The Liberal Party has a Nike problem

We now speak of Nike as a permanent feature of modern sport, like floodlights or televised finals. But the brand was once an emerging upstart in the late 70s and early 80s, compared to competitors like Adidas and Converse.

Both of those brands, at the time, imbued a more motivating, relatable, and easy likeability in their brand atmospheres, whereas Nike was grittier and unapologetically focused on winning. Nike’s brand projects an obsession for athletic excellence, dominance, and the cold discipline of the great athlete.

The brand was built by attaching itself to people who seemed to have access to a higher law of performance: Jordan first, later Tiger, then Federer, and by the 2010s Ronaldo, among many others. For the last forty to fifty years, that “win at all costs” positioning is the reason Nike has been one of the great brands of the world, and the definitive market leader in its category.

When Covid disrupted supply chains and pressured margins, Nike went direct-to-customer through its own stores and eCommerce, withdrawing from major retail partners like Foot Locker. There is a very modern managerial satisfaction in all of that. But it comes with an effect that brand people tend to understand more viscerally than accountants do: when you withdraw from a space that you win in, you vacate a space for others to win in.

If you’re not there, someone else is. Nike vacated shelf space to brands like On, whose stock price has boomed while Nike’s has plummeted. Big-name elite athletes have also signed with other competitors, and at the same time Nike’s ads shifted from a “win at all costs” posture to a more inclusive “try your best” posture.

Winning admiration through being inclusive is a very legitimate strategy for many other brands. But Nike is not many brands. Nike is a brand that spent decades teaching the world to associate it with the apex of sport. When Nike softened its posture, it loosened its grip on that territory which invited competitors to move in with frightening speed, because they do not need to be larger, or richer, or more famous. They only need to be better positioned. For Nike it was a retreat from a position they had owned for decades, what made them cool, and what made it feel categorically “Nike”.

Every positioning failure begins the same way. A brand forgets who it is for. The same rule applies to political party brands as much as it does commercial brands. Likening the Liberal Party to Nike is probably generous to the Liberals and unfair to Nike, but the positioning failure is the same.

The strategic positioning disarray of the Liberal Party

For anyone who has been paying attention to the Liberal Party lately, you’ll know it’s all going terribly wrong for them. The party appears to be in something approaching strategic disarray. The more uncomfortable question is not whether it is going badly, but whether the damage is structural and therefore harder to reverse. And when a brand vacates a successful position, challengers fill it.

There is currently only one political party operating within the centre of Australian politics. Labor and teal independents have stepped into unserved centrist segments of the electorate in much the same way challengers in commercial markets exploit gaps left by dominant brands. The empty space that has emerged in recent election cycles—between the centre and more populist right—is partly a consequence of departing from the centre-right that defined most of the Liberal Party’s overwhelming success since the mid 1940s.

Since the party’s founding in 1944, the Liberal Party brand fashioned itself as the political home for the aspirational middle: individualism, suburban households, small business owners, the professional class, those who believed in enterprise, reward for effort, and sober economic competence. It was a broad church, yes, but one that understood its demographic centre of gravity. That centre has drifted. And one cannot help imagining that Labor must occasionally reflect on the peculiar fortune of facing an opposition that seems determined to complicate its own path back to relevance.

Repairing brand credibility is one challenge; reasserting positioning is another. The brand once enjoyed ownership of economic management and national security in the public mind. In recent elections they have ceded ground on both fronts, to the point where in the last election, Labor was distributing how-to-vote cards proclaiming “vote Labor for lower taxes”. For a party that built its mythology around lower taxes, it is a major brand wound.

Yet credibility cannot even be tested if positioning is totally incoherent. Before the Liberals can demonstrate competence, they must persuade the electorate that they are a viable, mainstream centre-right alternative. Instead of competing with Labor for the broad centre, it finds itself competing with a protest party for a narrower slice of the electorate. The party is attempting to outmaneuver Labor in the next election by borrowing from the populist right, which is a difficult positioning proposition.

The increasing competition from One Nation

It’s striking how some powerful Liberals aren’t focusing on clearer distinction from Hanson, but instead engaging in a “will they, won’t they” flirtation with her politics. From a brand positioning standpoint: you do not attempt to win by playing the game your opponent is better suited to play. If One Nation’s brand lies in uncompromising anti-multicultural rhetoric, it is fanciful to imagine that the Liberals will outdo them in that arena. You do not win in this game by imitation; you win by distinction.

The Howard-era strategy was instructive. The aim was not to chase One Nation into its own territory, but to fence it off. Border protection was addressed without adopting the cultural theatrics that defined Hanson’s appeal. The Liberals refused a preference deal with One Nation, instead encouraging voters to put Pauline Hanson last on the ballot, and wedged her party to the extremes. The aim was to absorb voter anxiety without legitimising the protest brand, and it worked. One Nation remained largely peripheral for nearly two decades.

One Nation has since broadened from a single-issue protest party into a right-wing populist platform with protectionist economic overtones. It speaks of leaving free trade agreements, privileging domestic industry, and challenging global economic orthodoxies. Yet some leading Liberals have appeared tempted to echo elements of this protectionist mood, rather than trying to own the free-trade identity that once defined their own party.

