Have you ever heard of the phrase “strategic judo”?
I heard it for the first time when I went to a talk by a famous adman, Peter Souter.
He had worked on various Labour election victories. He was chairman of an agency called TBWA which he joked was an acronym for “Tony Blair Wins Again”.
He referenced an example of this ‘judo’ from 1995 when Tony Blair said “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.
Blair made the argument for robust policing – traditionally a Conservative strength – using rhetoric which left-wingers would sympathise with.
Strategic judo.
By using an audience prejudice to inform his communication, Blair created cut-through.
People see a piece of messaging which is counterintuitive, so they pay more attention, and the message sinks in.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party have used a bit of strategic judo in their latest video and I think it works pretty well.
There’s a strong media narrative which is finding an audience in the country around the notion that “Labour are sticking to the Conservatives’ spending plans and so there’s no real difference between the two parties”.
This video confronts that notion head-on and in doing so makes a series of policy announcements seem much more emphatic and punchy than if they hadn’t framed it within the context of the media accusation they’re facing.
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