I love Greece.
And I read ancient Greek and Latin at university.
And then of course I proceeded to go into a career
that had absolutely nothing to do with those.
What it has enabled me to do is to be incredibly
annoying and pedantic about spelling and grammar.
And also, at least, when we are on holiday with the family
I can read some of the signs in Greek.
But I have to say I never imagined that my student-self,
my grown-up self would actually be able
to find some sort of accommodation.
And I'll explain what I mean by that, I hope,
over the next few minutes.
I'll also explain what I mean by
including this gentleman here,
whom I'm sure you recognize, but this is Pericles.
And Pericles was one of the earliest
and most successful democratic leaders in ancient Greece.
It is very difficult to find a sculpture,
or a statue of Pericles without this helmet on.
And actually, this helmet was a symbol of his position.
But actually, the rumor was
it was because he had weird-shaped head.
But nevertheless, it was a very strong branded look.
So I suppose you could say that about it, too.
But actually, on a more serious note,
what was interesting about ancient Greek democracy was,
of course, it was a direct democracy.
People expected to get involved in a whole range of issues.
It wasn't just about one vote every few years
and representing people for that time.
So maybe there are some interesting parallels
for our conversations and our democracy today.
But when it comes to that democracy,
at the moment democracy has a bad rep.
A bit of a bad reputation.
Whether or not that's about wars, or whether it's failure
to tackle issues like climate change,
whether or not it's attached to democracy's difficulty
of getting people to vote for pain rather than pleasure
at the moment.
I guess what we all want is for democracy to really succeed.
Because that, I think we'd all believe,
is the way to get people to live healthier,
happier, more productive, safer lives.
Now what good branding does, is it does manage to connect with people
to touch people on their daily lives.
And I know what you might say,
buying a household brand is not exactly the same
as voting for someone who's going to represent your life.
It's on a rather different level.
However, because brands do manage to touch people
across boundaries, and by the way
I'm talking about brands that can be in any sector.
It can be retail, it can be corporate, it can be product,
it can of course be not-for-profit.
And often when people talk about brands,
they can forget that some of the world's
most powerful brands, most influential brands,
are in the not-for-profit sector.
Because when I talk about brands, I'm not just talking about
the top bit, the logo.
I mean frankly, the week doesn't go past
if we see silly headlines about you know,
this company has been renamed that cost 50 million pounds.
And frankly, if any of those amounts had been true,
I'd have retired to the Caribbean a long time ago.
But it's so easy for people to get distracted by
the top bit of branding.
You know the name, and the logo,
and the packaging, and everything else.
And I have to say, that working sometimes with political parties,
when you talk about re-branding,
what they really mean is could you give us a new squiggle,
and could you give us a new slogan?
What makes good brands really work
is the substance that lies beneath.
You know, the shared vision.
And the minute you start talking
about that substance and shared vision,
you might start thinking about some issues with democracy,
is there a shared vision for democracy?
And certainly from what I've seen so far, maybe there isn't.
Now, if branding has got some challenges,
then, democracy has, too.
And just on the challenges for branding,
I talked about some headlines but also this book,
for example, became a bestseller.
What I'd like to say, and it was interesting that
"The Economist" ran this front cover, in retort to some of the books
that have been written on the subject.
It was basically talking about pro-logo, that actually
branding is a very successful, sustainable engine for economies.
And what's more, sometimes people underestimate this,
if you've got a strong brand,
you've got a loyal customer.
If you've got a loyal customer,
that means more security of earnings, more security of income,
and actually more security of employment.
And that in itself is quite an important issue.
And what's more, is strongly-branded organizations
got a reputation to protect.
So they're likely to try and do the right thing.
However, I guess the thing that you'd also say
is that in today's digital age,
unless you are doing the right thing,
unless you are who you say you are,
and you do what you say you're going to do,
you'll get found out, with a speed and a scale
that will take your breath away.
And the same with political parties, and also political leaders.
So absolutely, beware.
Now there are some learnings in my view,
because brands can connect with people, get them to vote for people every day,
either in their purchases, or their influence.
I just want to use an example of that.
What was so interesting in some of the latest elections
in Greece or in France, is again how difficult it is
to get the people to vote for difficult things.
And the temptation so often, in politics, and in parties,
is to do equivalent of a BOGOF.
Have you heard of BOGOF?
Buy one get one free.
So coming up to elections
and what political parties start saying is, retire at 50?
Absolutely. We'll have that supermarket special offer.
Do you want to, you know, get a full pension, etc?
Absolutely, we'll do that.
So, politicians privately say, "Oh my goodness,
we know that we're promising things that we can't deliver
and can't afford to deliver,
but we do need to get voted in."
It's a very compromising thing.
And what's more, when they can't deliver at a later date,
that makes people rather cynical,
and not supportive of politics,
and the temptation to make promises that you can't keep.
