Eight Words That Changed The World E-Book

Chris Bruni-Lowe

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Have you ever wondered what the most powerful words in history are? The right political slogan, used at the right time by the right party, can have profound consequences on people's lives. And yet this aspect of political campaigning has been comprehensively overlooked. Thousands of books about politics, marketing and election campaigns are published every year, but none has focused specifically on the election slogan – until now. Drawing on a database of more than 20,000 slogans, this groundbreaking book uncovers the remarkable fact that just eight 'hit' words have been central to the successful outcome of most major elections. From Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'New Deal for the American People' to Nelson Mandela's 'A Better Life for All', these potent words have spanned continents and ideologies, toppled governments, ended conflicts, inspired sweeping societal transformations and been echoed by democratic and authoritarian regimes alike. Through exclusive interviews, campaign insights and voter psychology, Eight Words That Changed the World reveals why some words resonate deeply while others fall flat and how their use shapes political outcomes. A single word can mean the difference between victory and failure – and the right words deployed at the right time hold the key to power. More than just a study of political messaging, this is a guide for anyone seeking to understand the power of language in changing the world.

Leseprobe

i“Chris Bruni-Lowe is one of those rare political strategists who understand both polling and messaging. This new book, the first of its kind, is a timely and fascinating look at which political slogans work and why they work. Anyone wanting to understand the appeal of Donald Trump should read this book.”

Tim Shipman, Sunday Times chief political commentator

“A compelling read. Words, so often, are the currency of politics. This book tells you the exchange rates of the words with real value: those with the power to enthuse, provoke, motivate and persuade. If you’re interested in politics, campaigning and communication, this is the book for you.”

Chris Mason, BBC News political editor

“It was an idea just waiting to be turned into a book. Chris Bruni-Lowe has undertaken a deep dive into the specific words that help political parties win an election. Don’t be surprised to see a copy of Eight WordsThat Changed the World in offices in and around Westminster in the coming weeks – and much further afield. There are some illuminating observations in this insightful book, not least the extent to which ‘Make X Great Again’ is, far from being a fresh Trump invention, one of the most clichéd phrases in the electioneering handbook.”

Jim Pickard,Financial Times deputy political editor

“Few dispute that we live in the age of political sloganeering, albeit one that is badly misunderstood. This fascinating book explores the potency of political language in a brilliant new way. Chris Bruni-Lowe grasps the power and importance of these words – and you should too.”

Sebastian Payne,The Times columnist

“Shakespeare drew on 20,000 words. The world’s democracies, it seems, run on just eight! Here, Chris Bruni-Lowe explains which words work with voters and why. A surprising gap in the political library has been filled.”

Gary Gibbon, Channel 4 News political editor

“Slogans are so powerful in politics; they are long overdue for a forensic analysis. For anyone who cares about communication, I don’t need eight words, I can do it in three: read this book.” ii

Adam B oulton, broadcaster and political journalist

“At last, a book exploring the power of political language like never before. Anyone wanting to take back control of their knowledge of sloganeering should read this insightful and entertaining march through more than a century of persuasive messaging.”

Camilla Tominey,Daily Telegraph associate editor

“Political slogans are both ubiquitous and under-examined. This book offers an invaluable guide to show how their usage can make or break an election campaign. Bruni-Lowe blends anecdote with data to create an engaging analysis of the eight key words that define our times. From Mandela and Clinton to Netanyahu and Trump, this is an original and stimulating study that will stand the test of time.”

James Heale, The Spectator deputy political editor

“Global in its scope, impressive in its historical sweep and written by someone who’s been there and done that. This fascinating book – part in-depth exploration, part how-to guide – aptly demonstrates that just the right words, used in just the right order, have always had, and continue to have, the power to move people and their political choices in profound and often era-defining ways. Highly recommended.”

Tim Bale, professor of politics, Queen Mary University of London

“An insightful and compelling read about the power of language – its ability to persuade and its impact on the political scene. Chris Bruni-Lowe’s analysis is a must-read for anyone interested in politics and the art of framing political debate.”

Sir Robbie Gibb, former director of communications at 10 Downing Street

“Chris Bruni-Lowe’s Eight Words That Changed the World is essential, enjoyable reading for anyone wanting to craft election-winning slogans. This seasoned consultant, known for running regime-changing campaigns against the odds, shares his battle-tested wisdom. This is a book full of practical international insights from someone who gets how the right words shape political realities around the world. Don’t observe history; learn how to shape it. Grab your copy now!”

Paul Baines, professor of political marketing, University of Leicester iii

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EIGHT WORDS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

A MODERN HISTORY OF THE ELECTION SLOGAN

CHRIS BRUNI-LOWE

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Contents

Title PagePrefaceIntroduction: Great1:People2:Change3:Democracy4:Strong5:Together6:New7:Time8:BetterConclusion: FutureCopyrightviii

ix

Preface

What’s in a word? Quite a lot, it turns out, if the word in question is ‘people’, ‘change’, ‘democracy’, ‘strong’, ‘together, ‘new’, ‘time’ or ‘better’.

Election campaigns are remembered for the big events – the debates, the scandals, the victories and the losses. And above all, they’re remembered for the big personalities: the ones who successfully cast themselves as the storytellers of their age. We scrutinise their image, their strategy, their successes and failures, yet we rarely stop to examine the language they use to tell their stories. The words. The phrases and, crucially, the slogans. These are not just throwaway lines or marketing tricks – they are the anchors of an entire campaign. If the candidate is the author, then the slogan is the title – the few words that signal everything they want their vision of the future to be.

This book reveals the remarkable fact that these eight words have changed the modern world. They are the ‘hit’ words that, deployed in election slogans, have shaped democratic politics. They have won elections, brought down governments, taken countries to war, xended bitter conflicts and given political life to movements of the right, left and centre.

This claim is based on data. Throughout my long career as a pollster and political strategist, I have compiled a database of more than 20,000 slogans that have been used in major elections worldwide over the past century. I have scrutinised the results of these elections and evaluated how effective a particular slogan has been. These eight words have been used in more than 9,000 slogans in the past century – many of them in the same slogan.

This database is a unique resource, allowing me to show political clients when their favoured slogans have been used before, by whom and what the result was. As I will go on to explain, being able to point to past triumphs – and disasters – when it comes to slogans has proved invaluable. Throughout this book, with a chapter devoted to each of the eight hit words, I share for the first time some of those insights with a wider audience.

Of course, these same eight words have also made up unsuccessful political slogans and have been used in campaigns that ended in defeat. Simply combining them randomly to produce a phrase – for example, ‘New Time for Strong People’, ‘Better Together’ or ‘Change Democracy’ – will get you nowhere. In fact, this is the other part of the story. Deploying these words alone has never been enough to guarantee victory, even with the right marketing and promotional techniques. They create a framework for tapping into public sentiment, but other factors – like economic conditions, the credibility of the candidate, and timing – are equally vital. Just as important is who uses them – charismatic leader or clumsy loser – and how that individual connects with the public. With that said, my research does show that in most countries, a majority of people are predisposed to endorse slogans that contain one or more of these eight xiwords. Voters are more likely to respond positively to campaigns that use them. However, predisposition alone does not secure electoral success: these words must also align with the candidate’s authenticity and the electorate’s mood.

In my work as a professional pollster and strategist, I have surveyed the views of more than 2 million people in more than forty countries and advised numerous heads of government of the left and right on campaign messaging and strategy. This work has given me a unique understanding of what people care about and what they perceive when they see a politician and hear their words. The proliferation of messages that the public is exposed to in the digital age means it has never been more important to use the right slogan to capture people’s attention.

That is why this book is about more than just eight words. It is about how democratic politics works, or doesn’t work, and how politicians shape the society in which we live.

Compiling and using my database – which is effectively a catalogue of global political history right up to the present day – made me realise that no in-depth study of election slogans exists in this form. Thousands of books about politics and marketing are published every year. So are books about particular election campaigns. None, however, have looked at the bigger picture by analysing this specific aspect of political marketing on a global, historical scale. And yet the correct slogan, used to the best effect by a winning party, can have profound consequences on people’s lives, whether it’s a government taking a country to war or one determined to end racial apartheid. Similarly, using the wrong slogan can have disastrous consequences for a party and the people it claims to represent.

The challenge for me as a strategist lies in knowing when to deploy the right slogan and being able to explain why, so that I xiican craft a campaign around it. The lessons I learned through my practical involvement in electoral contests have contributed to my understanding of the power of political slogans.

The potency of these eight hit words, and the importance of using them in the right way at the right time, is illustrated by two very different campaigns in which I played a part. The first was Nigel Farage’s anti-EU Brexit Party, which won the most seats in the 2019 European Parliament elections in the UK. The second was the successful 2023 general election campaign by Montenegro’s Europe Now! Party, which aimed to win public support for Montenegro’s bid to join the European Union. These two campaigns aimed to achieve diametrically opposed outcomes – the first to leave the EU, the second to join it. Yet the same principles were applied in both, with considerable success. Here’s a brief story of how.

One morning in November 2018, I took a telephone call from Nigel Farage, the British politician whom Donald Trump calls ‘Mr Brexit’. He told me he was setting up a new political party, the Brexit Party, and he wanted me to work on a message and a slogan to help promote it. By then, I had spent almost a decade advising organisations and candidates of all political persuasions, as well as national and international companies, on what it takes to run a successful campaign, be it political or commercial. These experiences had given me a clear understanding of what language moves people to action and which words could help campaigns to win.

I understood that setting up a new political party in Britain would present unique challenges, because its national electoral system had been dominated for more than a century by just two forces, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. However, I was intrigued by Farage’s proposition. When he contacted me, the UK was stuck in a political quagmire. Two and a half years previously, a xiiiclear majority of its voters had chosen to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum. Since then, its Parliament had been paralysed by arguments and indecision over how and whether to carry out the will of the people and over the nation’s future relationship with the EU. One Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron, who had campaigned to remain in the EU, had resigned in June 2016 over the referendum result. His successor, Theresa May, who had also campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU, was finding it impossible to break the stalemate and looked close to being toppled. There was a strong feeling among Brexiteers that democracy itself was under threat because of the growing movement, headed by leading Remainers, that demanded a second referendum. But this time, they hoped to get the result they wanted.

Prime Minister Theresa May had repeatedly assured the public that the UK would cease to be a member of the EU on 29 March 2019. No ifs, no buts. But Farage told me over the phone that he didn’t believe this deadline would be met. The European Parliament elections, in which 400 million citizens from every member state are entitled to vote for members of the European Parliament in Brussels, were scheduled by law to take place six months later, at the end of May 2019, and Farage predicted that Britain would have to participate in them. To that end, he had conceived the idea of the Brexit Party, which would stand in those EU elections and safeguard the referendum result.

Having been the prime mover in forcing the Brexit referendum, and having played a central part in winning it, Farage had become arguably the one of the most consequential political figures in Europe. Yet my brief as a political strategist now amounted to helping him to build a new political brand, in order to fight a national election which nobody could be sure would even be held. If a poll xivdid take place, it would probably come to be seen as a second Brexit referendum.

The stakes were high. It was an unusual political situation that posed some distinct marketing challenges. Perhaps the toughest of these was how to reintroduce Farage to the public. He was already well known in the UK, having spent the previous twenty years campaigning for Britain to leave the EU, but for this election he needed to appear fresh and credible.

By early 2019, it was obvious that most Britons were desperate for the political chaos to end, whether they were among the 17.4 million members of the electorate who had voted for Brexit or not. Farage had begun giving interviews and addressing rallies, proclaiming that the only way to overcome the deadlock was to have a ‘political revolution’. He told me that he thought any logo or slogan that the Brexit Party used should contain the word ‘revolution’ and that the campaign should be based around root-and-branch reform of British politics once Brexit had been properly achieved. I knew he didn’t advocate the violent overthrow of the government, but I pointed out to him that the potentially explosive connotations of that term made it a risky choice. It was open to attack from the media and was likely to alienate some voters. It might also attract an irresponsible element to his cause or be wilfully misunderstood and used against him and the Brexit Party by political opponents.

I also knew that ‘revolution’ was a poor option from a marketing perspective. Just because a word or a message is intended a certain way, it does not follow that people will perceive it in the way it is intended. I suggested that a less radical, more nuanced slogan would be preferable. To locate the best form of words, I had to take a step back and listen carefully to voters’ concerns at the time. It was critical for me to understand the language that they used to express xvtheir frustrations, as well as taking into account Farage’s views and the aims of the Brexit Party.

As the Brexit Party rapidly grew, I could see that what others might perceive as its weaknesses were in fact its strengths. It was unknown; it had no staff or infrastructure and it had no representation in any Parliament. This lack of baggage meant that it could focus solely on its principal ambition: to bring about Brexit.

Furthermore, I endorsed Farage’s view that it must select candidates from every walk of life and that this should be one of its chief selling points. Every political party tries to claim that it represents ‘ordinary people’ because its candidates are themselves ‘ordinary’. By virtue of being new, however, the Brexit Party had a perfect opportunity to select people who would mirror the diverse backgrounds of Britain’s Brexit voters. In the most positive sense, this would set it even further apart from the UK’s established political parties, none of which, the Brexit Party argued, had seemed to want to carry out the will of the majority and most of whose MPs were at that time failing to represent the interests of many of their electors.

