The Party’s sails were slack. Voters saw it as "callous, bigoted, and sleazy". In ‘blind tastings’ voters who liked the Party’s ideas withdrew approval when they heard which party supported them. In short, the brand was toxic. As politicians and the Party faithful started to lose seats their first strategy was to double down on the issues and message which had done so well, for so long. It didn’t work, and things got worse, much worse, for a long time…
So, with thanks to ten years of The Economist throughout this writing, the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in trouble. Since the late 1990’s the Conservatives stumbled through the wilderness in British politics, snagging their coats on every briar along the way. They lost three straight general elections and there was some thought by otherwise reasonable people that the Conservative Party may have outlived itself.
Today the generic ballot is 45 Conservative 25 Labor.
Of course, one of the reasons for the re-animation of the Conservative Party is that, usually, the party in power exhausts itself and its ideas over time, which Labor has certainly done. In this case, however, it is more than the exhaustion of the majority party that has caused the turnabout. What Conservative Leader David Cameron came to accept is that political parties are market based entities, and that in the market if their brand is damaged, or the core of customers who will buy the product is simply to small to make a go of it, they will fail.
David Cameron and his faction of Tories began to do what any reasonable business person would do: repair the brand, alter the product to appeal to more customers, and compare their product directly with other competing products. This was not a painless process, but a required one since going out of business was the likely alternative.
The Conservatives kept the basic theme of their shop (ie the shop might sell shoes, or fruit, or paper products) but they eliminated products that did not sell, redisplayed products that had core customers in a manner which did not discourage new customers, and did a little market research to find new products that would bring new customers without losing too many old ones. In short they began to sell mostly what the larger customer base wanted to buy, instead of simply spending more money advertising products that drew a shrinking number of core customers. The Conservatives also took some effort to rebuild consumer trust in the new shop by demonstrating the new products were actually available, not just cardboard mock-ups to draw in customers who were faced with the reality of the old products, perhaps now with a ribbon around them, or in one of those boxes that Nordstrom’s ties come in.
I was struck that the Conservative Party, which claims to be made up largely of the middle class and small business owners, would take a decade to discover sound business practices. The British must be a very slow people indeed. God Bless America!