For richer, for poorer: Labour’s union-leader partners hand initiative to Tories

As first seen on Professional Manager

No-one is more able to undermine the credibility and electability of the Labour party than the very people who provide its funding. Despite calls for calm from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, and the appeals of more moderate voices like Chris Keates of the NASUWT, the Trades Union Conference (TUC) yesterday passed a motion that could pave the way towards a general strike.

Politically, it’s like Roman Abramovich insisting his team wear their boots on the wrong feet.

Granted, few people expect that there will be a national shut down, but plenty of people will talk it up. That provides a golden opportunity for the government to position unionised labour as the main barrier to economic recovery, and the Labour party as their political mouthpiece. It may stem from genuine concern over the impact of austerity, but union rhetoric against public-sector pay freezes sounds like simple self-interest to the ears of most people.

Recession itself is a pretty opaque opponent, and Conservatives would much prefer a simple scrap with the unions that people would more easily understand.

Ed Balls must have been delighted with the heckles he attracted in Brighton as he refused to back an end to the pay freeze. Ever since Ed Miliband’s election, the party has been trying to shake off accusations that the “Union Barons” call the shots. But the moment of conflict he created, and could have used to his advantage, has been superseded by another. His cause is no further forward.

Some in the Union movement want to sever the link themselves. Like a disgruntled spouse, they keep threatening divorce, and large parts of the Labour party think wistfully about the free and single life. Until it comes to the business of paying the bills, that is.

Latest figures from the Electoral Commission show that Labour received cash donations of £2.7m in the second quarter of this financial year, of which £2.1m, or 78%, came from the unions. Until something is done about party funding, Labour will simply have to take it on the chin and rack their brains for a way to seize back the initiative.

Jon Bennett
Director
jon@linstockcommunications.com

Apple vs. Samsung – How can Apple stay the apple of our eye?

A jury’s decision to award Apple £1bn in damages as a result of patent infringements by Samsung has led to much soul-searching across the pond. For many, the decision was naked protectionism, a blow against innovation and competition. Others felt Samsung’s punishment was not nearly severe enough. There is one certainty highlighted by these legal wranglings - Apple has wider issues around brand, image and communications that it will need to address shortly.

Fifteen years ago Steve Jobs returned to his spiritual home. His meticulous reconstruction of Apple is well documented, built as much on an instinctive understanding of brand, design and marketing as it was savvy business decisions.

As a challenger brand Apple was able to portray itself as edgy, young, exciting and importantly, aesthetic. Messaging started with the ‘Think Different’ campaign and moved onto adverts that included a PC and Mac compare and contrast, with a PC represented by a suited businessman and a Mac by a jeans wearing bohemian. Communications, and the Apple brand, was built around a sense of Mac owners somehow being different from their peers, more original, more free-thinking.

But Apple is now the biggest company in US history, not some uppity newcomer. Instead of playing the ‘new-kid-on-the-block’ card, they’ve shifted direction, with communications now portraying Apple as a lifestyle choice. Far from being a stamp of individualism, Apple is now a stamp of affluence, the technological embodiment of keeping ahead of the Joneses.

This change in direction has so far been managed relatively smoothly, but the Samsung case hints at choppy waters ahead. Can Apple continue to be the must-have brand, the epitome of urban cool, if it’s seen as a playground bully? A protracted legal case is surely far closer in nature to the suited businessman than the care-free urbanista Apple sought to portray itself as.

Apple customers are notoriously loyal, but how Apple communicates with the next generation of young adults is vital for its continuing dominance. It needs a communications strategy that acknowledges Apple’s popularity without compromising its image as a maverick. To do so, it needs to get back to what it does best – innovation. What could have been a ‘cooler’ response to Samsung patent infringements than to simply shrug, smile and continue to think outside of the box?

John Hood Consultant john@linstockcommunications.com

We love the greenbelt, so let’s build on it

In one of Lord Prescott’s famous malapropisms he once claimed that the green belt is a labour achievement and they mean to build on it.

It now seems some members of the Conservative Government wish to make good on his erroneous pledge.

Building on the green belt seems to be a regular reaction when Governments are under pressure to deliver new housing and stimulate economic growth.