The Brexit Party had to be different. It had to show that it was listening to the electorate and projecting its exasperation. As for Farage himself, he had led another party, UKIP, in the UK general election of 2015, securing 3.9 million votes and coming third place in terms of the popular vote. By any standards, this made him something of a political veteran. The Brexit Party’s slogan would have to reflect the fact that running this new organisation in these circumstances made him the ‘change’ candidate. Those who understand marketing will know that this would not be a simple task. It needed to be less of a line extension of an existing product and more an entirely new brand.

By February 2019, Farage had started to assemble a body of xvipotential candidates comprising businesspeople, doctors, journalists and others who had not been formally involved in politics before but represented the cross-section of society who had voted for Brexit in 2016. Of course, some existing politicians were also willing to stand under the Brexit Party banner, including the former Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe, the Revolutionary Communist Party member-turned-libertarian activist Claire Fox and Farage himself. But they were sufficiently different in outlook for the NewYorkTimesto note in its coverage of the 2019 European elections that the Brexit Party was ‘running candidates from all over the political spectrum’.

In keeping with the party’s standing as an outsider whose goal was to revamp British politics by the means of Brexit, I told Farage that all of the available data suggested using the word ‘change’ in its slogan was far likelier to strike a chord with the public than ‘revolution’. This mirrored the feedback I received from my focus group and polling work. In pure marketing terms, I knew the Brexit Party had to stake a claim to that word first in voters’ minds. So I devised the slogan ‘Change Politics for Good’. The double meaning of this phrase (to change politics for the better and to change it for ever) would add to its effectiveness. It was a tactic I had used successfully in other campaigns.

If adopted, this slogan would also confirm Farage as the ‘change’ candidate in the election, which, as this book will show, is not without risk. Succeeding with a ‘change’ slogan is rare for an established figure like Farage and for a party not considered to be part of the mainstream. But these messages would strengthen the idea that large numbers of fed-up voters were willing to embark on a collective exercise to alter the status quo and were open to voting for a new party. I showed some persistence, Farage concurred and xviithe new slogan was pressed into service on placards and on official literature ahead of the party’s formal launch in Coventry in April 2019.

As Farage had envisaged months earlier, it was confirmed by the government just two weeks before polling day that the UK would be participating in the 2019 European Parliament elections. This late call was advantageous to the Brexit Party, only adding to the sense of disorder engulfing British politics at the time. Even more useful for them, it helped fuel the idea that change was not just desirable but also necessary, because the established parties could not be trusted to do anything properly – including deciding whether the electorate would have a vote in a national ballot.

When the results came through, the Brexit Party was the clear winner. It had secured twenty-nine out of a possible seventy-three seats and 30.5 per cent of the available vote, crushing the mainstream parties. The governing Conservative Party lost fifteen of its eighteen seats and was reduced to 8.8 per cent of the vote, its lowest national vote share since its formation in 1834. The day after the election was held, Theresa May resigned as Prime Minister after only three years in the job. For the first time in British political history, a new party had won a national election in its maiden campaign. Despite having only existed officially for eight weeks, it had become the most powerful campaigning force in the land at that moment. How had this happened?

I am certain that one of the decisive factors in that extraordinary performance was the ‘Change Politics for Good’ slogan. It had acted as a magnet both to ‘outsider’ Brexit Party candidates and to the disgruntled voters whose anger it voiced. A winning slogan will always need to be matched by what people can see in front of them. ‘Change Politics for Good’ comfortably delivered on that score thanks to the xviiimix of ages, backgrounds, occupations and sexes across its representatives. True, Farage was himself technically a professional politician, having already served as an MEP in Brussels for two decades, but the overall message worked because it was visibly verifiable and because he and the other candidates believed in it so strongly.

This idea of changing politics for good took on the status of a mission. Indeed, it was in those circumstances that Farage became seen as the overall ‘change’ candidate in British politics, using the word ‘change’ frequently in conversation, in speeches and in interviews. We had succeeded in choosing the right word for the right candidate at the right time.

A ‘change’ slogan has been used eleven times in British national elections in the past century. This was one of the rare occasions since the Conservative Party under Winston Churchill in 1951 used ‘It’s Time for a Change. Vote Conservative’ that it had been successful. In the case of Farage and the Brexit Party, I knew that the circumstances at the time were so unusual that the electorate would be likely to set aside any preconceived ideas of him and of his political history. For that reason, I was aware that in this new reality, the ‘change’ narrative would work for Farage in a way that it never would have done for him before.

