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When the first designs of David Cameron's 'Tory tree' were circulated among party members this summer, Lord Tebbit, the Conservative Party's former chairman, remarked that it looked like a 'bunch of sprouting broccoli'.

He was not alone in his revulsion. The verdict of one horrified activist after the new logo was officially unveiled in September: 'My daughter said, Did David Cameron give his baby a crayon?' Another asked on the Conservative Party web site: 'Is it a tree or a magic mushroom?' One party member described the logo as 'a fit symbol for the morally bankrupt principle-free zone that is 'Cameron's Conservatives',' while another lamented the decision to jettison the famous torch of liberty logo introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. 'The torch came from an age of certainty... the fuzzy tree owns up to the lack of definition and uncertainty of today,' they wrote.

Rebranding the Tories as a more centrist, compassionate and modern-looking political party has been the main priority of Cameron and his aides ever since the 40-year-old became the party's new leader last December. Cameron has been photographed with huskies in Norway showing his concerns about global warming and melting glaciers. He has been pictured cycling to work (with an official car behind him), and has spoken at length about his disabled son. In his latest initiative, he has even launched a blog to show himself at home, washing the dishes with his children in the kitchen.

Hearts and minds

Persuading the electorate that the new, touchy-feely Conservatives can be trusted to run the country is likely to take several years at least.

Though they are only at the beginning of that journey, will the Tories' decision to scrap their old logo - with its soul-stirring colours of red, white and blue - go down in history as a giant leap forward or an embarrassing mistake?

Initial impressions are not good. Not only has Cameron, at a stroke, divorced the Tories from an important symbol of their past, but he has also replaced it with an emblem that is already used by a host of British organisations.

According to Thom Newton, director of corporate branding agency 35 Communications, the Environment Agency and publishing house Elsevier are just two groups that feature a tree in their branding.

'The Tories won't be helped by the common use of trees, particularly oak trees,' he says. 'I also suspect there will be plenty of opportunity for sniping - 'most likely to be struck by lightning in a political storm', that sort of stuff.'

At a cost of £40,000, the tree was one of around 100 images drawn up by design agency Perfect Day and presented to party activists this summer.

The main design is of a bright green oak in full bloom with a startlingly blue trunk. In Wales, however, there is a crucial difference - the foliage is thicker, apparently to reflect the Welsh sessile oak. In Scotland, the tree - perhaps significantly, given the Tories' recent failures to win votes there - does not lean as far to the right. The Conservatives have said that their new emblem represents 'strength, endurance, renewal and growth', but whether it is intended to convey anything beyond the vaguest of attributes is open to question. Damian Collins, managing director of Influence Communications - part of M&C Saatchi, the advertising group with a famously long association with the Tories - says: 'The oak tree is obviously a very traditional British symbol, and in terms of the agenda Cameron has set out, it links the party to the environment.'

Dr Gidon Cohen, lecturer in politics at Durham University, says: 'One of the things it is meant to conjure up is the environment, but I suspect it is also trying to throw up other images that have a long Conservative resonance such as the organic nature of society, and solidity and strength.'

Centre stage

To go from the decisive, purposeful icon of Thatcher's Tories - carrying the torch for Britain and Conservative values - to Cameron's woolly-looking doodle may be a hard pill to swallow for some party activists. But in the battle for the political centre ground, where it is no longer unusual for policies to chop and change at regular intervals, the deliberate ambiguity may well be more suited to a modern electorate.

According to Paul Edison, executive creative director of marketing and communications agency Black Sun, political parties have to change with the times in the same way as any other brand. Edison says: 'The Conservative Party is no different from Nike or IBM. Like a good brand manager at Procter & Gamble, Cameron is focusing on his 'customers' - in his case, the party members and the voting public.'

The adoption of the tree has been described as Cameron's 'red rose moment', a reference to the Labour Party's decision to abandon the red flag - a militant socialist emblem with specific connotations of revolution and upheaval - in favour of a far softer, vaguer image.

Seeking to persuade his colleagues to accept the change in 1986, Peter Mandelson, then an advisor to Neil Kinnock, wrote that the new logo was 'vital to reinforce the impression of an innovative party shredding old associations.' He suggested the logo was key to reviving the party's fortunes: 'I am looking at our overall 'corporate' image - everything that offers a visual impression of the party.' At a time when Kinnock was being advised to improve his image by wearing sharper suits and not smoking in public, the rose's particularly English connotations helped to distract from his Welshness. The rose is an old Christian and English symbol of virtue, and the 'crimson rose' appears throughout Shakespeare's work; it also still features on a number of national crests, including that of the England rugby union team.

