brand orange - the rollout

Via WhirledView, some extracts from an interview with Ukranian activist Dymitro Potekhin, one of the men behind the rollout of Brand Orange.

when did you start planning for the election? dp: a long time ago, more than a year before the race began. together with anatoly tkachuk from the civil society institute and petro koshukov from the europa xxi foundation, we submitted a funding proposal with the u.s.-ukraine foundation (usuf) staff, headed by markijan bilynsky in kyiv and nadia mcconnell in washington. koshukov joined in mid-2004. petro had his own project with swiss funding. our projects shared a mission, and we decided to launch a campaign under a joint brand.

kp: when did work begin?
dp: non-violent presidential election-related protest preparations began after parliamentary elections held in march 2002. a series of training sessions were conducted by people with past experience conducting similar campaigns, including the serbian civil disobedience campaign otpor. these activities were funded by the u.s.-based non-profit freedom house, which organized seminars throughout ukraine designed to teach activists to independently coordinate their activities and organize others, stage actions, talk with journalists, distribute information and work with young people. the albert einstein institute also funded the printing of 12,000 copies of "from dictatorship to democracy" by gene sharp, a theoretician specializing in nonviolent protest. the pamphlets were printed locally in ukraine and an edition was made available on the internet. steve york, a film director and author of the documentary film "bringing down a dictator," about the fall of yugoslav strongman slobodan milosevic, talked aei into funding publication of the book, which was promoted and widely read through the civil society internet portal maidan (www.maidan.org.ua).

what happened next?
dp: following the creation of the pora "brand," replete with its black emblem, logotype, etc., the strategic goal of the campaign was defined: to fight against the system of power under kuchma. the site kuchmizm.info (www.kuchizmo.info) was launched. stickers, reading "what is kuchmizm?" appeared on march 29, 2004 in 17 cities. stickers answering, "kuchmizm is poverty," "kuchmizm is banditry," "kuchmism is corruption," etc. answered the question weeks later.

kp: what are your future plans?
dp: i’m getting ready for the parliamentary elections, scheduled for 2006.

I’ll bet he is. OK, so what do we think of freedom as a brand management strategy? The obvious answer is: who cares, so long as it works. I think it’s a bit more complicated than that for a couple of reasons.

The first is to do with what you might call brand integrity. While the smart fellows were co-ordinating behind the scenes, the media were awash with images of joyous spontanaeity. The people were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, though mad as hell in a camera-friendly, tulips-in-the-gun barrels sort of way. It was this sense of spontaneous peaceful popular revolution that gave the Orange insurgency its moral force and helped bring about widespread foreign support. And along with that there was immediate criticism of people, as with Jonathan Steele, who tried to look behind the scenes to see how the whole thing was brought about. Steele’s sin in this wasn’t “opposing democracy”, it was blowing away the pixie dust around a highly organized information warfare operation.

There’s also the matter of Russian intervention. At the time this was spun as a brutish and clumsy attempt at intervention which broke on the rock of a spontaneous popular uprising. Now we know it was a brutish and clumsy foreign intervention on behalf of 44% of the electorate which was outsmarted by a slick and smart foreign intervention on behalf of 56% of the electorate. What do we suppose that Putin is actually going to learn from this? That Ukranian politics should be left alone?

But the major problem with the brand management approach in the Ukraine is that it has converted the ideas of freedom and democracy from a process that needs to be maintained and extended into a form of packaging around a specific government with well defined foreign backers. If people don;t like the product, they're going to demand a recall and be rather pissed off that they were fooled by the packaging.

Comments

[CKR]

I think you make some very good points, Jamie.

To take a particularly cynical viewpoint, the current situation beats the Cold War situation. Back then, if a group wanted to unseat those currently in power, they would apply to the major power of their choice (basically the US or the Soviet Union, but occasionally the smaller players) for guns, mortars, and rocket launchers. Once that equipment was supplied, they would proceed to wreak havoc against the powers that were.

Now proposals are neatly written in the proper format, and the weapons are made of paper.

Many fewer deaths, and much better theater. I think generally an improvement.

The insurgents of the Cold War variety used marketing tools, like charismatic and distinctive leaders (think Fidel Castro) and newly designed flags and posters. They just didn't call them marketing tools.

Less cynically, I don't believe that a marketing and branding strategy alone could mobilize all the people that participated in the Orange Revolution. I think you're right that if the new leaders don't live up to the promises, both explicit and implicit, that they've made, the public will demand something else. But that's always been true of revolutions unless they manage to install a government that doesn't allow the demand for something else.

Outsiders always want to influence elections. That's true in the US and UK and everywhere else. They use the methods available to them. Those within the country who want that help will take it, depending somewhat on the legal sanctions. If that help is transparent, as it was in this case, we can comment on it and evaluate it.