Never mind the sizzle, where's the sausage?

Somewhere along the way, the top people at the Labour Party seem to have decided that they are going to rebrand the party as the 'Progressive Party'. Besides it being the new "coalition for change" (taken straight out of the Obama script) and a national movement of moderates, it is also being touted as the party of progressives.

Nearly every press release issued from the Mile End Glass House is peppered with a reference to 'progressive politics'. Joseph Muscat repeats the phrase constantly, and the party's next general conference is going to be taken up with the fascinating subject of the party's "project as the catalyst of a Movement of Progressives and Moderates".

Now, as branding goes, I don't know how wise this move was. As anybody in the marketing business will tell you, the aim of a brand is to make a clear association between an organisation, product or service with an identity in the audience's mind. A brand image is instantly identifiable with what it stands for. Nike - or even its iconic swoosh - stands for sportswear and shoes. Almighty Google has become so big, it has become a verb. And everybody knows what Apple stands for.

Admittedly, these are three of the world's top 10 brands, but the thing they have in common is that anyone seeing the brand name or hearing it, will make an instant connection with what it represents. That connection is sadly missing, in the case of the 'progressive' tag. I'm quite sure that if the PL had to dispatch its find-outers to carry out a straw poll among voters as to what they thought the word 'progressive' meant, they'd come up across a lot of blank faces.

Maybe a few respondents would venture that it meant 'modern', or have a fuzzy notion about it being somehow linked to reform and not being a stuffy conservative; but other than that, there's very little recognition of what the progressive label signifies.

This is bad news for Muscat. He's campaigning on a platform which most people don't really recognise or understand. It's going to be very difficult to whip them up into a frenzy of excitement or even lukewarm acceptance about the progressive mantra that the Labour Party keeps on chanting.

I can't imagine what his advisers were thinking when they launched the PL's rebranding exercise in this direction. I attribute it to the insistence on imitating the campaign strategies and slogans of foreign political parties. First, we had the PN copying the Sarkozy posters, now we have the Labour Party acting like a political magpie and picking up campaigns from here and there.

Take the term 'progressive', for example. During the US Democratic Presidential debate, then Senator Hillary Clinton indicated that she preferred being called 'progressive' than 'liberal'. Now, the two ideologies are not worlds apart, but Clinton was basing herself on the conclusions of opinion polls carried out by the Rasmussen agency. These had concluded that Americans were more receptive to the word 'progressive' than the word 'liberal'. Presumably that's because 'liberal' has developed negative connotations suggesting immoral, swinging lefties, living a life of debauchery and loose living, tree-humping, drug-obsessed loonies.

Of course, this is just a clichéd and incorrect stereotype of liberals. But the people at Labour would have realised that in Malta's conservative context, coming across as a 'liberal' party would have attracted the same type of tags, so they switched to the safer - and fuzzier - 'progressive'.

Another campaign that Labour borrows heavily from is that of the British Conservative Party. It's quite clear - to me at least - that Muscat models himself on David Cameron. They both portray themselves as the young, fresh-faced alternatives to the fossilised incumbents. The message that both try to hammer home is that sticking to the devil voters know will lead to ruin, and that the country simply can't take another government headed by their respective prime ministers.

The title and key note of Cameron's first article this year was, 'We can't go on like this'. He speaks of "a weak Prime Minister and a divided government".

Muscat echoes this, stating: "There has to be a better way of governing these islands than what many of us are experiencing today", and criticises complacency and elitism. Cameron and Muscat have both tried to rebrand their parties. Cameron has tried to bin the 'nasty party' image of the Tories, replacing it with the compassionate conservative label.

Muscat is making a clear distinction between the party headed by him and the party in the past. On a certain level he's succeeded. The PL today is not as forbidding as it was in days gone by, and there has been some effort expended in fielding a good mix of candidates for the MEP elections. However, both Muscat and Cameron face criticism of being quite light on policy, of being gimmicky and market-savvy, but rather hard to pin down on matters of substance. In other words, of being all sizzle and no sausage.

I dare say that this is one of the reasons which contributes to voter apathy. We don't have much faith in politicians any more. Seeing politicians try to win us over without saying what exactly they stand for, what they will support or not, makes us even more disillusioned about the whole political process.

Mary Portas - the British retail and marketing queen - said as much when she commented on Cameron's recent poster. She was dismissive of his airbrushed image and had this to say about his brand:

"All successful brands stand for something, whether that's reliability, luxury or usefulness. I've racked my brains but I can't think for the life of me what Cameron stands for... David Cameron could be an incredible prime minister, but at this rate we'll never know, because so far he hasn't had the confidence to tell us why we should vote for him and what sets him apart from Labour and the Lib Dems. He needs to show his true colours. This poster doesn't reflect Cameron the man or Cameron the politician. It hasn't even got the presidential feel that was presumably intended. Far from it: it's mealy-mouthed, middle market, middle-of-the-road - and the middle-of-the-road is where you get run over." Muscat should take note.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt