Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control by Alex Marland (review)

This book represents another major contribution to the study of Canadian political communications and marketing by Alex Marland. It builds on his previous work in Political Marketing in Canada (2012, coedited by Thierry Giasson and Jennifer Lees-Marshment) and Political Communication in Canada: Meet the Press and Tweet the Rest (2014, coedited by Thierry Giasson and Tamara A. Small), but offers a more comprehensive account of recent developments in the use of advanced communications and marketing techniques and technologies by Canadian political parties. It does this by exploring the topic through the unifying lens of branding theory. Marland extends this analysis to explore how government departments, either in response to directions from the Prime Minister’s Office and Privy Council Office or to advance their own agendas, come to reflect the ‘brand’ of the political party in power. This problematises the already complicated relationship between the permanent government and the political government.

Marland offers an ambivalent perspective on this relationship. He notes that political branding, if done successfully, presents a unified, coherent image of government. This is helpful from both a partisan and bureaucratic perspective because it mitigates against the disruptive nature of social media and compensates for the decline of traditional media. It also simplifies the relationship between the government – in both its permanent and political forms – and the public, providing ‘information subsidies’ to voters while maintaining the legitimacy and authority of the government. At the same time, political branding poses a distinct danger to democracy. The merging of the permanent government and the political government into one unified brand (as seen in the example of the ‘Harper government’) obscures the separate roles and responsibilities of these two faces of government. Public resources are wasted in the name of the permanent government as the political government pursues a partisan agenda. Issues that fall outside the brand of the government are marginalised. This last point can be seen in the competing degrees of importance attached to the military, the environment, the North, and Indigenous peoples by the Harper government and the current Trudeau government. There are no easy solutions to these challenges, but there is no denying them either: branding has quickly emerged as a defining quality of contemporary party politics in Canada.

If there is a weak point to Brand Command, it concerns the limited historical reach of the text: this is essentially the story of how ‘Harper’s team’ pioneered the use of political branding on their journey from the office of the Leader of the Official Opposition to the Prime Minister’s Office. Nonetheless, Marland should not be faulted for this shortcoming because, as he argues in convincing fashion, this is where the story of political branding in Canada actually begins. The relative novelty of this subject matter only underscores the importance of Marland’s work, and while the story of the current Trudeau government remains incomplete, it is interesting to note the many parallels to the story of the Harper government that we have already seen.