Brands without a conscience: Brexit and the implications for UK's brand

Good morning everybody. Peter is going to talk about this very toxic subject, I guess you could call it Brexit, brands without a conscience. And I have to declare a prejudice immediately, probably like a number of my colleagues, in fact all of us I think, we were absolutely devastated by the decision that took place. And it has been, I think in my own life, certainly the most profoundly unsettling experience as a citizen of a country. I feel in some respects ashamed to be British as a result of the decision that we've taken. But I think what's really interesting from the perspective of branding is there's no doubt that either consciously or unconsciously the Leave campaign managed to tap into some of the most important principles of branding in their campaign. And I'm sure Peter will talk about this. Whereas the Stay campaign I don't think recognized the importance of appealing particularly to people's emotions. And I think actually there was an interesting debate on television recently. They relied too much on pushing a single message, which was a rational message about your economic well-being. And even though there was some debate about it, the government at the time had been so successful in winning the previous election based on pushing a single message to do with economic well-being, it felt that that worked then, so let's make sure that we do the same thing in this debate. And it also worked when it came to the referendum in Scotland for about independence. But in retrospect I think everybody realizes that the Remain campaign failed at a fundamental level, which I think is to do with branding. So I'm going to talk for about 25 minutes with lots of very quick slides to introduce the subject matter and to go a little bit into exactly what Simon was talking about. And then I'm going to ask my colleagues Erica and Simon from London just to respond to that, to give their perspective, and then we'll open out. It's really interesting talking about this in Denmark, because Denmark has a very complicated relationship with Europe and there is the rise of populist politics here in Denmark and a new dialogue which is perhaps a little worrying for those of us who have a certain view of Denmark from the outside. But Britain I'm afraid is a lot further in this. I had to convince Nicolai actually that we should talk about this as brands with or without a conscience, but I think it's a, maybe something's going to happen, there we go. But I think it's really, really instructive to try to understand what happened in Britain this year from the perspective of socio-political branding, because all politics is about branding at the end of the day. And conscience is really important in politics. We would like our politicians to be authentic, have a sense of purpose, be truthful and be sustainable. And what I also want to look at is I want to look at the two main brands that present themselves to the British public and I want to talk about them in terms of identity, including the visual identity, their positioning, their values and particularly how they communicated rational and emotional benefits. So how they campaigned to the British public and we're all brand and design experts. I think that's an interesting subject for us to talk about. A lot of the presentations you may have heard yesterday and will hear today are very uplifting. They're all about brands with a conscience, with a purpose, with authenticity and with value to all stakeholders. This one isn't. This one is depressing and this one is a warning about what happens when the balance between rational and emotional gives way to focusing entirely on what is emotional and worst when it's the lowest of the emotions, when it's fear, when it's prejudice and when it's absence of rational facts to support that. One of the things we've become very used to and we've talked about in Medinga is the power of personal brands. So individuals who are celebrities who use their personal equity to either just sell products and services or to endorse causes that they believe in. Here are three very attractive people who are very well known for endorsing certain causes and at one level the story of Brexit is actually the story of three personal brands and three personal equities which have very different trajectories. One became a disaster. It really is a Greek tragedy what happened to David Cameron. By the way, this week he announced he's leaving politics entirely. So it's the end of his political career when only last year, having won the Scottish referendum, he won the first outright majority for the Conservative Party since 1992. Fifteen months later his career is at an end. So this is an extraordinary story of how equity plunged. The second one is a deeply divisive individual, Nigel Farage, whom you may have heard of. Divisive but ultimately very successful. And the third is the key to the story. This is Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, who was the most popular politician in the country by some way and who chose to go a certain path and use his personal equity to support a cause rather than the other. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that but what I really want to focus on is the actual campaign brands. One was the in or stay or remain group. The other was vote leave. And I also want to touch on, and I think you have a version of this in Denmark, oops, oh dear, I touched a cable somewhere, I apologise. I touched a cable. Are we back? Where do we go? Somebody just, sorry, I'm not trying to touch any of the cables again. Lovely, thank you. Which is UKIP. And UKIP is the United Kingdom Independence Party and what was interesting is they were not part of the official vote leave campaign but they had a huge impact on the debate in the UK. So I want to look just very quickly at UKIP as well. When I first learned to present, someone said to me, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you've told them. Beginning, middle and end. So I'm going to tell you now where this is actually going. This isn't really about Britain and about Brexit. This is about a movement which is going across Europe at the moment and is very present in the US. And it's a movement about populist branding which is all about taking the brand message to its very, very simplest and quickest and most difficult to analyse, if you like, message and then finding a way of projecting that to the largest number of people. Which is why I'm showing this face. I leave no more comment about that but I think that is where this whole presentation ultimately is going to end. This is where this populist movement is going to end and I'm going to end my presentation by just having a reflection on Donald Trump and what's going on in American politics. I'm not going to bore you with all the facts and figures. I just wanted to remind everyone that Britain's relationship with Europe has always been very, very complicated. We didn't join the European Economic Community until 1973, which was the same year, I think, that Denmark joined. And like Denmark, it's been a really complicated relationship. The irony is that the whole idea of the kind of United States of Europe actually came from Winston Churchill. This is his speech in Zurich almost exactly 70 years ago. And Churchill was quoted a lot by the other side, by the anti-Europeans during the course of the campaign. But it was actually he who said originally we need a kind of United States of Europe. And it was Margaret Thatcher, John Major and particularly