Political party brand identity and brand image: an empirical assessment (original) (raw)

The Brand Image of Governing Parties and Leaders

An emerging area of practice and study looks at political parties as “brands”. Branding is concerned with the overall psychological impression conveyed through the sum of all communications. The idea is that synonymous and interconnected messages repeated across a variety of media platforms are much more likely to cause people to recall the overall desired brand positioning and to forget other details. Branding is about communicating symbolism rather than substance, since most audiences do not engage in a deep scrutiny of available information.

Political branding: sense of identity or identity crisis? An investigation of the transfer potential of the brand identity prism to the UK Conservative Party

Journal of Marketing Management, 2015

Brands are strategic assets and key to achieving a competitive advantage. Brands can be seen as a heuristic device, encapsulating a series of values that enable the consumer to make quick and efficient choices. More recently, the notion of a political brand and the rhetoric of branding have been widely adopted by many political parties as they seek to differentiate themselves, and this has led to an emerging interest in the idea of the political brand. Therefore, this paper examines the UK Conservative Party brand under David Cameron's leadership and examines the applicability of Kapferer's brand identity prism to political branding. This paper extends and operationalises the brand identity prism into a 'political brand identity network' which identifies the inter-relatedness of the components of the corporate political brand and the candidate political brand. Crucial for practitioners, this model can demonstrate how the brand is presented and communicated to the electorate and serves as a useful mechanism to identify consistency within the corporate and candidate political brands.

Brand Identity of The New Party

International Journal of Multicultural and Multireligious Understanding, 2020

Being a new party in the election and competing with other senior parties, making the new parties to build symbols, images, and programs that are campaigned through various media, including new media. This article discusses the new media for branding strategy in marketing policies Berkarya Party as a new party in legislative elections in 2019. This study limits one important aspect, namely branding, because it will focus on forming the Berkarya Party image as a new party that wants to attract young voters. As a new political party, the Berkarya Party certainly wants to introduce itself to the public. In the establishment of branding, brand strategy is the concept theory to formed party image, one of which from brand strategy is the brand identity with the theory of impression management strategy. This study uses qualitative methods with qualitative content analysis methods. The technique of collecting data is obtained from the contents of existing messages on websites and social me...

Problematizing the presentation and reception of political brands

European Journal of Marketing

Purpose There are explicit calls for research devoted to how political actors present their brand to the electorate and how this is interpreted. Responding to this, the purpose of this paper is to build an understanding of how political brand messages and values are received and aligned with voter expectations, which in turn shapes the consistency of a political brand. Design/methodology/approach Using an interpretivist perspective, this two-stage approach first focuses on semi-structured interviews with internal stakeholders of the UK Conservative Party and second uses focus group discussions with external stakeholders (voters) of age 18-24 years. Data was collected between 1 December 2014 and 6 May 2015. Findings The findings suggest that the UK Conservative brand had recovered from the “nasty party” reputation. Further, the Conservative brand was perceived as credible, trustworthy and responsible, with positive associations of “economic competence”. However, while the nasty party...

Politics and Image: the conceptual value of branding

This article argues that the brand concept is a powerful tool for understanding political images. It challenges typical economic versions of political marketing that tend to de-emphasise the significance of communication, popular culture and personality in politics, and argues that the brand as a concept can bring together the economic and the aesthetic, rational choice and cultural resonance. It proposes a model of brand distinctiveness and argues that this may be useful both in the analysis of party communication and in the normative evaluation of that communication.

Political Branding: An Exploration of Potential Areas of Research

2018

VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity are no longer just the issues faced by the commercial world, but also by the contemporary world of politics. These can be attributed to few of the factors such as: high political convergence; decreasing voter turnout and loyalty; voter cynicism; continuous media attention and scrutiny; need to improve brand image and equity; and cope up with changing macro environmental factors like growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), to name a few. This VUCA has led the need for application of commercial branding principles in politics; to identify and differentiate the parties and political products from the competitors and build long-term voter relationship. Political branding has been relied upon by politicians and parties in many countries few of them include the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Even the Indian Prime Ministerial Elections 2014 has transformed the facet of Indian politics with catholic capitalization...

Exploring the creation and development of political co-brand identity

Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal

Purpose The creation and development of candidate-politician brands, otherwise known as political co-brands, remains an under-researched area of study. This is supported by calls for more understanding on political co-brands and how they are positioned and managed by their creators. Framed by the concepts of internal brand identity and co-branding, this paper aims to investigate how political co-brand identity is constructed and managed over time, exploring alignment between the political co-brand and political corporate party brand. Design/methodology/approach An interpretivist revelatory multi-case study approach, using in-depth interviews, was conducted with three political co-brands (candidates-politicians) from the UK Conservative Party. The three cases represented constituencies across the UK from the North, Midlands and South of the country. The in-depth elite interviews were conducted July 2015 to September 2015. Methodological triangulation was also adopted to assess the co...

The Importance of Image when Developing a Powerful Political Brand

Postmodern Openings, 2019

A brand represents a name, a sign or a symbol that has the purpose of identifying goods (set to the disposal of customers) and to highlight them from the competitors. There are many similarities between the construction process of a brand in the commercial and political domain. The key elements of a succesfull brand, either commercial, personal or political, must fullfill the following qualities: to be authentic, to create an emotional bond between the brand and the customers or followers, to set well defined values and to be a step ahead other brands on the market. A political brand becomes powerful if it possesses good communication aptitudes with the electorate to expose the desired message. In the construction process of a brand, an essential role is the image, that needs to be a combination of qualities meant to put aside the other candidates. Popularity, prestige, authority and competence are key qualities to allure the attention and the interest of masses. The created image must be very closed to reality, so that the people don't lose their confidence in the candidate. Nowadays, new media and technology play a very important role in the construction of political people presenting both advantages and disadvantages for them.

Political brand image: an investigation into the operationalisation of the external orientation of David Cameron’s Conservative brand

Journal of Marketing Communications, 2015

The conceptualisation of political parties, ideologies and candidates as 'brands' has become an accepted proposition and a recognised area of research that continues to evolve and develop (French and Smith 2010; Harris and Lock 2010; Lock and Harris 1996). Rawson (2007) argued that political brands are powerful important devices, which need to be thoroughly understood (Needham 2006; Phipps et al. 2010; Van Ham 2001). Political brands can be seen as a trinity of three elements, including the party leader, political party and party policy (Butler et al. 2011; Davies and Mian 2010; Smith and French 2011). Existing research has tended to focus on one (Smith and French 2011) or two aspects (Davies and Mian 2010) of the trinity, neglecting the exploration of all three elements of the political brand (Pich et al. 2014). Political branding, especially with a focus on all three elements deserves more attention (Peng