From Makerfield to the Boardroom: Communications Lessons for Brands

The Makerfield by-election is far from a normal election. There’s a lot riding on it. Andy Burnham is standing in a seat that, on paper, should not carry national consequences. But if he wins, it does more than send him back to Westminster, it puts him straight into the conversation about Labour’s leadership – that is a huge shadow cast over a local contest.

Then there’s the campaign itself. Burnham is sticking to a grounded, local pitch. The wider Labour operation is going on the attack. Reform is pushing aggressively and trying to define the race on its own terms, while voters keep dragging it back to very specific local frustrations.

It’s all a little out of sync, and that’s what makes this interesting. Because this is what communications looks like when the stakes are high and everything is happening at once. At its core, it is a communications challenge.

Here are five lessons corporate communicators can take from Makerfield:

1. If you sound like two organisations, people assume you are

One of the clearest themes running through Makerfield is the split in messaging. On one side, a positive, locally grounded pitch. Calm, measured, and focused on what can be done for local people. On the other, a more aggressive approach from the central Labour team, with sharper language and a different tone entirely.

You can see how it happens – different teams have different priorities. Internally, that makes sense. Externally, it feels off. Audiences do not separate out who said what and why. They absorb it all at once and make a call. If it does not feel consistent, it does not feel trustworthy.

Corporate comms falls into this trap more often than most would admit, with brand, leadership, press, and social all being somewhat out of sync. Not dramatically, but often enough to cast doubt – that doubt is costly.

2. Leadership can lift you, but it can’t carry everything

A recognisable leader gives you an advantage, that much is obvious in Makerfield. Burnham can say fairly standard things and they land with more weight than they otherwise would. Local people know him, and there is some trust there already. He does not have to work as hard to be heard.

But that only buys you so much. After a while, people stop listening to the individual and start judging what sits behind them. This includes the track record and consistency of delivery of the national party, and whether it all holds together. If the wider story is not convincing, the leader ends up carrying it on their own.

It is the same in business. A strong CEO can steady things for a while, but you have a problem if they are the only reason the story works. Leaders should strengthen the narrative; if they are compensating for it, something is off.

3. If it isn’t specific, it isn’t persuasive

What stands out in Makerfield is how grounded the conversation is in real, local issues.

This is a debate about things people deal with every day, including planning decisions, local services, and a deep-rooted sense of being overlooked by Westminster. The candidates who lean into that sound more believable.

The ones who drift into broader, more portable messaging start to lose connection. This is where corporate comms often misjudges things. There is a natural pull towards language that feels comfortable – think strategy, ambition, and transformation. It all sounds right but the trouble is it does not always land. People respond to what they recognise, and if your message could be delivered by anyone, anywhere, it will struggle to mean anything where it matters.

4. Tone will make or break you, especially under pressure

The shifts in tone during this campaign are hard to miss. Measured and constructive at times, it has become more combative, more pointed, and less controlled at others. That inconsistency matters more than the detail of any single message because tone is instinctive. It is what people feel before they get to the detail. Lose them on tone and you are already on the back foot.

Say you are focused on trust, then sound defensive when challenged. That sticks. Say you are positive, then pivot to attacks elsewhere, your credibility diminishes. You cannot put one version of yourself out in one place and another somewhere else.

In corporate comms, tone is often treated as something to refine at the end. The reality is that it is doing most of the work, and it is usually the first thing to wobble when the pressure picks up.

5. Your past doesn’t stay in the past

One of the defining features of this by-election has been how quickly historic comments and old posts get dragged back into the spotlight. Things said months or years ago suddenly become central to the narrative. That is not unique to politics, it’s the environment everyone operates in now. There is no reset button; everything you have posted sits there, waiting to be found, reframed, reinterpreted, and redistributed.

For communicators, that changes the job. You are not just thinking about what to say next, but also managing everything that has already been said, and how it might come back. Most organisations say they understand this, fewer act like they do.

What this means for marketers

The point is not that politics and business are identical, it’s that both are judged the same way when pressure builds. People notice when the message loses discipline, they notice when tone shifts from one channel to the next, and they notice when different parts of an organisation appear to be telling slightly different versions of the same story.

That is why Makerfield matters nationally. It offers a clear, public example of what misalignment looks like in practice. Once that happens, trust thins out and every message has to work harder than it should. For communicators, the lesson is straightforward: alignment is crucial.

The strongest campaigns and the strongest brands are the most coherent. They know what they stand for, they sound like themselves in every setting, and they don’t force audiences to piece the story together on their behalf.

That is the bigger takeaway from this by-election. In a crowded, high-pressure environment, consistency makes communications more credible, and credibility is usually what decides whether a message lands or slides past unnoticed.

The author: Joseph Price-Moore is PR director at WPR.  He’s a communications professional, with a global outlook and a passion for navigating complex narratives across sectors, audiences, and borders, who brings clarity, creativity, and confidence to the table.