Of all the projects I have been involved with since 2018, the one that comes closest to replicating my experiences of advising the Brexit Party presented itself in January 2023 – but from a very different, pro-EU political perspective. It provides a lesson in how the use of those eight key words in political slogans can cross over all political divides in different situations.

I helped Milojko Spajić, the former Finance Minister, in Montenegro, part of the former communist state of Yugoslavia that was now a European democracy of just 600,000 citizens. He had xixresigned from the government six months earlier to found a new political party called Europe Now! and he wanted my help to win the presidential election in March 2023.

The parallels with the work I had conducted for the Brexit Party were striking. Like Farage, Spajić had gone against the grain by setting up a new party in a heavily contested political marketplace, in this case thanks to the sheer quantity of parties in Montenegrin politics. He too wanted to prise his country from the grip of the past and shift it onto new political terrain. And, as had also been the case in Britain in 2019, Montenegro had reached a political impasse. This was in no small part due to the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro having been in power since 1991, with one man, Milo Đukanović, serving variously as Prime Minister and President throughout that 32-year period. Yet there was a key difference between Farage and Spajić: Farage wanted to pull Britain out of the EU, whereas Spajić wanted to use Europe Now! to get his country to join the EU.

Spajić’s aspiration might have been the direct opposite of Farage’s, but from my point of view, the initial objective was the same. Spajić needed to overturn some deeply entrenched attitudes in order to win two democratic elections.

Spajić wanted a slogan that he believed would reflect the metaphorical crossroads at which Montenegro found itself. He wanted to convey that under other parties, the country would drift politically either to the left or the right but that he would take it forward. My polling showed that the ‘crossroads’ analogy would not work. My focus groups showed voters believed that change was being forced upon them, something which makes electorates all over the world uncomfortable.

In this case, unlike in the UK with the Brexit Party, the campaign xxand language of change had to be implicit, not explicit. My research also identified in the crossroads analogy a fourth possibility – standing still. This was something that Spajić had not even considered. A sizeable chunk of those I consulted felt that, even after more than thirty years of the same party being in charge, the ‘devil you know’ option would be preferable to voting for a new, untested party. This again proves that a political message counts for little if the electorate’s perception of it is, for whatever reason, different to the politician’s own.

Based on my analysis of what approach and what language would work best, I suggested a clearer slogan, which was then trialled with focus groups: ‘It’s Time’. These words would be used to suggest people’s lives would be improved economically, rather than merely presenting Spajić as the ‘change’ candidate for the sake of it.

The idea worked. This slogan chimed with Spajić’s general thesis. It also invited voters to believe that change would occur naturally if they supported him over settling for the status quo. A campaign plan was based around how the economy would be improved for everyday Montenegrins so that they could finally enjoy European standards of living, which was particularly effective because Spajić’s personal standing and reputation as former Finance Minister were so solid. Telling people that the moment had arrived for a better economy and that Spajić was the person to deliver it justified the use of the ‘It’s Time’ slogan. It played to his strengths and it was the message that the electorate wanted to hear. For the people of Montenegro, it was time.

The route to success was not straightforward, however. For one thing, Spajić had initially intended to stand for the presidency of Montenegro. Weeks before the ballot, it was announced by Montenegro’s official election body that he was ineligible for the post xxiowing to the fact he had dual citizenship – despite the fact that he had renounced it. This was a politically motivated tactic used by his opponents to wrongfoot him. Nonetheless, it required a response. His Europe Now! co-founder, Jakov Milatović, stood instead and subsequently defeated the incumbent, Milo Đukanović. The momentum gained through that victory helped Europe Now!, headed by Spajić, to win the subsequent parliamentary election. In October 2023, after weeks of negotiations, a party that had only been created the previous year formed the government, with Spajić becoming Prime Minister. Aged thirty-six, he became the world’s youngest head of government.

The different campaigns run by the Brexit Party and by Europe Now! stand as two useful case studies because of their reliance on good messaging. These examples show how two sets of contradictory objectives (leaving the EU and joining the EU) can lean heavily on the same rhetorical strategies. Even though Farage and Spajić knew who they needed to appeal to, they weren’t always sure what language would work best. In both instances, I was able to steer them onto the most fertile political ground by finding the right hit word for the situation.