Tony Blair in the 80s and 90s who pushed the single market. Which is exactly the thing that Britain is now in danger of leaving as a result of leaving the EU. It was the Brits that really pushed for the very thing that they're now going to abandon. What happened in terms of the chronology is that there was an increasing split in the Conservative Party between the pro-European camp and the anti-European camp. Some people have made it their life's ambition for Britain to leave the European Union again. Labour also had some splits. And there was the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party. And as a result, in order to keep power, Cameron promised that if the Conservatives won the election in 2015, last May, he would offer a referendum to the people. Which is great if the people really understand what it is that they're actually voting on. If they understand the European Union and the different pros and cons. But it wasn't done for the people. It was really done to keep the Conservative Party together and to stop people drifting off to the United Kingdom Independence Party. Cameron went to the Council of Ministers and got his breakthrough agreement, which was the emergency break on benefits. He was out to negotiate a new deal and all he got was the emergency break. He came back. We had the referendum. On the 23rd of June, 52% of the population voted to leave the European Union. 48% voted to stay. And in September 2016, the government came back and we now know that Brexit means Brexit. Whatever Brexit actually means. But we keep being told that Brexit means Brexit. The other thing to remember, and those of you who were with me four years ago when we talked about flags as brands, UK is really complicated. It's not a federation. It is a United Kingdom of nations. And this became very important in the EU debate. So you have England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, not on the map here. And then you have the Republic of Ireland, which is an entirely separate country, of course. And it turned out that people in different parts of the country had very different views on the relationship with Europe. So that's just a little bit of context. So let's talk about these three brands in terms of branding. Oh, and just to make it sit, as well as these three brands, we also have the complexity of the political brands that sit behind the campaign brands. And the complexity here is that the leaders of both in and out actually came from the Conservative Party. So the leading party split into two. Labour was a little bit divided. The SNP, the Scottish nationalists were on this side. The Liberal Democrats were on this side. And of course, UKIP out to the far right. You might be quite amused by some of the visual identities that our political parties have. They're supposed to represent something. So of course, we have the free liberal bird flying off, which is the Liberal Democrats. We have the famous rose that Tony Blair brought in to indicate new Labour, the new type of centrist ground. And I love this one particularly. Can you understand what this actually is? Can you work out? This is a tree. What happened when David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party back in 2006 or 2007, he decided that the Conservatives needed to be more green. They had to have more environmental credentials. So the logo, which I think had been a torch, was changed into a green tree with Conservatives written underneath. And then someone said, it's not obviously patriotic enough. So now we have a tree that looks like the British flag. Really very, very bizarre. But anyway, so these brands sit behind the campaign brands. And then to make it more complicated, we have the national identities, which it turned out were deeply divided. So Scotland ended up being very much on the inside. England ended up being significantly on the outside. So was Wales and Northern Ireland was split, but actually the majority for very specific reasons to Northern Ireland decided to stay. So it was a really complicated identity and brand landscape. But let's talk about first of all, remain. The first problem was the word and how to express the word as an identity. The reason it was called remain was that it was agreed with the Electoral Commission that the most explicit way to write the options on the ballot paper was should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union. The obvious problem with the word remain is it's very passive. It says keep things as they are, stay the same. Don't do anything. Be inactive. You have to vote, but it's a vote for an inaction rather than an action. And actually expressing remain as a visual identity is really very difficult. And we had a whole variety of ways of trying to express this. So somebody decided that actually the in of remain was the thing that we should focus on. And we could perhaps brand that in the British fashion, red, white and blue. So you have remain. Then you have in, which was actually the little pin badges that were issued to lots of people that were very, very clear because in means in. And then you also had what became the strap line Britain stronger in Europe. But people got very confused. Stay in remain. There was a problem in actually identifying this, whereas leave is a much clearer call to action. The positioning of the brand remain was, well, the tagline was Britain stronger in Europe, but it was extremely negative. It was all about how bad things would be if you did not remain. There were very, very few, and Eric is nodding in my direction here, there were very, very few positive messages about Britain in Europe. So we would be worse off economically if we left. We would be less powerful if we left. And this is a paraphrase. This obviously didn't appear in literature. But the best way I can paraphrase what David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, the leaders of the Conservative Party, all seem to be expressing is we don't actually like the EU very much. We don't particularly want to be in the EU very much. We don't believe in the European project. We've negotiated that we don't have to be part of ever closer union, but we can't leave because if we leave, the results are worse. That's a really difficult way to run a brand campaign. We don't like these people very much, but we have to be with them because if we leave them, things get worse. That was the fundamental problem of the remain campaign. And Cameron's own position was really difficult because he said all along, I'm a Eurosceptic and I want a new deal with Europe. He goes to Brussels, he comes back with the emergency break and immediately declares the referendum because he's got something. And the press rightly said, that's not a new deal. You didn't bring back what you promised. So right from the beginning, this campaign was undermined by the inability to sell a truly positive message about Britain in Europe. And this has then reflected in our famous rational and emotional benefits of the brand. So the rational was first of all, the simple economic argument. So all the experts, all the economic experts, including the governor of the Bank of England, all said, you cannot take the risk of leaving the European Union. The damage to the economy would simply be too great. But the problem was quantifying it because no one has ever left the European Union. There are European countries that are outside the European Union. One has tried to become an associate member, Switzerland, and Norway is paying in and having the benefits of the single market, but no one's ever