Not a great commercial, often for democracy.
Now I'm just going to talk briefly about this very strong brand here.
Apple hardly ever discounts, it doesn't do deals,
it's very engaging with its consumers,
and with apologies to a previous speaker,
it does have a strong vision.
It talks about, man shall not be subordinate to machine.
And it's easy to be cynical about this kind of stuff,
and actually in the UK sometimes
we've elevated cynicism to a fine art.
On the other hand, it really does connect with people,
it really has engaged with people.
And what's more of course, Apple had a leader
who enthralled enough consumers
to vote for Apple to make it the world's most valuable company.
And that's despite the fact that it's incredibly expensive,
relatively speaking.
It occasionally makes mistakes, and whisper it,
occasionally it can be a little bit arrogant.
So, I don't think we'd say that Apple employees
felt that it was particularly democratic.
But what we would say though, if you just looked in a market place,
at what's happening here,
so you look at these declines,
even if those are little blip at the end of some of these graphs,
and you would say,
"Hm, you need a bit of innovation,
you need some radical, strategic input,
you need some new brands, for goodness sake."
And again, these are the numbers of people who are not voting.
This is the decline
in numbers of voters just across the UK,
and across the USA.
So clearly, we need to do something.
No wonder people are disengaged.
Because of course, you can only vote for people
every few years.
You can't make your views felt
you can't make your views count,
in a democratic process, more often than that.
And that again, compared with what you can do
in the commercial space these days,
you can shape brands, you can make your views felt,
you can really make some changes.
And yet actually in politics, in democracy,
it's really quite difficult to do that.
So we need some innovation,
and we need to send these graphs, in my view,
in the opposite direction.
You can compare the shape of these
with for example what happens with strongly branded businesses over time.
And just see how strongly
well-branded businesses outperform the average of others.
And I guess that we can do with a little bit of movement in this way,
in democracy itself.
And the take-up of democracy as well.
Because if you were to look at those previous charts,
you'd say, actually there's a problem here,
the management is pretty rubbish.
And not doing a great job.
And again, we need to break out and do something
very different.
So are there some lessons we can learn from
branding to democracy that doesn't involve
a spanking new logo or indeed a new slogan?
If you were to take the top 100 brands,
we've looked at them for about last 15 years
there are three key characteristics that come up
time after time.
And what makes a strong brand that might be very good
as a comparator with democracy.
And the first one is about clarity.
Clarity of what the brand stands for,
how it's different from the competitors,
and of course right now you look at democracy and say,
is it very clear what we mean by democracy
is that a shared vision?
I mean half of the world live in some sort of democracy,
only 11% live in a full democracy.
But of course, there are different ways of doing that for democracy,
either forced or otherwise voluntary.
And many different points of view about how to engage.
Now if you are going to be creating a global brand
and take some lessons from there,
you'd actually bother to ask the people who really matter,
like your customers.
Your consumers.
How about asking people around the world
because in the moment, what happens, with democracies,
is that it always act like export brands,
and of course, if you've got an American export brand
or Western-European export brand,
that might not go down very well the way it is done,
in other parts of the world.
So, if you wanted to create a global brand,
you'd start with a global perspective.
You might get some experts from around the world.
Possibly not politicians, who've come to think about
what are the best practices and evidence-base to the best practice,
for how you absolutely deliver democracy
in a way that was most likely to deliver
the healthiest, wealthiest, and safest societies.
So clarity and consistency, if you just think about
consistency in a political context,
and you'd say, actually, a lot of political parties
for example, they're not executed consistently.
What about coherence in policies?
This currently doesn't work as well as it might do.
And of course,
the final characteristic of a very successful brand is about leadership.
And leadership is obviously about
who runs the organization, who symbolizes the organization.
As of course, it can apply both to commercial
and also to political parties.
But it also means restlessness,
it means innovation, it means setting the agenda in markets.
And maybe that isn't always done in,
if I can call it, the political market, too.
When one thinks about leadership,
and RIP Steve Jobs,
but what he did do though, he absolutely symbolized
all the best characteristics of the Apple brand.
And I wonder how it will survive and thrive after he has gone.
And then when one thinks about the political world,
obviously there are some political leaders
who've been rather more successful than others.
And rather more successful people at persuading
that through the pain, there will be some pleasure at the end of it,
and that it's worth absolutely sticking through that.
But just back to Pericles and back to ancient Greece, again,
coming back to direct democracy,
ways of getting people involved in the political process,
on a much more active level, this has to be absolutely,
the way forward and it would be great,
I've shared some ideas maybe how to use the principles of branding,
to engage people in a democracy,
and I'd be fascinated with your ideas, too,
and thank you to Greece and thank you to Pericles
for the inspiration.
Many thanks for listening.
(Applause)