Both examples also show that politicians often have deeply held views and fixed ideas about how they want to express them, but what they want to say, what they end up saying and what voters hear do not always align. Judging the mood of the electorate is vital. The same applies to timing. Knowing when to say something is just as important as saying it. Indeed, an election slogan with the word ‘time’ in it had been used by opposition parties in Montenegro on several occasions prior to 2023, to no effect whatsoever. The fact that it was used by Milojko Spajić so successfully in 2023, despite its unsuccessful use in prior elections, proves the point. xxii

The lessons I have learned through my involvement in dozens of electoral contests gave me the idea to write this book, as did my decision to compile an election slogan database. Having a catalogue of global political history at my fingertips made me realise that no in-depth study of election slogans has ever been published before. I’ve asked myself why not. After all, as already noted, the choice of political slogan can have profound consequences for entire nations, for better or worse.

On the one hand, it seems surprising that more attention has not been paid to the strengths of slogans. On the other hand, I can think of some obvious possible reasons that such an analysis has so far been overlooked.

Even though a slogan’s words are often striking enough to remain in people’s memories for years, the creative and strategic agencies behind some of them are often reluctant to acknowledge the important role that a pithy phrase can play. Perhaps the executives think to do so would diminish what they do in the eyes of others. For some, Walter Bagehot’s maxim ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic’ is surely applicable across political life, not just in relation to the monarchy. This unwillingness to be categorised as just another part of a slogan-generating machine or a linguistic sausage factory runs counter to the fact that slogans are fundamental to the business of politics.

At another level, those who are actively involved in a political campaign will rarely concede the importance of a slogan either. They may feel that any admission that they are linked to what is essentially another form of marketing goes against the way they like to see themselves – and be seen by others. No politician would wish to undermine their own role in this way. They certainly wouldn’t be keen to admit publicly to spending large sums of money on focus xxiiigroups in order to find the best slogan or most popular policy, even though most of them do. Many politicians all over the world like to present themselves as being in touch with everyday people. They would hate to be shown as dependent upon marketing surveys to understand the concerns of their constituency of voters.

The electorate, the last link in the chain, is the most important, as both the target audience and the group which has the ability to hire and fire governments and politicians. Again, there is a simple reason why voters often overlook the significance of a slogan. Who would openly confess to having been seduced by a few words in order to get them to vote for one party over another, no matter how clever some of the wordplay used undoubtedly is?

As this book will show, complex calculations take place in people’s minds when they are invited to vote in an election. Although the words in a slogan may seem straightforward, their use tends to encourage voters to weigh up the options and choices in front of them, whether consciously or unconsciously. Traditionally, it has been assumed that voters are less open-minded than they realise, with political habits and opinions acquired in their youth being difficult to shift – though recent election results suggest that voters’ allegiances are now becoming increasingly more fluid.

I believe there is a further reason why a book like this has never been published before: too many people who are involved in politics, whether as frontline politicians or as advisers, take a tribal view of their work. Some even refuse to consort with those whom they assume are their opponents. The idea of sharing or exchanging information is anathema to them, as I found when researching this project.

Those who operate at the commercial end of politics will likely have spent their entire career representing one party or another and xxivso the scope of their experience is limited only to that side of the political divide. The net result is that almost everybody who works in and around the political arena, including those who work as consultants, is unable or unwilling to offer a balanced view of an adversary’s campaign or its principal slogan. This stands in contrast to the advertising industry, for example, in which almost every executive would at the very least be willing to express an objective opinion on the merits or otherwise of a rival firm’s marketing campaign for a given product. The advertising industry even holds numerous awards ceremonies, which are dedicated to rewarding competitor firms’ campaigns. Such even-handedness barely exists in politics. Who, for example, can imagine one of Donald Trump’s opponents acknowledging publicly that they envied effective aspects of the successful election campaigns he ran in 2016 and 2024?

One of the dangers of our current era is that too few people are able to free themselves from their default setting, politically speaking. This intransigence has a knock-on effect in a professional sense. The fact that so many people would refuse to put aside their personal political preferences by working on a campaign whose message they might not necessarily endorse narrows their outlook. Indeed, it is an irony that those who work in an arm of the communications business can be so blinkered themselves. Democracy is the poorer for it.

Any study of words and their effectiveness requires a balanced view. The great value of my slogan database is that it is factual. As this book will detail, it can demonstrate what has worked, when it has worked and why it has worked, bypassing any preconceptions that anybody might have in the process. This serves me well professionally. I hope that it inspires others to write on the same subject.