left. And one of the problems was that numbers that were projected as scenarios were then presented as facts. So this is the first case where I would say there was a lack of conscience on this side of the argument. Some models were run and then these numbers were presented as this is what's going to happen. No, no, this is what might happen. That would have been a much more truthful statement. The second was the security argument. The opposition, the Leaf campaign said this is nonsense. We're part of NATO. That's what secures our security. And it was pointed out this wasn't about military security. This is about counterterrorism and criminal activity. The EU works very, very closely together. If you leave the EU, and this was Theresa May's argument as the interior minister, we might no longer have access to some of those security arrangements. She thought very long and hard about her position. She's now the new prime minister and she supported remaining in the EU specifically because of the security argument. And then there was this interesting thing about place in the world. And Cameron expressed it very well as the EU is one of the way a British prime minister gets things done. So if you're not in the EU, you've lost one of the ways that you can get things done on the international stage. And more specifically, if you are standing up to Putin or talking to the Chinese about human rights or dealing with the Syrian crisis or the Ukrainian crisis, you're much better doing that in alignment with your European partners. And Britain now is, I think, definitely going to be left out in the cold in some of those discussions. So there were very strong rational arguments. Again, it's worse if we leave. And the emotional therefore was it's the safer option to stay. Don't do anything. Be inactive. Stay because the risk of leaving is far too much. It's a leap into the unknown. And the really interesting one was trust the experts. All the experts are saying it's too risky to go. You're much better not taking that risk. And therefore, Boris Johnson, who became the leader of the Leave campaign, called it Project Fear. And I think we all know in branding that hope should trump fear. If you say a positive message about the brand, that will be much more powerful than essentially telling the negative message of be afraid. And this is what the opposition to the Remain campaign called this whole project, Project Fear. Some of the adverts that were issued were aspirational. The more you have to live for, the more you want to live in Europe. It's obviously a very emotional piece of advertising. And this was all about the fact that most younger people, i.e. those who had their lives and their careers ahead of them, wanted to remain in the EU. They saw the opportunities of working and living in Europe. But I'm afraid most of the campaign advertising was a bit like this. This is just one example of many. Once out, the pin can't be put back. In other words, the whole thing on day one after Brexit, it will all blow up. That's the implication. And again, this was a criticism that was rightly levelled at the Remain campaign of exaggerating the disaster of Brexit. In fact, things haven't fallen apart in the first few weeks after Brexit. The currency has certainly gone down considerably, the British economy is holding up. Security has not been compromised yet. So the Remain campaign was rightly accused of hyperbole, of gross exaggeration in some of its advertising. And this is scare tactics. Take the pin out and the whole thing will blow up. You can't do that. The other thing that the Remain campaign was accused of, even by its own supporters, was a lack of passion. That's really, really important in branding. So nobody, not even Cameron, had a real passion for the European project, had a passion for Britain's role in Europe. And Theresa May, who's the interior minister, hardly said anything during the Remain campaign. Worse, the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, whom you may have heard of, traditionally has been an opponent of the European Union. And when asked about his views of the European Union whilst representing the Remain campaign, he said, I think I'd give it seven out of ten. He actually said that to the press. I'd give it seven out of ten. That's not exactly a great endorsement for the Remain brand. So now let's talk about the importance of David Cameron. I can do this statistically. In November 2015, when YouGov, which is one of the major opinion poll organisations, did a poll for the Times on levels of trust in politicians about speaking about the EU and the referendum, David Cameron, who was then the very successful prime minister, scored 35% on trust for the EU and speaking on the referendum. By May 2016, that had fallen to 18%. So he personally, his personal brand is to a large extent responsible for what happened in the Brexit campaign. People just stopped believing him. He went to Brussels and came back with very little. He always prided himself on being a great communicator. In fact, his professional skill is communications. That's what he studied. That's what he did after Oxford. And yet he was a remarkably poor communicator in this campaign. And he was aided by a finance minister who made the most ridiculous presentations about the economic impact, including the need for emergency budgets and what we would have to do to the tax regime. And he was rightly ridiculed and he rightly lost his job as a result. So Cameron does bear a large part of the responsibility for what happened to Brexit. Well let's stop talking about the brand that failed and let's talk about the brand that succeeded. Vote Leave. The first thing is the visual identity is extremely clear and it was great for all types of advertising across media, particularly poster and press. There were two varieties, white on red and then black on white with the red. And note the strapline Vote Leave Take Control dot org. We talk a lot about this, take control. I like the red for two reasons. It's great for a call to action. Red is a colour that is a very active colour. It makes you want to do something. And they were very clever not to choose blue, white and red, which is the flag of Britain, which you might have thought was the more obvious choice. So it's a very clear, very stark red. The other reason it's clever is this is the colour of the Labour Party. And very early on the campaign strategists realised when they were a long way behind in the polls, to win the debate they had to win two audiences. The old people, who are the older, who are the ones who traditionally vote. So they convinced the older British voter to vote for Leave but also they had to target the left of politics. The more working class people who perhaps felt threatened by immigrants coming into the country. So I think the choice of red was not accidental. The positioning, I've put back in brackets and I'll explain in a second why, but take control or take back control of the country. So this is the patriotic choice, very simply Vote Leave. Control, independence. There was a lot of talk, this great word repatriation, which basically means bring it back to your country. So repatriate all this money that we give to Brussels and let's spend it directly on the UK. And a huge debate about border control, which is bizarre because we're not part of Schengen. And I'm going to show a poster later on that really makes this very explicit. So to get into the country you have to have your passport checked and visas if required. But the idea was we can't stop Romanians or