The Liberal Party also has a One Nation problem

Possibly the biggest reason the Coalition has ceded ground to One Nation is the Liberal Party’s weakening brand as a viable mainstream alternative to Labor. When the opposition is not perceived as a credible alternative government, it creates a permission structure for voters to support parties that have never been viable parties of government. After all, if One Nation is polling north of twenty percent, they can’t be that fringe. The old tactical logic—“I’d vote for them but they can’t win”—dissolves once the supposedly mainstream alternative doesn’t look like it can win either.

The Nationals’ pressing positioning problem compounds this. They want their Liberal partner to tilt harder right so regional voters don’t bleed to One Nation, but that pressure drags the Coalition’s centre of gravity away from the metropolitan seats the Liberals need to win back. The Nationals can survive as a regional brand by going more nationalist-right; the Liberals can’t, because a harder-right Coalition posture costs them votes in the cities.

The appointment of Matt Canavan as Nationals leader is worth noting. He has been the de facto leader of the Nationals for years, a provocative internal warlord who has spent the better part of a decade crossing the floor, agitating against net zero from the backbench, and running a parallel communications operation through Sky After Dark and social media that overshadowed the actual leader.

Now that the title matches the influence, the positioning intent is clear: wedge One Nation on the right flank and reclaim their voters. Canavan is an effective retail politician in that register and a sharp operator online who has built a real audience. The conundrum is that he is a Brisbane-raised, KPMG-trained Queensland senator with no electorate to defend in the regions, and the first Nationals leader to sit in the Senate rather than the House.

For a party whose entire brand proposition is built on being the authentic voice of rural and regional Australia, that’s a tension worth watching, whether the media war against One Nation can compensate for a leader whose credibility is built in studios rather than paddocks.

The asymmetry between left and right

On the left, Labor is still widely understood as a party that can form government. It has kept the Greens positioned as an uncompromising outlier rather than a serious governing coalition partner, and benefits from occupying an uncontested centre. The left is competitive but structurally consolidated. The right is competitive and structurally fragmented. If the Liberals retreat from the centre ground, Labor is free to claim it. Teal independents may capture slices of metropolitan centre-right territory, but they do so seat by seat. Structurally, the centre remains largely Labor’s to define, but don’t discredit the teals as a threat purely to the Liberals.

Nike left a huge gap on shelves for its competitors to fill when it launched Nike Direct

The teals and the open centre

If the traditional Liberal vote continues to collapse while the right fragments further, the old Coalition formula may completely implode. Which earlier this decade would have been unthinkable, but here we are, with the Coalition already breaking up twice since the election. The teals have been the more consequential disruptors in Australian politics than One Nation. They are usually discussed as the primary threat on the Liberal Party’s left flank, but it would be a mistake to treat them as a Liberal-only problem. They pose vulnerabilities for Labor too.

In the aftermath of this most recent election, the teals have grown from an urban insurgency largely confined to safe Liberal seats into something closer to a broader centrist proposition. If the Liberal Party continues to vacate the centre-right, and if teal-style candidates can run without the nationalist-right baggage that now clings to the Coalition brand, there is no particular reason their ambitions must stop at Liberal heartland. Safe Labor seats, especially those with an underlying small-l liberal constituency, could become targets too. When the centre is left open, it tends not to stay empty for long.

Ben Develin – author

Is it only up from here for the Libs?

Unlike Turnbull or Ley, whom the nationalist-right of the party never trusted and often seemed more focused on conquering than supporting, Angus Taylor occupies an interesting position in this unfolding drama because he is cut from the ‘conservative cloth’. That may grant him internal stability and give him a better shot at holding the whole show together than his predecessors. The question is what he does with it.

His conservatism is less “on the tin”. He is tribally located within the national-right, but his emphasis has tended to sit more in economic orthodoxy than overt cultural war mongering. Whether that shifts into a small-c, centre-right posture in the mold of Howard, or drifts toward a harder cultural line, will depend on a strategic choice: whether they want to own the hard right with a party room more tolerable to them, or win elections.

Like Nike, the Liberal Party’s positioning drift created political white space in the centre-right. In both markets, consumer and political, when a leader leaves territory undefended, challengers will claim it. In my mind, there are three likely outcomes.

First, the centre is effectively uncontested. If you are a centrist voter who wants moderate economic leadership and a party capable of forming government, Labor begins to look like the only viable selection on the menu for the near future, because the Liberals haven’t articulated an appealing alternative for middle Australia.

Second, the Liberals could walk back towards the centre-right. That would require winning back moderate voters without alienating the conservatives who have effectively conquered the Liberal party room. If this sounds easy, it truly is harder than it sounds. Parties are often better at conquering themselves than persuading the electorate.

Third, and this is the genuinely disruptive possibility, the old Coalition arrangement may continue to fragment and then re-consolidate into new parties, as it did in the 1940s. Over time, you could imagine a new centre-right formation emerging from would-be moderate Liberals, teals and small-c conservatives, similar to how Menzies reorganised the fractured anti-Labor forces into the Liberal Party in 1944, leaving nationalist and populist forces to consolidate elsewhere.

If the Liberal Party can take anything from Nike, it’s this. Nike has been edging back toward its original DNA, honouring elite athletes, intensity and competitive excellence rather than its softer inclusive participation messaging. It suggests Nike has remembered where its power has always come from, and that chasing new territories has left room for competitors to take its place. The lesson for the Liberals is that sometimes the old ways remain the winning ways. It is, admittedly, an almost offensively neat conclusion for the conservative side of politics, but neatness does not make it wrong.

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