Beautiful shapes and missing content
It is always wrong to tinker with a familiar brand for no good reason. The FDP’s problem is not its name or its logo, but a rampant decline in its brand identity.
No one reading this will doubt that brand management and the constant evolution of a brand's content and form are crucial to its prosperity and longevity. Tons of paper and thousands of posts on the web are dedicated to the intricacies of brand management. But when the substance of the brand is under scrutiny, people prefer to argue extensively about its form in order to avoid an urgently needed debate about brand content.
This has recently been the case with the time-honored founding party of the modern Swiss Confederation, the FDP. The party has been losing substance and voters for some time now. So the party has been working diligently and anxiously to give the brand a new face and a new name and to merge with a partner, the "Liberals".
With verve and meticulousness, those involved pounce on the most unimportant and wrong things. They are thinking loudly and publicly about whether the FDP should become the FLP (Freisinnig Liberale Partei). This makes the columnist's heart happy, because once again it is being demonstrated for all the world to see that people enjoy arguing about the form and the name when they can't think of anything to say about the content.
There is not a single sensible or comprehensible reason to turn the FDP into an FLP. Giving up an established name or tinkering with a familiar brand without need is always wrong. The FDP is not suffering from its name or its logo, but from a rampant atrophy of its brand personality.
It has no tangible identity, no stringent program, no clear convictions and no characters with whom one could identify. At the moment, it simply lacks everything that could turn a brand into a Lovemark. Because only Lovemarks manage to generate "loyalty beyond reason", the greatest asset a brand can create.
Instead of defining the role of the FDP in a modern, globalized society in a very pragmatic and tangible way, the party takes refuge in a bizarre name debate that neither interests nor affects anyone and overshadows the urgent need for discussion about the sensitive and controversial characteristics of the FDP brand.
But instead of just complaining, here is a very practical indication of the basis on which a substantive debate could take place.
Even if there are politicians who would rather see "visions" located in a university psychiatric clinic, it would not hurt to define the basic convictions on which the FDP brand is based, the mission it is committed to and the values it represents.
It is not a detailed party program, but a pragmatic and action-oriented brand platform that does not get lost in generalities, but concentrates on the essentials.
Instead of blaming this content on the voracious party apparatus as usual, a debate on the actual actions that a high-profile liberal brand personality should trigger would be appropriate. The actual target audience of a party, the electorate, would certainly reward this. The spectacle of a party caste preoccupied with itself, which makes public name-dropping the main activity of its political action, would then be superfluous, and voters would be in for a welcome surprise that they have hardly dared to believe in.
In view of the widespread lack of direction in the liberal-liberal camp, the hope of abandoning the name change exercise and returning to substantive discussions and the resulting political action is an illusion.
If the FDP really were a brand, as it would like to be, then there would be no way around positioning itself in terms of content with a clear, distinct profile. But it is probably more than a guess that it will not do so and will therefore remain "just" a party.
This has recently been the case with the time-honored founding party of the modern Swiss Confederation, the FDP. The party has been losing substance and voters for some time now. So the party has been working diligently and anxiously to give the brand a new face and a new name and to merge with a partner, the "Liberals".
With verve and meticulousness, those involved pounce on the most unimportant and wrong things. They are thinking loudly and publicly about whether the FDP should become the FLP (Freisinnig Liberale Partei). This makes the columnist's heart happy, because once again it is being demonstrated for all the world to see that people enjoy arguing about the form and the name when they can't think of anything to say about the content.
There is not a single sensible or comprehensible reason to turn the FDP into an FLP. Giving up an established name or tinkering with a familiar brand without need is always wrong. The FDP is not suffering from its name or its logo, but from a rampant atrophy of its brand personality.
It has no tangible identity, no stringent program, no clear convictions and no characters with whom one could identify. At the moment, it simply lacks everything that could turn a brand into a Lovemark. Because only Lovemarks manage to generate "loyalty beyond reason", the greatest asset a brand can create.
Instead of defining the role of the FDP in a modern, globalized society in a very pragmatic and tangible way, the party takes refuge in a bizarre name debate that neither interests nor affects anyone and overshadows the urgent need for discussion about the sensitive and controversial characteristics of the FDP brand.
But instead of just complaining, here is a very practical indication of the basis on which a substantive debate could take place.
Even if there are politicians who would rather see "visions" located in a university psychiatric clinic, it would not hurt to define the basic convictions on which the FDP brand is based, the mission it is committed to and the values it represents.
It is not a detailed party program, but a pragmatic and action-oriented brand platform that does not get lost in generalities, but concentrates on the essentials.
Instead of blaming this content on the voracious party apparatus as usual, a debate on the actual actions that a high-profile liberal brand personality should trigger would be appropriate. The actual target audience of a party, the electorate, would certainly reward this. The spectacle of a party caste preoccupied with itself, which makes public name-dropping the main activity of its political action, would then be superfluous, and voters would be in for a welcome surprise that they have hardly dared to believe in.
In view of the widespread lack of direction in the liberal-liberal camp, the hope of abandoning the name change exercise and returning to substantive discussions and the resulting political action is an illusion.
If the FDP really were a brand, as it would like to be, then there would be no way around positioning itself in terms of content with a clear, distinct profile. But it is probably more than a guess that it will not do so and will therefore remain "just" a party.