Bulgarians or Poles who come to find work from coming into the UK. So we can secure the border or take back control of the border and not allow them in. But we can only do that if we leave the European Union because the European Union will not allow us to be in the single market and not have free movement of labor. It was kind of a very complicated argument. So there was a lot of that taking control, which is obviously a very active statement. And therefore the rational and emotional benefits. The first thing was just don't send this money to Brussels. Let's use it here directly in the UK. The big one and increasingly the debate became not about sovereignty but about migration. So I think the debate originally was about sovereignty and control and increasingly it became about immigration in reality. So kind of rationally there has to be a limit to the number of migrants we can accept because our health service and our public services, our schools will suffer if we allow too many people into the country. And critically we cannot control migration whilst we're in the European Union, at least from the European Union. So that was very important. And then finally, and pressure on wages. This became a big issue. Obviously your Romanian plumber, who is much cheaper than your British plumber, is causing a problem for your British plumber because the wages are going to sink. And also this idea that the EU is failing and therefore Britain shouldn't attach itself to an organization that is actually in decline and is going to fail. And there was a big discussion about the refugee crisis, about the eurozone crisis, which again is odd because Britain didn't contribute to the Greek bailout because they're not part of the eurozone. But there was a lot of kind of rational arguments around it's a failing organization, pressure on wages, pressure on public services. But the emotional is what really won the day. So taking back control is such a positive message. And it makes you feel as an individual British citizen I'm helping my country to regain control from the bureaucrats and the technocrats in Brussels who don't really understand my life in the UK. This idea that Great Britain, I wish we didn't call it Great Britain, unfortunately that's a historic term. It actually is a geographic term, not a political term. But the idea that Britain can never be great inside the European Union because the EU is run by the French and the Germans. And the Germans were the black sheep. The Germans came up quite a lot in the discussion. And this is a historical problem that Britain has with Germany. And I'm a German myself, so I understand this perfectly. But the idea is you can only be great again if you are independent of the European Union and then you can be a beacon for free trade or liberal politics or whatever it is you want to be. But the key was this uncontrolled migration, this fear of being overrun not by refugees, this is not the German or Swedish or Danish situation, this is actually being overrun by Europeans, by members of the European Union. And I think there was a lot of focus particularly on Romanians, Bulgarians and the very large Polish population that came to the UK to work and pay taxes. Thank you very much. They contribute to the UK economy. And this word was actually used by a politician very controversially when he talked about some towns in the east of England being swamped by migrants. It's a word that you understand, yeah? They're overflowing. They will push out the UK population eventually. This is very, very emotive language. And he was criticized, but that's what a lot of people thought. There is a danger my country is going to be swamped by migrants. And finally, don't trust the expert, trust your own common sense. You know what's right. The experts are far remote and they don't live your life. So it was dubbed Project Hope by Boris Johnson. Their project fear, we're Project Hope. And A. A. Gill is a wonderful writer for the Times, wrote an article and he's a Eurosceptic. He said the problem with this campaign for vote leave is it's looking for peak blighty. And blighty is an old fashioned way to talk about England or Britain. So I'm going back to old blighty. Let's go back to old blighty. So it's a very nostalgic idea. And he said everyone's looking for peak blighty whenever Britain was its most British and its greatest, which some people think is 1940, the Battle of Britain. And we have Battle of Britain reenactments every summer in Britain, in towns and in most village fates. Or it's just before the Suez Crisis when Britain still had the empire and can claim to be strong. And a lot of people in debates talked about I want my country back. Whatever the vision they had of the country, I want my country back. It's a really powerful message. Facts, rational, who needs them? So in this post expert and post factual era, some people said extraordinary things. This is Michael Gove, who is one of the leaders of the Leave campaign and who was the Minister of Justice, so a man who should be dealing in facts. And he said people in this country have had enough of experts. So we got this. You've seen this? This is the battle bus. So Boris and Michael Gove went on this battle bus around the country and it had on its written on its side, we send the EU 350 million pounds a week, let's fund our NHS instead, vote Leave, let's take back control. The problem with it was it suggested two things, that we send the EU 350 million pounds a week. First of all, we don't. The number is a little bit smaller than that. But also the number is a gross number. We get back about 160 million in EU subsidies, which are fundamental to the fisheries and farming industry. And if we didn't have those subsidies, those industries would be in big trouble, particularly in the west of England. So this number was extremely misleading. And the idea was, of course, we would take the money and we would put it into the National Health Service. We have a free, free point of delivery health service. In fact, nobody has ever promised and nobody has ever guaranteed that any money that is repatriated will go to the NHS. In fact, the first thing that has to happen with the money that's repatriated is to replace the subsidies from Brussels that we're going to lose as a result of leaving the European Union and the government has already had to guarantee that. The problem was, although it was factually incorrect, there was no way to stop this. So one of the themes of this presentation is when it comes to political branding, we don't have the kinds of organisations we have in commercial branding that can hold brands to account. This bus was never taken off the road. We also had this. Turkey, population 76 million, is joining the EU with dirty footprints coming through the border with a European passport. I didn't know Turkey was joining the EU. Did I miss something? But this poster was perfectly acceptable because it had been suggested by some commentators that maybe Turkey would join the EU and the implication is population 76 million more swamping migrants. By the way, they're Muslim, so they're all terrorists. Turkey is a bugbear because Turkey is not Christian fundamentally. And then there was Boris. I'm running out of time, I have to get a bit quicker. Now, it could be that Boris rationally got himself to a place where he really believed that Britain should leave the European Union. The funny thing is when he was mayor of London, he always believed that Britain should be in the European Union because it was better, particularly for London, if Britain