10 Strategy Points For The UKIP To Improve Voter Perceptions

…A marketer looks at the UK Independence Party as a brand positioning challenge.

The UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by the polemic and gadfly-like figure of Nigel Farage, is a pro-democratic anti-European-federalism pro-patriotism pro-capitalism political movement whose fast rise rightly has all the main political parties worried.

Their rise in recognition and support comes, I believe, in large part because they represent to ordinary people a party that actually stands for a coherent set of opinions, and expresses those opinions directly without the expected political hedging and spin. Someone with an opinion, whatever that opinion is, beats someone with none.

Even without looking much into the details, it’s clear to most people that they are a disruptive, rebellious, opinionated, divisive, and non-boring political party. You don’t have to like them, but all of those factors are basically positives compared to main political parties and politicians, who at best inspire gigantic yawns, but more usually disappointment, distrust, or plain contempt. Such ordinary politicians have real trouble understanding UKIP’s source of popularity and fighting back. The more the incumbent politicians and spin doctors try to deal with UKIP, the more it helps UKIP: it’s a classic asymmetric / antifragile challenge.

UKIP have the power to attract anti-establishment votes, and this is an important part of any new party’s rise. Even if you don’t agree with UKIP’s policies, or if you don’t really know exactly what those policies are, or if you don’t even care that much — a “protest vote” is a very powerful democratic act. Being able to vote those in power out of power is at least 51% of the value of democratic systems. UKIP is good at attracting these protest votes, and should continue to find ways to do so.

So far, though, UKIP has risen more from passive positioning than active marketing. They’ve tapped into wells of natural support from several important opinion-constituencies who didn’t have existing political representation, and on a larger scale have started to ride a rising tide of anti-big-government anti-corruption anti-elitist-oligarchic public opinion. They are riding currents and finding natural areas of support, but the organization’s conscious branding and positioning efforts can surely only claim a minor contribution. Plus the energies of Farage are an unpredictable wild card rather than part of a coordinated plan. But what will happen soon is the vote-measured popularity of the party will rise to the point that they have to get serious about their image — and controlling and projecting an image — which calls for a more intentional approach than just relying on native strengths aligning naturally with popular opinion currents.

Regardless of political standpoints and current affairs, the objectives for any up-and-coming (and disruptive) party like UKIP boil down to two things:

1. Increase awareness;
2. Project an image of trust and professionalism. (Way more significant for the British than “popularity” or even “likeability”.)

Both of these need to be worked on at the same time. At the moment, UKIP is in danger of having too much visibility compared to the amateur image presented. To a certain extent the un-polished image and materials coming out of UKIP are endearing, but I think they are already at the limits here.

The two needs of awareness + trust are very familiar to marketers of any brand or organization, so, as a marketer, despite a lack of any in-depth knowledge of UKIP or UK politics, I’ll have a try at a list of things this party could do to improve their position:

