Britain’s political brands can’t stop looking sideways.
Every party, left to right, spends more energy watching the others than understanding itself. Reading the rival’s polling. Copying the rival’s lines. Tacking left, tacking right, forever shifting their message as a reaction to the competition.
The Conservatives can’t decide whether to chase Reform rightward or pivot to the centre, so they tend to try both, with limited success. Labour look just as unsure. Spooked by their own Reform challenges, they’ve hardened on immigration – then soften when the Greens start snapping from the left. A governing party pulled two ways at once, never quite sure what it believes.
Even Reform, the great challenger brand that seemed to know exactly who it was, is now starting to be out-challenged by the seemingly further-right Restore (with a helping hand from Elon Musk). And suddenly that crystal-clear challenger message feels muddied.
This glancing sideways habit is a very human failing. We do it as people, too.
Comparison, the saying goes, is the thief of joy – measure yourself against everyone else and you slowly stop being yourself. And it’s easy to spot. The colleague who agrees with whoever spoke last. The friend whose views move with the room. We don’t tend to trust them. We trust people who know who they are, and confidently stay there.
The more we stare sideways, the less ourselves we become. And brands are no different.
But the lesson for brands isn’t to stop watching your competitors, obviously. Understanding your rivals, your category, the trends and the gaps opening is some of the most valuable thinking a brand ever does. The brands that truly change their categories do that thinking properly, once, not constantly.
Fever-Tree did exactly that. Schweppes had owned tonic for a century, as a mainstream, populist brand. But gin was racing upmarket and the mixer had been left behind. Three-quarters of a gin and tonic is the tonic, and nobody was making a premium one. Fever-Tree saw the gap, planted a flag, and never moved it.
For brands, comparison isn’t the thief, then. Constant comparison is.
A brand that keeps glancing sideways drifts. It borrows a rival’s tone, matches a rival’s launch, chases a rival’s price. When every brand in a category does that, they converge – same language, same offers, the same trends at the same moment – until the whole category collapses into a grey soup of sameness. In trying so hard to beat each other, they end up identical.
And a category that has blurred into one is a category waiting to be taken.
Look at European lager. Peroni, Stella, San Miguel, Estrella, Birra Moretti. Somewhere along the way they all seemed to merge into a single idea – ‘premium European’ – with much the same taste, and much the same marketing, usually based on a brief of ‘togetherness’.
When Madrí launched six years ago, the UK didn’t need another one. Least of all another ‘Spanish’ lager, brewed in Tadcaster, that tastes much like the rest. No gap. No room.
And yet it took the category by storm. Today it’s one of the best-selling lagers in the country. Not on a better product – just on being the ‘new one’, with a clear identity, and an aggressive distribution push from Molson Coors. In an aisle that all looked and tasted the same, that was enough.
Endless adjustment, reacting to every competitor move, and reinventing yourself every season rarely leads to strong brand foundations.
The winners think hard once. They decide what they stand for, and what they’ll never do, through a proper brand reset. And then they own it and live it, with confidence. Through the quiet quarters. Through the rival’s noisy launch. Through every temptation to chase the next shiny thing.
Back to politics. The next election won’t be won by the party that reads the others best. It’ll go to the one that knows exactly what it is, and isn’t afraid to be it. Voters, like consumers, back a brand that believes in itself.
The room is always worth reading. Just don’t let it constantly rewrite you.
Jamie Williams is Managing Partner of isobel, the Brand Reset Co.