was in the European Union. And it is said, and he has not denied it, that he wrote two articles for the Telegraph, for whom he writes a column, one of which supported Britain in the EU and the other one of which opposed Britain in the EU. And he had them both on his shelf whilst he was making up his mind which way he was going to go. The reality is, of course, I think that he found the best way to position himself inside his own party to depose David Cameron and become the leader of the party and become prime minister. And if you don't know, David Cameron and Boris Johnson have been locked in a personal battle for power since they were about 13 years of age and pupils at Eton School. Boris thinks he's brighter, smarter and more political than Cameron and does not understand how Cameron became prime minister and he didn't. And his mission was to depose him. The best way to do it was to support the leave camp. He thought he was going to lose, but that doesn't matter. You position yourself correctly in the party to make an opposition to Cameron. Whatever the situation, what he said once he had made up his mind and started talking to the press about vote leave was extraordinary. There were comments about the EU institutions being like Napoleon or Hitler trying to take over Europe. That went down really well in Berlin. But I like this one particularly. Barack Obama came to the UK and supported the remain camp for very rational reasons because the US wants Britain to be in the EU as its partner. And news broke that Obama had removed a statue of Winston Churchill, ah, Churchill again, Winston Churchill's statue from the White House. In fact, he hadn't. What he'd done is he'd moved the statue into his private quarters so he could see it every day and had put another statue of Winston Churchill into the Oval Office. But Johnson cottoned on to the fact that a statue had been removed and then said some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part Kenyan president's ancestral dislike of the British Empire, which I'm sure he developed in Hawaii with his mother. Even better, the Italians, who used to be a great motor manufacturing power, have been absolutely destroyed by the euro as was intended by the Germans. So the reason that we drove the euro because we wanted to destroy the Italian car industry, a lot of the British car industry is owned by Germans, specifically BMW, some of our prestige brands. And the biggest threat now to the car industry comes from the Japanese pulling out as they have already threatened because we're leaving the EU. I'll skip this because we haven't got time. And then finally, UKIP. This was the election manifesto poster in 2015. Look at the title, take back control of our country. So UKIP was seen to be too right wing and too radical to be an official part of the Vote Leave campaign, but we like the slogan, let's take back control of our country. So this was directly lifted from the UKIP election campaign and became the official slogan of the Vote Leave campaign. Its identity is rather hilarious. These are the colours of Megabus. Those of you who travel in the UK, which is a cheap discount bus company. So it's very bright. It's purple and yellow. But of course, I'm sure you recognise the symbol. This is the pound sterling. And this plays on the fact that we never joined the eurozone, that we maintained our independence. It's a very powerful symbol of British identity. You can't exactly put the queen in the middle. So let's have the pound sterling. Its positioning is very simple. Take back control, exactly the same as Vote Leave. It's specifically anti-EU rather than anti-immigrant. And it's a rather complicated position because some of its members, and it's a very broad right wing party, believe we should go back to the Commonwealth, back to the old empire and be more welcoming to some of our friends in the Asian colonies, for example, or Australia or New Zealand. So it's a bit complex, but it's very anti-European. What's really, really clever is they never talk about themselves as being far right. They say we're neither right nor left. We put Britain first. That's very similar to a message that a party 80 years ago that was both nationalist and socialist in principle was also able to tell in a different country 80 or 90 years ago. So British first, but there has been accusations towards Nigel Farage of being nativist. It's my favorite word of the year. You've all come across the word nativist, the idea that if you are born in the country and you belong to the country and your grandparents were born in the country, you are naturally superior and you should be given more credit than other people who came more recently. It's a big debate. He's a really interesting character. He's won and he's actually decided now to step down and do something else with his life. He was a member of the European Parliament. Nigel Farage said this, I've invested the best part of my adult political life in helping to try to build up this movement and I'm far from perfect, but I do think I am able through the media to deliver good, simple, understandable message. Well done, Nigel. You've done that extremely well. And I just highlighted these words, media, because the media has changed. It used to be television and radio. More and more it's social media. And if you're working as a politician in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, you need to really funnel down your message into the simplest thing that you can say in 65 characters on a tweet or in a two-minute YouTube clip because people don't have the attention spans that they used to. So he's very good because he's understood that the media has changed and you need to boil down the message. Good, simple and understandable, particularly at an emotional level. He's a very clever man. So we have this poster. This is wrong for all sorts of reasons, but again he refused to take it down. It continued to be advertised, particularly in London. What's wrong about this specifically is this photograph was taken by an Agence Presse photographer in Slovenia to highlight the misery of Syrian refugees walking vast distances to the next border to try to find asylum. What Nigel Farage did was he said, breaking point, the EU has failed us all. Let's take back control. The indication is that all these people were walking to Britain, which is a bit odd because the British government doesn't let very many Syrian refugees into the UK. It has a policy of giving money to keep them in the camps in Turkey. The only way that any of these people could get into the UK really would be on the back of a lorry illegally from Calais. So maybe he was suggesting that all these people were going to go to Calais and get on the back of a lorry. So lack of conscience? You bet. I'm going to skip this. Finally, the role of the press. We have intelligent media, Times, Telegraph, but we have an awful lot of, I don't know what you call them in Boulevardblätter, I don't know what you call them in Denmark. And they were almost all, with the exception of the Daily Mirror, in support of Britain leaving the UK. And these are masters of the headline, the one I really, really love. This is great. Queen backs Brexit, said the son. Somebody had leaked that in a private conversation with the Queen, she had expressed the opinion that Britain should leave the EU. Of course, she didn't do any such thing. The Queen is not allowed to make any political observations. It is not her role. Prince William, interesting enough, recently in Germany on a tour, expressed his regret at Britain's