Britons vote Virgin as the brand they’d most like to see governing both the country and the nation’s finances…

Given the decline of respect for politicians in the UK, we wondered if well-known brands would fare any better with the British public. Our survey results are in, just as the real polling begins!

We gave our ‘electorate’ (a nationally-representative panel of 1,000 UK adults) a set of popular brands, from which to choose those they would most like to have as Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer.  

Virgin topped the polls in both – taking over 18% in the PM survey, and just over 17% of the vote in the Chancellor poll. And despite all the money spent on building Virgin’s young challenger image, it was the 55-64 year olds who were most in favour of Branson’s empire, garnering almost a quarter of that vote (24.5%).   

Microsoft was equal favourite as the brand people would most like to run Britain’s finances, also taking 17.2% of the poll. More interestingly, in the 1,000+ strong poll, only 6 people voted for RBS to be their choice of Prime Minister – the lowest score by some margin (0.6%).

“The Virgin brand has been built on putting the customer at the heart of every product and service,” said Giles Lury, our Director of Branding. “In an era of dodgy expenses claims and banking turmoil to name just two, voters are clearly saying, “don’t forget about us!” and are crying out for a leader, or in this case a brand, that puts them first.”

“Nick Clegg has been clearly doing that in the debates and out on the campaign trail, and both he and Branson have similar appealing characteristics. Each go against the grain and both  have very personable styles versus Brown or Cameron.  I think it’s a very revealing comparison, and one the Tories and Labour could learn a lot from.”

There were some interesting additional insights that came from the research:

• The iGeneration (18-24 year olds) preferred Apple to lead the country, with over 16% of the vote, but it was Microsoft who won the battle of the tech giants, scooping 12.7% of all ages in the leadership vote versus Apple’s 9%
• Three times as many women to men wanted Cadbury in No.10 – an eighth (12.5%) of British women like the sound of chocolate leading the nation
• Unsurprisingly almost three times as many men than women voted for a beer brand – so Carlsberg is probably not the best Prime Minister in the world with only 9.7% of the overall vote
• Almost twice as many women than men voted for Boots to be Prime Minister (10.6% vs 5.8%), indicating that issues of healthcare and the NHS register highly with them
• And it’s clear Coca-Cola won’t be winning many hearts and minds of the grey generation.  Of the 1,000+ interviewees, only 1 person over the age of 54 voted for the soft drink giant to lead the country

 “Branson‘s choice as Chancellor is an interesting one,” continued Lury.  “Despite the initial scepticism when he entered the banking services market, he has proved that he can provide innovation with products like Virgin One, and now he’s potentially offering real scale if recent offers for high street banks are successful.  Voters clearly want a Chancellor who is willing to do something new.”

“But it’s clear people buy into personality and want something different in this election, and if you compare the statistics to this year’s real race, you can see why the Lib Dems are doing so well compared to past years.”

Over 1,000 Britons were polled in the survey, with an even split between age, sex, demographic and location.

Thanks to a new Specsavers parody, Unilever appear to have succeeded in getting their media spend for the Lynx ‘billions‘ ad on BOGOF.

One of our mantras at The Value Engineers is ‘out-think, rather than out-spend the competition’ but even good thinking costs more than good luck. So as supporters of savvy,  canny marketing, we can only congratulate Unilever’s response to the burdensome decision it must have faced when, according to MediaWeek, their ‘permission for the strapline’ was sought before the launch of this (Specsavers) ad:

Once again we’re pleased to see our brand in the news.

This week Giles Lury, Director of Branding, appears in The Grocer, in Alex Beckett’s article, ‘Chew on this: too much NPD can be a category’s undoing’.

Giles comments on some of the issues facing the chewing gum market – we’ve selected some of his quotes:  ”Chewing gum got too complicated for its own good… There was an explosion of fruit flavours a few years ago, which led to a cluttered shelf space that was hard to navigate. In some ways it was a victim of its own success.”

“Society doesn’t have a good perception of gum and it lacks positive role models… [it] has a long term-societal battle to fight.”

If you’d like to read more and have access to the magazine online, click here.