Joshua Blackburn, published in The Guardian, June 2004
How times have changed. Today no self-respecting initiative is launched without acres of market research, a shiny logo and an empowering vision statement. Government departments spent £258 million on marketing between 2002-3 and the proliferation of logos, straplines and prime time advertising are testimony to the triumph of the marketeer and brand consultant in government planning.
This most unlikely of love affairs reflects a long overdue shift in the culture of public service. Indeed no sector has been immune to the sirens of brand, including charities, trade unions, universities and arts organisations. Such organisations have used brand as an important catalyst for change, challenging the dusty and introspective conservatism for which much of the non-commercial sector has been known. It has made organisations re-examine the services they provide and the image they create.
But the meeting of commercial brand logic with the world of public services is having a curious effect on the culture and personality of our public goods. The consultants have landed with their brand models, customer journeys and gap analyses, and a new lexicon now permeates the public sector. Tax payers are ‘customers’ and services have become ‘products’. Government departments go nowhere without their mission statement, vision and mandatory five values. Indeed your values will likely be drawn from the magic brand-generator, making you ‘honest’, ‘transparent’, ‘customer focused’, ‘empowering’, ‘professional’ or ‘human’.
Take the jobseeker. Yesteryear, if you were looking for a job you were left to fester in the soul sucking gloom of the Jobcentre. Today the Jobcentre has been joined by the Jobcentre Plus, with hopefuls going to Jobsfairs, logging onto Jobpoints, phoning JobseekerDirect, hopping onto the Worktrain, using their Connexions, grasping the NewDeal, or searching out Modern Apprenticeships. If education is your interest, you can LearnDirect, GetOn or Aimhigher - all so that we might find the Way to Learn and achieve Success for All. Many of these branded initiatives are complete with the full arsenal of straplines, pithy values and lofty missions.
Paul Hoskins, director of the brand consultancy Precedent, calls it “Branditis”. Hoskins has extensive experience of the public sector and is aware of the dangers that clients can face. “Some agencies sell brand like a science and surround it with jargon”, says Hoskins, “this creates a panic so that people think they have to have a brand when they don’t always.” Certainly the brand agencies have been complicit in the feeding frenzy, spurred on by the knowledge that the public sector is truly recession proof. For them, there’s no such thing as too many brands.
The result has been a baffling proliferation of new brands, re-brands and sub-brands. UKOnline is now Directgov. The Government Internet Forum was buffed up into The Forum - the list goes on. Cynics remark that not only is this unnecessary but also expensive. Few businesses generate, re-invent and scrap brands at quite the rate that the public sector does.
Whilst the public sector has shown that it can use brand and marketing to great effect - witness the success of Learn Direct and the New Deal - their enthusiasm for logos and airtime can appear profligate. Of more concern, however, is that it is merely creating noise for the sake of it.
Unlike the corporate sector, public initiatives don’t have a product to shift, and nor do they have competitors in the traditional sense. We might well be ‘customers’ to the Inland Revenue, but try as we might, few us can take our custom elsewhere.
Andrew Wade, head of consultancy at the COI, the government’s own communications experts, highlights this important difference. “Public sector branding is about signposting and understanding”, Wade says, “but for the private sector it’s about selling and persuasion.” Such signposts are essential when it comes to the maze of public services, but there is always the danger that too many signposts add to confusion rather than cutting through it.
Branding and the public sector can certainly make for strange bedfellows, and despite the advocates there is still much suspicion and uncertainty about the branding “agenda”. One concern is that the corporate polish that branding brings can devalue the essence of our public service, alienating staff and public alike. By making every initiative into a new brand the public sector risks creating a succession of one dimensional logo jobs that inspire a growing fatigue.
But whilst some might like to see the sharp suited brand consultants sent back to the frapuccino bars from whence they came, it would be more dangerous to see the public sector return to being worthy but inaccessible. Marketing and brand has helped the sector think about the people they are there to serve, and this has made an important difference.
The challenge is neither to reject brand thinking outright nor to become dazzled by the prospect of a new logo and poster blitz. Instead, the public sector needs to use its brand and marketing with precise effect, defining an approach that has integrity, depth and creative intelligence. After all, strategy needs more than a strapline.