decision, and that was very controversial, that a member of the royal family expressed a personal opinion. But this was given as fact. The Queen backs Brexit. So very quickly, we got the result. What I find really interesting about the result, which overall was 5248, is if you break it down by age group, you might imagine that younger people would be more swayed by the emotional argument. They may be less sophisticated, they're younger, they don't understand the rational benefits. But the emotional campaign would hit home. And older people, a little bit more mature, a little bit more risk averse, maybe play it more safe, would therefore vote for remain. Actually, the opposite happened. So the younger people, the younger the age group, the greater percentage of voters who voted to stay in the EU. So the poster was right that I showed you earlier. And the older the age group, the greater the percentage of voters who voted to leave the EU. And the break point is actually at 45. So this is the one where it's almost equal. Above 45, it was leave, and below 45, it was stay. But the most frightening number is this one. These are the people who abstained, who didn't vote at all. And this is the 18 to 24 year old age group. And I have a question as a brand strategist is, is this because young people just don't want to vote? They can't be bothered, they don't think it's important enough. Is it because these campaigns just didn't speak to them enough? Or is it as two young people I spoke to about it said to me, the problem was I couldn't understand the arguments. And because I couldn't really understand the arguments, I made a conscious choice not to vote. I deliberately abstained. Maybe partly in protest, but I deliberately abstained because I didn't understand the arguments that were being presented by the two sides. Whereas this age group, which are the people who remember Britain before the European Union, they were won over by the nostalgic arguments. I want my country back. One of my older friends actually said, I want to go back to where we were in the 1950s. But you can't really go back. But that's a very powerful emotional argument for people of a certain age. And I think what the Vote Leave campaign realized is older people vote. So if we can get them to come out and vote and vote for us, we will actually win this debate. And just to say for those of you who weren't aware, Scotland, significant majority to remain. London, where we all live, significant majority to remain. Northern Ireland and then the rest all voted to leave. So the country is now deeply, deeply divided on this issue. And Brexit means Brexit. There's no plan. There's no timetable. There's no promise to fund the NHS. There's no date to trigger Article 50. We have no experts to negotiate new trade deals. There was no plan B. The government has absolutely no plan for what to do about Brexit. They're working it out at the moment. They're having cabinet sessions at the moment. It could well, well, it is already sparking renewed independence drive in Scotland. And it causes all sorts of problems with the Republic of Ireland because we have a border that is open, because we're both members of the EU. Do you now close the border? That's very, very controversial. So what exactly did the 52% vote for? I think the 48% voted rationally. So the ones who voted to stay voted, I'm not saying they voted correctly. I'd be very careful in my words there, but they voted rationally. They weren't swayed by emotional arguments. There are very, very few real fervent pro-Europeans in Britain. They voted by the rational argument that it was too risky for the economy to leave. The 52%, I think, voted for a whole variety of reasons. Some because they were anti-establishment, some because they were fed up with Westminster and central power, some because they were frightened by immigration. But I think this lady, Amber Rudd, who's the new interior minister, got it right when she said in an interview on Sunday on BBC television, what the British public voted for was to make sure that we reduce immigration from the European Union. That's a given. We have to find a way of doing that dot, dot, dot without ruining the British economy, I think is what comes next. So, and it's unfortunate because Amber Rudd, bless her, was one of the biggest supporters of Britain staying in the European Union when she was the secretary for energy and climate change. She's now the interior minister. She now has to decide how we do that. So what? We're a little island off the coast of Europe. Who cares what the little islanders decided to do? Yes, it has some shock waves in Europe. They will pass. There are still 27 other nations. It's not just about Britain. There is a whole tidal wave of populist politics that has understood that emotion triumphs over ratio. That the easiest emotion to appeal to is not the aspirational emotion but actually go for the lowest common denominator, fear, panic, anti-foreign behavior, anti-immigrant behavior, self and the other. We don't like the other. We don't trust the other. That's how you can succeed. And there are a number of these people now in Europe who are gaining a frighteningly large share of the public vote. This lady, the leader of the alternative for Germany, just scored 19% in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The polls for Marine Le Pen in France are very high. It is said that Gert Wildersen, the Netherlands, could score up to 40% in a public vote at the moment if there were an election right now. It's because they've all understood something fundamental. I said I was going to end with Donald Trump. He says a lot of things, but this one was rather revealing. Vernon Bogdanoor, who's the professor of constitutional history in London, said, in a democracy you have to accept that it is not only the people who pass exams who are allowed to decide how your country is run. Everybody has a vote that is equal. That's the principle of democracy. The upside is that everybody gets a say. Everybody gets a vote. The downside is if you're dealing with people who are more sophisticated and people who are less sophisticated, the easiest thing is to appeal at that lowest common denominator that does not require sophisticated argument. Maybe the more poorly educated, maybe the less sophisticated. Demagogues have always been very, very good at understanding that. Good brand experts in politics have always been very, very good at understanding that. When I said I was going to end with Donald Trump, of course I was lying as well. I'm actually going to end with him. Josef Goebbels was a great brand expert. He was able to communicate a brand, manage a brand, massage a brand in ways that we would recognize today as outstanding political branding. He was the Reich's propaganda minister. The word propaganda originally just means advertising and promotion. It still is the word in Portuguese. He said something interesting while he was at the height of his powers. If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. So 350 million was never the right number, but because it became part of the public discourse, it became a fact. It's 350 million. It will be spent on the NHS because it says so on the bus. We will spend this money on the NHS. Turkey is joining the European Union. It says so on the poster. If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. By the way, he never actually said this. This is one of the great jokes. It was attributed to him, but we always recognize this is one of the Goebbels. He said something similar about the