Other than what I have described here, this book will not detail case studies of my work as a political consultant and pollster, though xxvit will draw upon my extensive experience operating in these fields. Instead, it looks at slogans through the widest lens possible, setting out to show their impact around the world over the past century and explaining what makes one slogan work over another. Based on information produced by the database, plus extensive interviews with more than 100 politicians, advisers, academics, marketing executives and behavioural scientists, its purpose is to identify what makes an election slogan successful in the view of those who have been involved in creating them and using them.

Each chapter focuses on one of the eight ‘hit’ words that has helped to win an election and which has therefore contributed to changing the world. The thinkers and strategists behind some of them will explain how they came up with their slogan, how it was marketed and offer their assessment of its effectiveness. How many times has each of these eight words been used in election slogans over the course of the past 100 years? Why has it been successful? Was it used by a right-of-centre or a left-of-centre party – or both? And which factors cemented its success in one election as opposed to another? This book seeks to answer each of these questions and, for the first time, tell the story behind the slogans that shape our world.

Whether you are a politician, a campaigner, a student of politics, a marketing professional, a voter or a general reader who is interested in looking at politics from a slightly different angle, this book aims to provide the fullest account of the history and use of political slogans in an accessible and entertaining way. It would be a mistake for anybody to assume that merely using one of the eight words that have changed the world is a guarantee of success. At the risk of stating the obvious, the words alone are not enough to win. Their potency lies in who says the words, when they say them – and understanding how best to exploit them. xxvi

1

Introduction

Great

Tens of thousands of electoral slogans have been produced around the world over the past century, yet most people can only remember a handful of them. One reason for this is that since the turn of the century, the proliferation of media has increased the volume of slogans produced, meaning that, paradoxically, fewer of them resonate. In the pre-digital age, political parties were able to rely upon fewer slogans and still run a successful election campaign. As the ideological ties between politicians and voters have loosened in the twenty-first century, however, party machines are prepared to use many more slogans in what can seem like a desperate effort to connect with the public. Furthermore, so much everyday language has been truncated or dumbed down into what could be termed slogan-speak that genuine political slogans have lost some of their distinctiveness and power.

Having said that, over the past twenty-five years there have been several examples of slogans becoming inextricably linked with the politicians whose campaigns they promoted. Mention ‘Yes We Can’ to any voter in the US and a majority of them will surely remember that these three words helped sweep Barack Obama to the White 2House in 2008. Similarly, anybody with knowledge of contemporary British politics will recall that Boris Johnson built the Conservative Party’s 2019 general election push around a vow to ‘Get Brexit Done’. It worked. The party won by an eighty-seat majority landslide and Johnson’s promise partly defined his three-year premiership.

Undoubtedly the best-known slogan of recent times, however, is ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘MAGA’ for short. Even those who are not especially politically engaged, including non-American citizens who had no stake in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, will probably know that this phrase was deployed by Donald Trump as he defeated Hillary Clinton to become the forty-fifth President of the US. He used it again in 2020 when he lost the presidency to Joe Biden and then for a third time in 2024 when he defeated Kamala Harris to become the forty-seventh President – a feat widely considered to be the most remarkable political comeback of the modern era. Many people probably assume that Trump created the slogan. He did not. It is merely the most famous example of an old phrase.

For a host of reasons, ‘Make America Great Again’ has become synonymous with Trump’s political brand to such a degree that by 2024 it had come to be regarded not just as a slogan but also as a kind of political philosophy. But how have these four words become so piercingly effective? The marketing principles he used to advance the phrase, beginning with his highly unusual decision to submit a trademark application for the slogan with the US Patent and Trademark Office, have certainly played a key part. Yet even though the words ‘great’ and ‘again’ – neither of which is one of the eight ‘hit’ words – have had a surprisingly low rate of delivering electoral success over the past century, and Trump’s campaigns of 2016 and 2024 are only two of relatively few examples of these words being used by 3a winning candidate, it would seem perverse not to examine his use of them in a book of this nature.

Unlike any previous slogan, this one has itself become something of an ideological border within America. How voters align themselves with it – or against it – is likely to remain a talking point in US politics for at least another generation, because in some ways ‘MAGA’ has replaced the traditional divides of left and right. Furthermore, it is probably the most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) political slogan of all time and it illustrates perfectly how the history and meaning of any slogan – not just this one – are often far richer than people may appreciate. Language is always evolving, meaning that people’s interpretation of it is as well. This in turn raises questions about how feasible it is to suggest that a slogan can ever be said to ‘belong’ to any party or politician in any accepted sense, despite slogans having become much more limited in their application and more strongly identified with individuals or causes in recent years.