1. The initialism “UKIP” should not be the brand name.
   In publicity and adverts, the party should use the full name UK Independence Party, as this is a powerful brand that states exactly what they are about, and conversely “UKIP” when spoken sounds weedy if not risible. Followers are already nicknamed “kippers” which is something you don’t want to stick.
2. Get rid of awful purple colour scheme.
   Rebrand professionally with a better, stronger logo and colour scheme. The colour scheme should be blatantly based on the union flag to correlate with the UK Independence / strength / confidence message. UKIP must bite the bullet on this now before it is too late / costly to work on.
3. Get professional help with online materials and social media.
   UKIP has a strong “organic” following and reach online. They also benefit from agility in online marketing compared to the sluggish approach to these opportunities predictably taken by the big parties. But the work is currently amateur and uncoordinated. UKIP should be more intentional in making their online publicity structured, coordinated, and proactive. In order to do it really well, UKIP must enlist dedicated professional resources, not only well-meaning volunteers or undirected part-timers.
4. Listen and adapt.
   One key benefit of getting more organized and active in online marketing is that you will be able to collect ideas and opinions from a wide spectrum of people, in greater quantities, more efficiently than trying to do this from doorsteps or formal surveys. Some of the key vote-winning points, not to mention priceless education for marketing copy writers, will come simply from listening to the people who are talking to and about UKIP online, and that includes opponents as well. Political parties are slow to act here and very “vertical” and formal in their approach, so UKIP could have a major early-mover advantage in fully engaging online and hoovering up valuable feedback.
5. Nigel Farage and who else?
   UKIP desperately needs to build up a visible team of credible leadership figures around Nigel Farage. His independent, up-yours attitude is a huge strong point in a landscape of ordinary politicians who we tend to agree have the “charisma of a damp rag” and appearance of a “low-grade bank clerk” [Farage’s own turns of phrase]… but the party should not depend only on the single leader figure. There should be a group of smart people brought to the fore ASAP. Ideally they should be chosen with image considerations: i.e. deliberately diverse in terms of age, class, and ethnicity to illustrate broad voter appeal. But they should still be capable, interesting, and articulate people, not just tokens. UKIP must retain a focus on substance over style… but displaying diversity is a matter of substance! UKIP is a rising power so should be able to recruit some very talented people.
6. Look the part.
   Similarly to the above point, Farage and his team must look like a leadership team. They should have at least one dark-glasses security guard wherever they go (seriously!), ideally one or more attractive young assistants for the background, and pay more attention to their hair, skin, and fashion for different photo ops.
7. Get celebrities.
   UKIP should recruit celebrities and use them to pre-empt competing parties’ PR accusations of elitism, over-nationalism, nerdiness, etc. Political parties should not try to be cool or enlist celebrities to make them cool, but they should aim for a sense that it is acceptable to be interested / support if existing popular figures are happy to stand on stage with UKIP. Lots of celebrities have their charitable, environmental, or social causes: great, bring these messages on board, starting from the common ground that the elitist 1-percenter status-quo run by unelected bureaucrats stands in the way.
8. Campaign against vacuousness.
   UKIP news output, copywriting, and speech writing should exploit the Farage ‘voice’ of being able to (-delighted to-) question, mock, and upstage empty-suit, cliché-driven politicos and bureaucrats. They should directly attack the incumbents by calling them out on meaningless soundbites and challenging them to plain-speaking clarifications of their real position. UKIP is already good at this, and ordinary people see it and like it because we are (of course) much smarter than politicians give credit, and, as we know, journalists are not doing their job enough on this front.
9. Ridicule boredom and predictability.
   UKIP, as I have argued, stands more in our consciousness for being interesting, opinionated, and rebellious, than it does for any policies we are aware of. Fine: UKIP should amp up the rebellious image by (on a daily basis) ridiculing mainstream politicians and media for being pompous, boring, outdated, predictable, and out of touch. The ridicule should of course be well supported by rational and factual arguments about what politicians ought to be working on, which, as I have said, voters are more than capable of appreciating. UKIP has already proven able to neutralize traditional political attacks simply by dismissing and laughing at them, and should prioritize this “guerilla” behaviour in order to seize control of as many discussions as possible, and move incumbents out of their scripted comfort zones.
10. Seek and speak truth first, campaign for votes second.
    Continuing the above concepts, UKIP should position Farage and the party’s engagement with current affairs and policy debates as “anti-politicians”. This exactly what their main strength already is, i.e. to stand as argumentative critics, campaigners for truth, champions of the truth-speaker. Policies in the manifesto should be presented as logically arising from these more general pro-freedom, pro-democracy, pro-transparency (etc) values. UKIP should wade into all sorts of topics even if they are not part of the core manifesto or part of the mainstream-media-provided agenda. After all, UKIP needs to be taken seriously as a broad-spectrum political force, not just a single-issue complainer about Europe. The key point here is that the dialogue — and UKIP popping up in news and debates all over the place — should show the party as an active, engaged, thinking, truth-seeking force primarily, and only incidentally campaigning for votes. This approach will win a lot more votes.

A lot of the above ideas are generalisations or easier said than done, but the overall point is that UKIP can benefit in both awareness and image from a more intentional marketing strategy. UKIP must think in terms of “positioning” the “brand” in a way that aligns with their existing strengths and values, and those of voters. To keep rising, UKIP has to obtain and apply sufficient resources for this marketing challenge, and this begins with organizing responsibilities and priorities internally to take image and perception improvement much more seriously.

@georgebaily