Jews once. In other words, this post-factual, post-expert era is not an era that we're moving forward into. It's an era that we're moving backwards to. We've been here before in the 1920s and then in the 1930s, getting that simple brand message which is highly emotional and highly provocative and is a call to action. So I'll conclude and hand over to my colleagues. I think we've got another 10 minutes maximum perhaps. Just to say, I think sociopolitical brands like all others must have a conscience and they must be held to account. I had a thought the other day. If this had been Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola or any two competing commercial brands, if one felt that the other was telling lies or was saying things that could not be substantiated or was prejudiced or could be an incitement to racism, they could have gone to the advertising standards authority and said that advert, that poster, that communication must be removed or an apology must be made or a new statement must be made that contradicts the original statement. We couldn't do that in this campaign. There was no one you could really turn to who could stop either side from making claims that were erroneous or unconscious. That I think is a worry. My colleagues from London, please, if you'd like to respond. Do you want to start? Firstly, I'd say thank you very much actually for a really riveting talk about, as we can see, a highly emotional and also highly important issue. Peter, thank you. I think that was really, really interesting and really well researched. I'm not sure what else we can say after that because it's so well researched and covered. I think I'd pick up on three things that Peter has really covered, but for me, going through the process of Brexit just really stuck out both from a purely from an emotional perspective at a personal level but also from a branding perspective. I think the first one that Peter's talked about there is simplicity. The take back control message for me was extraordinary because it's what everyone said. It was like the narrative that was going on in Britain. It's just three words and it was just so powerful. What struck me more than anything, what Peter's really saying there is there are a lot of lies going on, but actually take back control philosophically is impossible. What are we taking back control of? Yet the Remain campaign, I think actually failed to question that issue. How do we control? Can we truly control anything in our lives? Of course we can't. For me, it was just a fallacy, but it was the thing that they spent most of their time on. We had a big debate, which is the thing that a lot of people tune into towards the end. We had the two sets of leaders, Boris and Farage, of people talking. I think it was one of the media. They counted. It was something like over 60 times that the Leave campaign said take back control. It was the one thing that everyone went and it plays absolutely into fear. The second thing, so I think there's a positioning piece for me around branding there. It's the simplicity. We all know that, the simplicity of message. The second was to me around communication storytelling. What I think the Remain campaign failed to do was to tell stories. We know how important storytelling is. We talked about it yesterday in branding. They didn't paint the picture of what it might be like for us in reality if we left the European Union. Would we have to queue up to get a visa if they had painted a picture? Rather than queues of migrants coming in, us actually queuing for hours to get a visa to visit France. If we actually wanted to buy a property in Europe, we may not be allowed to now. If we do buy one, sure as hell we're going to be taxed. When we now go abroad, the cost of our holidays has gone up significantly. I've even noticed it here this last few days. The Remain campaign did not paint any pictures visually for anyone. They didn't tell any stories of what it might be like for us all in a Brexit world. The last point I'd say is around relationship and the piece around trust. I couldn't believe that Remain continued to use corporates as their means to say, listen to the experts. Right now, corporate trust is at its lowest ebb ever. As Peter just said, the political arena, politicians are also at a low ebb. Camden shot down to 18%. I don't know who their campaign manager was in this, but if you are looking at who to trust when you're telling a story about Remain or Leave, using corporates was absolutely and incredibly the worst possible thing you could ever do. The unsophisticated, whether they are poorly educated, unsophisticated, feel absolutely at a distance to the corporates. They have no relationship with them. They don't mean anything. They are faceless entities. Whereas the Leave campaign used emotional storytelling the whole time, used visual identity all the time, imagery, really strong imagery all the time. For me, I think there were three things, positioning, communication and relationships. Trust were the three things that I would link to brand in addition. You had so much covered there, Peter, but those are the three things that I felt personally. It was actually, 23rd June is actually my birthday and I was hoping it was a really nice birthday surprise. I was absolutely devastated when it happened because I'm with Peter and Simon on this, that it's just such an extraordinary thing to be living with now, maybe for the rest of my lifetime. I would just sort of echo, I think, what you said, Erika, particularly when we talked about the critical millennial vote, when particularly the 18 to 24 year old, you said people abstained because they didn't understand the arguments. I knew the guy who was running the Stronger In digital campaign and I had met him for a drink about three months before the vote when it first became apparent that millennial audience would be critical. He said, the problem we face is we don't know how to get them out of bed to vote. We have a certain amount of money to spend on our campaign and we're probably going to spend it on an audience that we think are more likely to get out of bed to vote, which was a slightly older one. I said to him at the time now, and I kind of regret not doing anything about it, I said, this is an audience that you have to hit at an emotional level with, and this is storytelling and painting a picture of exactly what they will lose. For me, I was always taken by those great Generation EasyJet ads back a couple of years ago where you see just the joy of being able to travel, work, study in Europe, just the feeling of the spontaneity of it. I said, you should run some ads that you just suddenly have a big kind of slash over it to kind of say, this is what you're going to lose. We didn't do any of that. I think one of the problems is the statistics. I may be right about this is that I think only 31% of those who were eligible to vote bothered to register. Most of those who did vote and did register did vote to remain, obviously. But you realize now how critical that audience was, and I spoke to a couple of people who just said, well, we never thought it would happen, and we were traveling, we were on holiday, and we're absolutely dumbfounded. So yes, I think it makes the point, the two things you're saying, storytelling, painting a picture that's really emotionally resonant, and also the trust thing. Again, nobody trusts experts, and it's true actually. Who knows really what's going to happen? But I think that's what I would add to it particularly, and particularly for an audience, a segment