The Week in Bloggingportal: Branding the EU for dummies
[Introduction with a letter]
Wow, György,
you run the Communications Department of the Hungarian government [a government that currently holds the EU Council Presidency; just a remark] and you still have time to blog about how to brand the EU.
That is amazing, György, that’s absolutely amazing, because we all know the EU doesn’t yet spend a lot of money on self-branding, self-communicating and also a lot on self-referencing. Oh, and the values you propose as the only common thing we have, that’s also “wow”, espececially with regard to self-branding. These values are so much EU values that they are actually the topics that the Council of Europe (not an EU institution) deals with. So what you are proposing is to dissolve the EU and focus on the branding of the Council of Europe?
And even better: You get support for that by Reijo, the head of communications at the Council. So now we have two major EU brand managers joining together how to make the brand better instead of simply making the work of the EU better.
Great work, wow, great work!
PS: And while the Council Secretariat and the Council Presidency still are lost in debates about branding Europe, others just do the branding, as the Week in Bloggingportal has shown once again.
Niels presents how they make EU Parliament data available in a useful and user-friendly way. If the Parliament would to that on its own, wouldn’t that be some kind of brilliant branding?
Shawn discusses in a very provocative way the way countries like Greece and Portugal may have exchanged democracy for the Euro, a discussion the EU Commission and the Council would probably not like to join in because they would have to admit that branding European values may come with breaking them from time to time.
Joasia notes that the European data protection supervisor told the EU that it’s data retention directive is against the fundamental right of data protection. That’s a great branding topic, isn’t it? - “We’ve got the greatest values in the world and we know how to infringe them with our own laws!”
Marco, throwing in his cent for the debate, reports [if we understood the Italian correctly with the help of Google Translate] that the EU Commission is threatening to withdraw a lot of money for a project on a rail track connection between Lyon and Turin. That is brilliant branding: The EU member states are unable to get on with a project co-financed by the EU which shows how useful the EU is to make cross-border projects going. Not.
FinancialGuy in his turn tries to help the EU’s Committee of the Regions with its branding by interviewing its president. We all know that this is useless because the Committee of the Regions shares with the Economic and Social Committee the great pleasure of being the most likely winners of a Most-Useless-EU-Institution contest. But as we have learned, it’s all about branding, and you just have to let a useless organisation’s president speak very generally about innovation – and everything is fine. Ask Barroso and his Europe 2020 thing!
Sami finally proposes nuclear energy as an area in which a European debate is needed - but what a disaster this topic would be for branding the Union with all the divisions that exist on this issue! Imagine those against nuclear energy misusing the EU flag by saying it represents energy coming from the stars (solar energies) or from electric windmills (wind power). This would leave all those in favour of nuclear energy behind who could only say that the circle represents a 100 km death zone around an exploded nuclear power plant but that since this never happens they didn’t put a picture of a nuclear power plant into the centre of the circle with the 12 stars. Devastating branding!
But since branding is all about image and figures about images and images about figures about images, we will not leave you without pointing to the statistics assembled by Moritz on the blogging EU commissioners, making us realise that a fishing Commissioner is more read than one with a well-branded portfolio including such wonderful and shining things like “The Digital Agenda”.
Now this would be the great moment closing this blog post with the saying “The fish stinks from the head“, but we think this would be not a good branding for the fish that – unlike the EU – actually just has just one head that can stink.
We thus excuse to the fish for being not nice to him but remind him that at least the Commissioner dealing with its concerns is well-read. If the fish is still unhappy, it shall loge a complaint to the Hungarian Council Presidency which will address the fish with the word “halak” [in Hungarian, the fish is called "halak" which is an educational remark made to support the European value of multilingualism, something the fish will never understand].
Until the next Week in Bloggingportal – your Bloggingportal team that hopes you will speak only well about our brand!
Picture: doviende / Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0
Dear Bloggingportal Editor,
As much as I enjoy talking to you at our meetings, I am happy to see this post appearing here. A good debate is so rare in the Brussels Bubble and this gives me an occasion to start just that: what you wrote here is total, utter nonsense!
Moreover this post is also a wasted opportunity: I disagree with many of the points made in the post by György, but you are not looking at the real issues and lose yourself instead in pointless irony. Irony can serve a purpose, but it is a very fine art and needs to be applied with care and finesse.
Let me just react to your first three paras:
1) contrary to your ironic remark, it is good that presidency communicators have time to blog: increases transparency, creates debate, opens up a bit the closed world of the Council, etc. None of us is paid extra to do this, we are doing it in addition to our daily tasks (but this you know already).