But if this does happen in some form how do you communicate this positively to local communities that are fiercely protective of their surroundings?

Being involved in a current planning process on a green belt site I can vouch for the strength of feeling people have about their local environment. Rightly or wrongly attachment to what has now become the sacrosanct green belt is heartfelt. 

The coalition has talked about providing financial incentives for communities to approve developments. And certainly demonstrating a closer link between future development and the actual benefits for existing communities is vital.

This takes previous section 106 planning agreements to a new level. Rather than developers just paying for additional services to meet the needs of the new development there must also be a significant benefit for the existing community. Not in my back yard can often be overcome through this kind of measure.  

This does not get away from the need for good old fashioned community consultation and engagement. Yes, there are ways to carry out consultations online and gather people’s views and these should be embraced. But nothing is quite the same as a face to face meeting. This gives you the opportunity to look people in the eye and explain the detail behind plans and respond immediately to their concerns.

Trust is a word that comes up regularly in discussions with local residents about planning issues. And this is hard to build purely online.  

You may not win over everyone through meeting them face to face. But surely even a heated consultation is better than no consultation at all?

Tony Cox

Consultant

tony@linstockcommunications.com

A Stroke of Genius: Priming, Timing and Human Behaviour

This month’s Harvard Business Review highlights new research showing the potential impact of priming – a psychological process where a stimulus predisposes people to react in a certain way.

An experiment by research scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany found that golfers primed to believe that they were using a putter used by a professional golfer were 32% more successful at sinking putts than a control group that was told nothing. Similarly, the primed group estimated that the hole was 9% bigger than the control group of golfers. The golfers who believed they were playing with a professional’s club thought they’d perform better, so they did.

The research echoes similar findings Linstock unearthed as part of a recent academic review for Fidelity’s pension business in the UK. Research shows that exposing people to words associated with the elderly e.g. wrinkles means that they walk much more slowly when leaving the room and have a poorer memory of the room. On the flipside, participants asked to make sentence out of words like lean, fit, active, athletic are much more likely to use the stairs instead of the lift.

But what are the implications for communicators working on behaviour change campaigns? Firstly, priming can and does work. Secondly, techniques used to target the sub-conscious can sometimes be more effective at changing behaviours than the more obvious appeals to reason.

But there still remains a question mark over the longer-term impact of priming techniques. Once the prime is removed, people often return to their original state. Likewise, priming is just one of a number of behavioural influences. To truly affect longer term behaviour, a number of these influencers need to be used together. Researchers, including members of the MINDSPACE team in the Cabinet Office, are working hard to understand these types of affects and apply them in behavioural change campaigns.

While they continue their experiments, I’m just about to give the team a handful of pens used by Einstein.  

Simon Maule

Director

simon@linstockcommunications.com

Is backbencher backbiting overshadowing leadership?

As first seen in Professional Manager

Politics used to be all about the “big beasts”: frontbench heavyweights with big personalities and big ideas. But a succession of political leaders has shifted power away from the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, and towards small cabals of advisers and acolytes.

In doing so, they have drawn policy decisions even further away from MPs on the party fringes, leading to a number of flashpoints between leaders and disgruntled backbenchers. Tony Blair was able to placate these MPs through a mixture of charm, bluff and minor concessions. But David Cameron has found this a much harder task.

Cameron’s backbenchers include the usual collection of lickspittling careerists – but they also contain a large number of MPs willing to risk career stagnation in order to challenge the party hierarchy. In addition to a familiar group of elder statesmen and embittered former ministers, this includes new, youthful backbench MPs from a diverse range of backgrounds. Given the broad church that these Conservatives represent, Cameron and his supporters have found it hard to whip them into line. As a consequence, rebellions have grown to a level approaching insurgency.

In stark contrast, Ed Miliband faces more benign objections from Labour backbenchers. Following a start to his leadership in which his momentum seemed glacial, Miliband was beset with questions over his competence. But improved performances at PMQs and a greater deftness with managing conflicting Old and New Labour factions has shored up his position and quelled backbench criticism.

What, then, of the Lib Dems? Nick Clegg has found his approach questioned by backbenchers on more than one occasion, but on the whole, most seem to accept that the party is locked in a loveless marriage with the Conservatives, and that any further turmoil would only harm the party and its chances for re-election.