As David Stewart, a lecturer in history at the University of Central Lancashire, explains: 'Labour's adoption of the red rose was a skilful move because prior to that the red flag could be exploited by the Conservatives as a symbol of the Russian Revolution and the Communists.' As long as Cameron's new logo sticks, it may eventually come to be viewed as of similar importance to Labour's decision to break so symbolically with its past in 1986.

The symbol life

Logos have been around as long as men and women have been dividing themselves into sub-groups within society, from the fish symbol of early Christians to the 'standards, banners and babies' described by Catherine of Aragon as she prepared for war in 1513. In his book Images of labour, historian John Gorman wrote: 'Symbols create identity: they denote purpose, signal unity and create for the member of an organisation a sense of belonging.' But although there is no doubting the importance of logos as a unifying tool for a political party's rank-and-file members, their impact beyond that circle is far more debatable. Oliver Thomson, a retired advertising executive and history lecturer at Glasgow University, says: 'Logos are probably hugely overestimated by the people who adopt them. Nobody notices them until they have been used very intensively over a long period.' In particular, Thomson points to the adoption of the swastika by the Nazis and other emblems used by extreme populist parties, most famously the hammer and sickle of Communist Russia.

Intensive use, as with commercial products - the golden arches of McDonald's, the Nike 'swoosh', the Pepsi globe - leads to increasing brand awareness and a product that is instantly recognisable. With totalitarian political parties, this visual association is taken to another level. Thankfully, political logos in the UK have never had the sinister overuse of those symbols leveraged by totalitarian states, but their history tells an interesting story about the main political parties' attempts to appeal to the mass electorate in a sophisticated way. Since 1918, when universal male suffrage was introduced and the vote extended to some women, the UK's political parties have attempted to harness the campaigning possibilities of mass communications. In 1924, Labour introduced its first proper logo, a design incorporating a torch, shovel and quill beneath the word 'Liberty'. It was intended to represent the unity of blue-collar (shovel) and white-collar (quill) workers, and to be the visual counterpart to the party's socialist anthem The Red Flag. But while the Labour leadership of the 1920s might have wanted to apply its new logo across the national stage, the party's in-built aversion to marketing (a tool of capitalism) prevented it from taking full advantage. By contrast, the Tories were far more willing to throw money at promoting their image, though they, too, were hampered by another problem of the age: decentralisation. For both Conservative and Labour, even until comparatively recently, elections were often fought on a local basis, while many Tory candidates campaigned as Unionists.

Colour clash

Until the 1950s, the red of Labour and the blue of the Tories were not uniformly used as party colours, and as recently as the 1960s it was still possible to find election candidates using other hues. The Tories did not receive their first 'corporate' brand until the first incarnation of Thatcher's flaming torch in 1982 (the hand was added seven years later). Until then the party's branding revolved almost exclusively around the party leader and images of the Union Jack. Churchill, with his V-sign and cigars, was especially well suited to this, but Thatcher was another who wrapped herself in the flag - particularly after the Falklands War. In the US, largely because voting rights were extended there so much earlier than was the case in the UK, the two main political parties have been utilising consistent visual logos since as long ago as the middle of the 19th century. Founded in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Party has reputedly been associated with the image of a donkey since 1828, when its presidential candidate, Andrew Jackson, was branded as stubborn as a mule for his refusal to back down over a key issue.

Although the Republican Party was not founded until half a century later, by the 1870s it also had its own symbol after it was depicted in a cartoon as an elephant demolishing the flimsy planks of the Democrats.

As the US so quickly realised, the power of the visual image cannot be underestimated. Although the advertising industry in the UK has never been as influential as it is in the US, in today's world of four-second soundbites, 24-hour television and podcasts, the need to have a distinct visual image is more important than ever.

Rightly or wrongly, David Cameron feels that the way he packages himself and his party as a brand will be crucial to the next general election, even if the reality is that until he spells out some concrete policies his logo will, for most voters, remain an inoffensive but essentially meaningless image.

Until then, as the letters pages of the Daily Telegraph attest, the precise implications of the Cameron tree will be a matter of concern only for political anoraks, Conservative Party members and goodhumoured troublemakers.

As one reader quipped shortly after the new tree logo was unveiled: 'It seems to lean to the right. But it's a tree. So, if you went behind it, the slope would be to the left. Both ways at once. Perfect for David Cameron.'

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