Abstract
Alex Marland’s Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control provides us with insightful and profound lessons about how government works behind the scenes. Marland collected and analyzed a wealth of fascinating primary government data to write the book, and as a result, it demonstrates how tightly government can manage its communications, raises questions about how effective centralized systems are, and requires us all to reflect on how (or even if) we can judge whether the practice of political management is acceptable or not for democracy.
The book explores the increasing controlled and centralized communications that developed in the Canadian Conservative Harper Government, both his Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and other areas of government, including ministerial departments. It does so through an understanding of political communication, the nature of the media, and political marketing, especially branding. When reading it, I was reminded of criticisms of Blair’s New Labour Government in the United Kingdom: The lessons it has are relevant to scholars and students interested in any democratic system.
There are four key notable distinctions in the book. The first is that it shows how government works in practice. Chapter 9, “Politicization of Government Communications,” covers the practical aspects such as coordinating and running complex government diaries, going into depth into the nitty gritty of communication planning. Chapter 7, “Central Government Agencies and Communications,” also explains the different staff and units within the Canadian PMO. It gives a really valuable (and rare) sense of getting behind closed doors that is of interest to academics but also a guide to students wanting to go and work in government. It also discusses the pressures of working in government, commenting that “stress and anxiety are normal” (pp. 207–8) and “senior politicos learn on the campaign trail that barking orders at subordinates is tolerated and even rewarded if results follow” (p. 208). It also makes us think we need to do more in academia, media, and practice to improve working cultures in government and politics.
Second, the core methodological value is showcasing actual government documents. As well as conducting more than seventy interviews, Marland made 109 access to information requests to Canadian government departments and received four thousand pages of emails related to communications and branding. This is a methodology we could all consider copying where practical. The documents featured throughout the book bring the accounts of government communication alive and provide a fascinating insight into political behavior in government. For example, Marland notes on page 211 that memos to cabinet were required to include comments on how it relates to the government agenda, analyze the public environment, including public opinion and consultation outcomes. I was able to identify the document which I can then use in research but also teaching graduates workplace skills. I hope Marland finds a way to publish the web links and references, as well as the government documents, online as it would in itself create a valuable data resource.
Third, the major intellectual contribution is actually communications management and the implications of centralized control. It is less about branding than I expected from the title—and indeed my main critique would be that key branding theory is missed out from the review in Chapter 2 and that political branding is policy and decisions not just communications. However, as Marland concedes in the last chapter, “This book uses the word brand as an amalgam of the outcome of marketing theory, image management, centralized decision making, and communications simplicity” (p. 350). By the end, the book seemed more about the political management of organizational communication, which there is little if any literature on. Marland has therefore broken new ground and discovered a new area of practice that we need the literature to catch up with. The wealth of empirical sources Brand Command features should be connected with management organizational communications theory. From this flows issues of control/freedom and costs/benefits of this—highlighted for me when at the end of Chapter 9 on p. 325 Marland notes in relation to Harper’s unemotional response to public opinion around the 2015 refugee crisis that “a glaring weakness of brand control is an inability to pivot quickly when circumstances demand it . . . the process of tight scripting for planned events does not provide sufficient flexibility to respond to the unforeseen.”
Finally, Brand Command raises fundamental democratic questions as to how we judge whether political practice is acceptable for democracy or not. I am not talking about the usual question, “Is political communication/political marketing good or bad for democracy?” The more challenging question for us as scholars to debate is just because we do not find it nice, does that make it wrong/something we should prevent? In the preface of the book, Marland calls growth of top down command “an unedifying proposition” (p. xiii). And with words like distasteful, I am reminded of the legal ruling on a Canadian Senator Mike Duffy’s expense scandal that the PMO’s handling of the issue: “The precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud. However, in the context of a democratic society, the plotting as revealed in the emails can only be described as unacceptable” (Judge Charles Vaillancourt). We need to develop concepts or principles as to what makes for acceptable plotting before making such judgment. Although we are right to question the democratic impact, we also need to develop training in effective and ethical political management that takes account of the realities of the environment political practitioners face made so clear by Marland’s book. Only then will our ivory tower critique have any chance of affecting the command structure used within our governments.