In the case of ‘Make America Great Again’, some wonder if this form of words – or something close to it – could ever be used by another candidate or party again in future or whether it is somehow tainted by virtue of a politician as controversial as Trump having apparently monopolised it. In fact, Trump’s use of the slogan shouldn’t be a consideration. The words should be judged on their merit, not on the figure with whom they’re most often or recently associated. They should also be judged on their ability to help convey the message in relation to a candidate, encapsulating their personality and complementing their political journey. But as Trump was not the first person to use it, such concerns are not necessarily valid anyway.

Contrary to popular assumptions, almost every slogan can be 4traced to a past election, public campaign or political speech, sometimes from decades before. The ‘hit’ words that define those slogans usually date back even further, but as we shall see, it can take decades for them to crystalise into the neat constructions that make up today’s election slogans. Politicians of every era may claim to have conceived their own ideas and, in some cases, they will strenuously deny allegations of poaching, but there are few word groups that are so unique as to be entirely original.

Take Barack Obama’s use of ‘Yes We Can’. His aspiration was that this phrase would stir within voters a sense of hope and unity irrespective of his, or their, race, creed or skin colour. It worked, capturing the zeitgeist of progressive America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Yet how many members of the US electorate at that time knew that ‘Yes We Can’ had been used by the Scottish National Party (SNP) during the British general election campaign of 1997? Those who were aware of its history would have understood that the SNP, under its then leader Alex Salmond, used ‘Yes We Can’ with an aim that was diametrically opposed to Obama’s. Whereas Obama wanted to bring his nation together, Salmond and the SNP were prepared to break up Scotland’s centuries-old political union with England and Wales in order to achieve their main goal: independence for their country. To what degree Obama or any other politician may have been consciously aware of having adopted the SNP’s election slogan is difficult to assess. But if nothing else, ‘Yes We Can’ shows that the same three-word phrase can be used in two countries at different times for distinct purposes.

As it happens, it also resulted in different outcomes. Although it helped Obama to become the first African American to hold the office of US President, the SNP has still not managed to gain independence for Scotland. Indeed, ‘Yes We Can’ was probably the 5SNP’s least effective slogan of the past thirty years. This contrast shows that even a resonant slogan can fail if the party’s broader appeal, timing or credibility are lacking. Would Obama still have used this political slogan if he had known of its history? Arguably, yes, for this example shows not only that two politicians can use the same slogan with opposing objectives in mind but also that other factors beyond the slogan itself go into making a particular set of words work. And, of course, he should have felt no compunction about using it if he genuinely believed it conveyed the message that he wanted to send to voters.

When their respective achievements are examined, it is plain to see that Alex Salmond and Barack Obama had different qualities. It would not be unfair to say that whatever Salmond lacked in popular appeal, Obama had in larger quantities. Similarly, the SNP and the Democratic Party are two contrasting organisations with histories that bear little relation to each other. Considering all of this, the importance of personality and marketing in making a slogan work cannot be overstated. The words can work, but only if they’re used by the right person at the right time.

Just as every artwork has a provenance, so every slogan has a lineage, as my database shows, beginning when it was first used in an attempt to win an election. There is more likely to be a connection between slogans when they are brought into play by politicians who are campaigning in the same country or who have a similar political outlook. The same slogan does not always hail from the same lineage, however. Politicians are often motivated to use certain word formations for reasons that are hard to pin down, and as we have seen, it is not unusual for individuals operating thousands of miles apart to stumble upon near-identical phrases independently of each other. No matter where you are in the world, when certain 6conditions present themselves, politicians appear naturally driven to base a campaign around certain key words – and voters are most likely to respond to them. Getting the timing right is critical. What is important to recognise is that voters are generally receptive to acting upon similar words and ideas – even if they are presented in different languages and do not translate literally. Indeed, in 2014, a left-wing political party called Podemos – meaning ‘We Can’ – was launched in Spain.

Donald Trump has long maintained that the expression ‘Make America Great Again’ came to him as he sat at his desk on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan in November 2012, the day after the Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney lost the election to Barack Obama. Thrilled by its possibilities, which chimed with his view of the US as the most powerful nation on earth and of himself as a titan of its corporate culture, he asked his lawyers to contact the US Trademark Office. They successfully registered a claim on his behalf for the exclusive right to use it for ‘political action committee services, namely, promoting public awareness of political issues and fundraising in the field of politics’. The fee was $325.