The last government was characterised by its clashes between Brown and Blair – but this bickering did not prevent the party from presenting a (relatively) unified front in public. Both figures understood that party infighting is a guaranteed vote loser.

The difference for Cameron is that he is not faced with an ambitious colleague looking to dethrone him, but numerous colleagues questioning the government’s direction. It may well be highfalutin ideals that power these rebels. And their rebellions may be symptomatic of their simple desire to make a mark. Nonetheless, Cameron needs to find a way to placate them if he wants any chance of retaining power at the next election.

John Hood
Consultant
john@linstockcommunications.com

150 Million Olympic Tweets, but who won Gold?

It was a question asked on Radio 4 today and it’s worthy of closer examination. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising has estimated there were 150 million Olympic related tweets sent during the Games. That’s 150 million tweets across 16 days, a pretty staggering figure. But we already knew that London 2012 had captured the public’s imagination. The real question is how have businesses used Twitter to cash in on this activity?

Brands have recognised that getting people to talk about them is the real boon of social media. The more people talk about a brand, the more familiar they are with it, the more popular it becomes and the more likely people are to invest in it. It sounds a hopelessly simplistic description of human behaviour, but by and large it rings true. Familiarity breeds favourability, not contempt.

In the main, companies have learnt to reject the corporate ‘hard-sell’ from a generic company Twitter account. Instead, businesses focused on individual athletes and competitors.  A company like Adidas has done particularly well by sponsoring high-profile athletes, both through traditional mediums such as billboards as well as via social media like Twitter. In fact some estimates suggest the number of people following Adidas on Twitter has increased ten-fold during the Games.

Another question this has raised is whether Twitter and social media is effectively making traditional forms of advertising and marketing redundant. The simple answer is, no. In many cases social media is being used to accentuate the effects of TV advertising. If anything, social media is working best in partnership with traditional methods of engagement.

So another win for Twitter and the social media revolution, right? Yes and no. Twitter’s effectiveness in generating debate on brands is almost unparalleled. But understanding how this can be effectively translated into increasing sales, for example, is a much trickier process, and one a number of brands are grappling with.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learnt from this is that we should not forget the ‘social’ aspect of social media. It is still about conversations between people, not organisations. For brands to use Twitter effectively, they mustn’t lose sight of this. 

John Hood

Consultant

john@linstockcommunications.com 

A fair cop? Police Commissioners and the oath of impartiality

Last week we blogged on how the process to elect new local Police Commissioners in November might lead to a lack of independent candidates and possible political bias. In the last couple of days, there has been an interesting development as the Home Office confirmed that all Commissioners will have to swear an ‘Oath of impartiality’ once they start their role. 

The thinking behind this is obvious. It makes a public contract between these Commissioners and the people who elect them and acts as a symbol of the commitment to serve their communities properly and responsibly. But will it actually work? A few commentators have suggested an oath will make a good headline, but will actually do little to affect behaviour. Besides, surely they should be behaving in this way anyway?

Interestingly, however, there is academic research which suggests this type of ‘public commitment-making’ actually works. Psychologist Dan Ariely set some students in the US a number of tests. On some tests the correct answers were already pre-marked and, predictably, those scores came back higher. But when asked to sign an ‘honour code’ on the test paper, even with correct answers marked, the cheating stopped. What this tells us is that when faced with issues of honesty and integrity (in this case a fictitious ‘honour code’), we are more encouraged to behave in this manner.

But, as with lots of tools developed to affect behaviour change, research shows only a short-term impact. To really influence long-term behaviour, there is an argument that pledges need to be made on a regular basis. Otherwise, human nature dictates that other factors and biases will increasingly come into play.

So going back to the Police Commissioners, perhaps this public pledge initially will have a positive impact on behaviour. But arguably, it should go even further. These high-profile roles will involve regularly making big decisions which will have significant consequences. Likewise, Commissioners are expected to serve a four year term. To ensure impartiality remains front of mind, perhaps the oath should be considered as a yearly – even six-monthly – event, rather than a one-off pledge at the outset, or some other means found to remind Commissioners of their responsibilities. 

Tom Yazdi

Consultant

tom@linstockcommunications.com