I am Alex White, a progressive campaign strategist, writer, social marketer and policy activist.
Read any number of journalist or blogger commentaries over the last several years and you will have seen the infiltration of marketing terms like “brand”, “positioning”, public relations, image management and more. Obama is the most recognisable example of this “political brand” phenomenon, but we’ve seen it elsewhere: New Labour under Tony Blair (Gordon Brown [...]
Last year I wrote a (yet uncompleted) series of posts on Labor’s breaking of the immutable rules of marketing. (You can read part 1, part 2 and part 3.) With an election due around September this year, I thought I’d take a quick stock-take on whether Labor is branding itself effectively. Since the election of [...]
Should your union bother with QR codes? I was recently asked my opinion on QR codes and whether a union should start to use them for a campaign. I was luke-warm on the idea to say the least, but apart from a general distaste towards them I couldn’t name any specific reasons. Well, regular columnist [...]
Unions have brands. Brands are the set of mental and emotional associations that make up the perception in the mind of members, non-members, other unions, and the community about the union’s “personality” and promise. The concept of “union” has a brand — the promise of better pay and conditions and the mixture of positive and [...]
I’ve got most of my experience in communications, marketing, graphic design and campaigning from the union movement, book-ended by political and non-profit experience. What I’ve seen across all three of these sectors is that communications, public relations, graphic design, and marketing are treated as interchangeable. They’re not. Marketing, PR, communications, graphic design are all different [...]