson Tuckey, an outspoken, politically-incorrect maverick, divisive for sure, but who called it exactly as he saw it – and who turned out to be right.
Tony Abbott is many different things to different people. Most are agreed that he is colourful and speaks his mind. There is nothing wrong with a splash of colour in a political arena that is, to use Tony’s Abbott’s own expression, drab, grey and a toxic bore for most Australians. He has come out recently and said that he plans to be himself.
This is good, a very positive message. It supports a position of authenticity.
Australians will want to get to know him and make up their own minds. This means that efforts by the ALP to position him as an “extremist” may backfire for them more than work in their favour – a risk that has already been reflected in polling.
85% of Australians didn’t consider Abbott extremist, not yet at least. The polling also disproved another ALP strategy, the claims he didn’t appeal to women.
Australians tend to be somewhat cynical of Government-driven personal attacks on opposing leaders (and equally suspicious of overt graciousness towards them, as was the ALP case in the departure of Malcolm Turnbull).
It’s a fine line to walk, but right now, while people express an interest in making up their own minds, the more the ALP try to portray Tony Abbott negatively, the more sympathetic attention they draw to him.
The great risk is that people make up their minds quickly too, and decide they like what they see, almost in spite of what the Government says.
The by-elections in both Bradfield and Higgins showed swings back towards the Liberals from the battler households. If Tony Abbott is smart, and I’m certain he is, personal attacks give him the opportunity to also endear himself to Australians using another classic challenger brand positioning – the Underdog.
Nowhere was this better demonstrated that during a recent interview with reporter Laurie Oakes, a well-known left-leaning journalist, where Oakes raised the issue of Abbott’s religious beliefs.
Did Tony Abbott believe in evolution?
Yes, he replied, but why was Laurie Oakes asking him that question when he had never posed the same question to Kevin Rudd, who frequently has cameras on standby to enable him to hold impromptu press conferences on the doorstep of his church?
The message is clear. You’re singling me out. You’re picking on me.
Of course, this is exactly the sort of message that the average Australian understands and resonates with.
Most people don’t like bullies – and don’t condone bullying the underdog.
There are many factors that support Tony Abbott’s prospects.
Let’s take a quick look at some of them:
He ‘s a volunteer lifesaver (which is why he was snapped in Speedos, not to state the bleeding obvious but lifesavers don’t usually wear three-piece Armani suits on the beach), a volunteer firefighter and a bloke who heads north each year for a month as a volunteer, unpaid teacher.
So this is someone who puts a lot of effort into his community and sticks close to his community.
This community-orientation, his personal demonstration of what he presumerably considers patriotism, gives him the natural platform against which he can target Kevin Rudd, which he recently did in the Australian, saying that the PM should be staying at home rather than jet-setting the globe, adding to his “carbon footprint”.
Predictably Margie Abbott has emerged from the shadows, with pictures of the three Abbott daughters doing the rounds of the media, standing by her man. Frankly no-one expects otherwise. It’s an unusual wife that declares her husband to be a total creep.
This is an obvious PR spin that doesn’t really add anything of substance to the profile of Tony Abbott, other than to support his reputation as a stable, family man, albeit over-run by a household of women (which may help dispel the urban myth that he has no appeal to women).
Much, more more formidable is Abbott’s background as a former journalist.
This gives him great communication skills, far outstripping the abilities of Rudd, who relies heavily on indecipherable large words and bucket loads of spin. The mantra when it comes to boat-people is a classic example of where things that are said simply don’t make sense.
As The Age put it:
“TOUGH but fair. Tough … but fair. Tough. But also fair. And can I say: tough. Humane. And fair, while being tough as well. That’s the Prime Minister’s position on asylum seekers arriving by boat.”
By early December 2009, Australia had intercepted 52 boats for the year carrying suspected asylum seekers, while people smugglers had made appearances on television saying how easy Australia was to target. For many Australians, the so-called tough but fair approach to relaxing border security had become a joke.
Abbott, in positioning as the opposite to the Government – the alternative purchase choice – just needs to talk straight. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what he’s doing and people are noticing the difference already.
Here is an example from Melbourne’s Herald Sun:
“Abbott, using plain sentences we’d never heard from Malcolm Turnbull, said the Liberals would no longer agree to pass the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme.”
And he has taken it a step further.
The ETS, somewhat steeped in mystery and badly sold to the Australian public from the start, has morphed in the minds of voters from the ALP position “the greatest moral challenge (and solution) of our generation” and “for our children’s and grandchildren’s sake” to Abbott’s resounding “a big new tax on everything.”
It’s not going to take Einstein to figure out what the voters hear.
However, the quality that will most polarise and endear him, and place him squarely on the map, is courage.
Leaders must be courageous, and show strength, in order to be taken seriously. Tony Abbott is a person that has courage, some say recklessness, by the spades.
Notwithstanding his critics, it took an immense amount of courage to stand up and be counted against the ETS (even though the Liberals were finished if they didn’t). And it’s this type of courage that will cement him most certainly as a serious challenger to the PM come the next election. And we’ve seen it in action already.
Since blocking the ETS in the senate, Abbott has repeatedly challenged Kevin Rudd to a nationally televised debate on Rudd’s proposed ETS legislation.
Rudd has declined. He knows Abbott’s communication skills are far superior to his own. Worse, the ETS taxing mechanism is flawed and now wholly owned by the ALP.
His failure to front up, though, positions Rudd as a coward. And cowards are typically untrustworthy because people think they have something to hide.
In the suburbs, the noise will be deafening as brain cells whir inside ordinary voters heads. The rumble goes something along these lines: If you cannot explain and defend your policy, why are you wanting to impose it on me?
Politics is a whole lot more interesting and entertaining with a character like Tony Abbott at the helm of the Liberal Party.
Provided he can keep ignoring Malcolm Turnbull’s attempts to distract by nonsensical sniping, focus on the real issues and Kevin Rudd, and continue to call things as he sees it in language that everyday Australians can understand, he’s a genuine contender in 2010.
If I was Rudd, I’d be nervous. A true challenger brand has emerged.