2) those values are laid down in the Treaties and the Charter. Yes they overlap with those of the CoE, but that should be no surprise. How does this imply the dissolving ofthe EU? I don’t get it.
3) Nobody talked of branding instead of making the system work better.
Let me give you a simple example: for me the EU is like the London Underground. Living there I often complained about it, it was far from perfect, but when a strike closed it down I realised how difficult life was without it. The EU has similarly become an integral part of our life, even if it is far from perfect, but if we closed it down, life would become very difficult and much darker. And just like the London Underground, the EU needs to build a brand and communicate on its activities – especially in times facing a surge of one-sided eurosceptic arguments all over Europe.
How to best do it should of course be debated – and I prefectly agree that big, expensive projects are not necessarily the best solution. (I am just writing my take on this, soon it will come on Kovács & Kováts.)
Hope we can turn this post into a meaningful debate.
Best, Gergely
Dear Gergely,
before starting to enter into the substance of the debate, there is a first confession one has to make: Writing the Week in Bloggingportal (WiB) is different to how we usually write our personal blog posts.
It’s a rotating task within the team, usually done last minute and under considerable constraints that have to do with our anarchic working style here at the Bloggingportal.eu ivory towers, namely that each editor highlights relevant blog posts during the week independently and the poor person who writes the WiB has to make a somehow coherent blog post from that. These blog post are ideally not too long and not too short and summarise a complete or somehow relevant selection of the posts all editors found noteworthy during the week.
In this regard, despite the “pseudo-serious” entry into the post, this is just a way to hide the difficulty of making such a connection, and any weakness in argumentation here and in other WiBs results from the fact that for us it is more important to get the WiB out on as many Sundays as possible compared to making it a fine art of blogging and argumentation. We actually hope the debate to happen on the blogs we highlight, not in our house, because we have a very messy house and are ashamed of having visitors.
But since now you demand a serious debate, you shall not be disappointed:
On your 1st remark:
If you read the blog post correctly, you would have spotted that it is written that it was great that the presidency has time to blog about branding the EU. If you want to see a criticism in this, it is more about the choice of subject than about the activity itself.
On your 2nd remark:
Now here the WiB totally went over the top, what a mess, incredible. Just becaused we read that the only common things we apparently would agree on were values that are promoted by another European organisation on a much wider scale we proposed that this would mean to dissolve the EU. I don’t know where we had our mind when we wrote that.
On your 3rd remark and your example:
Ah, Gergely, this was not well thought-through on your side, I fear. If I follow your example, you are saying that the Tube is a messy thing and it just needs good branding to understand that although it’s messy I need.
If you apply that, you are saying that the EU is a messy place but all we need to do is to have a uniformly applied logo and a single message (like the Tube may have) and then everyone will be happy. The argument in the WiB appears to be more about the fact that it’s not about the Tube or the EU being better branded, it is about making their service better, bringing in new technologies to prevent disruption or delays, help people to find the quickest way from A to B, and keep all corners of the system as clean as possible.
The argument in the “introductory letter” of the WiB – if there was ever a well-developed argument – which then was kind-of supplemented by the other stories showed that maybe spending time on branding may be wasted time compared to all the real problems that exist, that branding discussions may actually be proxy discussions for real issues.
Or, to say it differently: Maybe a Presidency blogging about revealing insights (as we have seen a number on Kováts & Kovács) is a better branding for the EU than blogging about how to brand the EU. But again, this is not a well-thought-through argument but one to close this comment.
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I agree with much of Kováts’s dismay. On to substance:
* Branding: The EU should brand itself. It occasionally even does this well, most often its advertising and PR efforts are awful though.
* Competence: The EU should cultivate a technocratic, sober, slightly “Germanic” air. Especially with regard to the EMA, ECB, energy (Oettinger’s “fridge race” doesn’t help), statistics in general, etc. When it says nonsense, oversells or visibly lacks independence it undermines this.
* Cutting edge/biggest market: The EU should highlight the fact it has so many of the world’s biggest companies, the world’s leading high tech firms, the world’s biggest market, and one of the most open markets in the world.
* Peace/democracy/international law: Turn EU military non-cooperation into an asset. The EU flag, as Kristalina Georgeva has said, should be synonymous with massive aid to disaster-struck areas. The EU should visibly stay in line with UN resolutions. They EU should visibly take principled stands against dictators.
I think that should do it: moral, independent, frighteningly competent and modest. That’s an image of the EU I’d like to see promoted..
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