who do feel absolutely devastated because they're saying, hang on a second, my future is now entirely different. What was interesting just at a personal level is my son's 20, so he's one of the bottom run there, and all the way through the campaign he was going to vote leave. That's his choice. But I began to explain to him what that world might look like, and had there been some of those easy-jet ads, as I began to explain what might happen if we were a family and we couldn't necessarily choose to go into the broad. Traveling may not be as easy as it is now, his freedoms may not be there. He actually decided about a week before to vote remain, but his story to me was that all of his friends, all of the social media was a story about take back control, and it was all about the migrants, even though they didn't really understand the story, that's what they were holding on to. So his job, his future, his world as a graduate was already tough, and it was going to get tougher. So his story as a young person was the world will be tougher if we remain in the EU for me. But when I explained the other stories around his life as a whole, he changed his mind. So I think again it goes back to the piece around what the messages were. Which is that I'm not sure the EU is telling a particularly good story at the moment. I mean this was against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, which has been really messy, and the refugee crisis, which has been even messier. So this was easy for Nigel Farage. However he twisted it, the EU does appear in some areas to be failing, and it's not telling a very good story at the moment. I think that's true, and a lot of people said it's really hard to come up with a reason to say why I love the EU. So to simply say I love the EU was hard for people to articulate. Although I went on a march afterwards where of course we had lots of placards saying we want you back as in EU back. There were lots of really powerful emotional statements after the event. Any observations from the largely Danish audience? Thanks a lot. I'm not really from EU, but I have been following the event all the way through. Just like you just said, after the event, after the actual Brexit happened, there are actually many stories happening. People start to tell the story, what happens then we don't have the visa so easily to go to France, to Paris, to enjoy my summer holiday and so forth. What does that actually have in fact to the future? Because of course the event doesn't end just here right now, and we have many things going on in the future. Would that be actually a better lesson to learn for many people in the world, not only in the EU, in the States, in China where I come from? Would that be a new lesson for them to learn from? Because now the stories are presented, now the stories are reviewed, now the stories appear. So would that have some impact? And finally, it's just a very short observation-ish finding. When we're talking about conscious, actually there is a word science in the word, and the science is very fact-based. So the word itself is more factual and rational instead of emotional. So it's kind of interesting how we balance the two sides together. And so much more. So, precisely, and happy birthday of course. A view from Russia? Yeah, precisely, but I'm from England and China, so we can discuss about that at the event. Thank you. Hello from Moscow. I would, I would. Because it seems to me it's not only a problem of EU, it's a kind of global problem. I look at that from a social point of view, from a societal point of view, because it's a lot of attempt of people from last century, like 60s, 50s, years old, to flashback, try to restore their time when they felt happy, when they understood what's going on in the globe. Like we see a young generation, they even didn't understand the reasoning for Brexit or stay or leave. It's interesting. It seems to be like happening in Russia. We also try to protect our territory. We have the same situation, we're communicating this Russian world idea, that borders is very important for us to save our identity. But while I feel the identity, you show when you are in conversation with other nations, not building walls around your country. More or less, Brexit is about building walls, invisible but walls between EU and UK. It seems to me it's another example of all generations try to keep power, keep the power. But it's also about community. So those who were yesterday, we talked about community based brand. That's something that Votebeev got absolutely right. And there is a nativist element. If you are from Britain and you belong to Britain, you are a community. What was fascinating was that Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister for Scotland a week after this happened, gave a presentation where she said, if you come to Scotland and you contribute to this country and to this economy, you are welcome. The Scottish National Party includes people who are British Asians, for example, who are also Scottish nationalists. It's most peculiar. So there are two very different mindsets about what is a community. Yes, sure. What is community for us? Whether we travel, we communicate with different nations. For me, community is the globe. That's it. It seems to me for young generation the same. For them, for those who are 25 minus, younger than 25, community is the globe. I have one more question. It has to do with community. And I think it's an obligation about the genealogical as opposed to the Irish or the Irish or the Welsh. I mean, the Scottish are mostly voting to stay and they want to be part of the EU. The Welsh, I think, voted to leave. Yes. The Irish, we know, vote for the ones who want to stay. And I think it's quite interesting when you think about the world we live in, we all look at things uncomfortable with multiple identities. I'm actually half English, half Scottish, so I sort of feel British. But equally, I feel a European and I feel a member of the world. And I think the problem may be that actually the English, in particular, have a particular problem with their own identity. The Scottish are comfortable with being Scottish and being British and being European and part of the world community. And it's a cliché, but when you look at what has happened and this kind of backwards-looking desire for nostalgia, inevitably you can't help but feel this is an expression of the phrase of the little Englander mentality, which is particularly true for the English. And I don't pretend to understand exactly what drives the English sense of identity or lack of or its inability to be comfortable with multiple identities, but I think that plays a part in it. The other thing I was just thinking as you were saying there, as you were saying about the idea of the world community, when we talk a lot about conscious leadership today, the attributes of conscious leadership, being worldview, accepting, non-judgment, open-minded, these are some of the, when we think about Trump and we think about conscious leaders potentially of the future, they go against. All of this piece around taking back this negative views about other people coming into our business permeable borders, it really is contradictory to what we talk about when we talk about conscious leadership. So I have a real concern about that, that there was a sense that perhaps we were going the right way and some of this, as Peter says, it almost feels like we're going back and that's a real concern. All right, time's up. We have a bit of time that we need to catch up with. Thank you.