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The cultivation and maintenance of a brand is becoming increasingly important as politicians seek to connect with constituents. Through the lens of social cognition and group dynamics, this paper aims to understand the impact of evaluations of politician brands on voter intentions.

Three studies utilize the social cognition constructs of warmth and competence from the stereotype content model (SCM) and Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF) to evaluate the impact of brand perceptions on voting intentions, comparing fit between the models. The first study establishes the impact of these perceptions on existing politicians. The second study replicates these effects while controlling for party affiliation and extraneous factors and explicitly studies politicians as brands. The third study examines the formation of perceptions and assumptions when full information is unavailable.

Social cognition and group dynamics drive responses to politician brands. The data herein support perceptions of warmth and competence as significant predictors of voting intentions. Dependent upon whether the politician is being evaluated as a brand or a person, BIAF or SCM predicts the dimension that will be most impactful. These patterns persist in the absence of full information. As expected, voting intentions increased significantly when the voter was of the same (vs opposing) party as that of the candidate.

Conducted during an election year, evaluations of politicians are susceptible to the current political climate and the predominantly two party political system in which the studies were conducted. The design of Studies 2 and 3 addresses some of these limitations. Results point toward the interrelated nature of warmth and competence perceptions and the usefulness of applying both BIAF and SCM to understand how voters view politicians and the drivers of voting intentions.

This study evidences the depth to which perceptions of candidates impact voting intent, establishing politicians’ unique position as both brands and people. These findings prove useful in interpreting the outcome of elections this year, and beyond.

Expanding a limited body of existing research, this work contributes to our understanding of the application of SCM within the context of politician brands. As the first concurrent investigation of SCM and BIAF, these findings are of value to political strategists and academics alike. The contribution is augmented by the consideration of the impact of party affiliation and missing information.

The democratic political product is complex and untangible. An underlying assumption of a democratic system is the involvement of voters, or consumers, but with contemporary political apathy this aspect is relatively unacknowledged. This paper aims to explore the role of the consumer in political branding.

Two contrasting case studies compare the balance between the corporate brand of the political party and the brand image of two different kinds of local politician. Aaker's “Brand Equity Ten” is adapted to provide a suitable conceptual framework for the case study comparison.

Investigating the interaction between the community and politicians drew out important implications for the political brand. The paper concludes that managing the political brand entails a recognition of the inherent duality that resides in the political product. In an environment of reduced differentiation of political offerings to the electoral marketplace it is important for politicians and the political party to make early decisions about which aspect of this brand duality best serves individual careers and the party. Key to this decision is the opinion‐leading role of politically aware consumers.

This research shows that an individual politician's brand can compete with or enhance the corporate political party brand, which implies that political branding must take into account the communication role of the highly involved consumer.

This paper examines the under‐researched area of consumer contribution to political branding. The role of highly involved political consumers in constituency politics is clearly shown to affect the politician's brand equity. This leads to a re‐conceptualisation of the politician's brand vis‐à‐vis the political party brand.

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.

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 coherency of emerging themes with online and offline materials and documents. A two-stage thematic analytical approach was used to interpret the findings.

This multiple case study demonstrates how successful political co-brands create and develop identities tailored to their constituency, often distinct from the corporate political brand and developed several years before electoral success at the ballot box. In addition, this study reveals that political co-brands are dichotomous in terms of strategically managing a degree of alignment with the corporate political brand yet maintaining a degree of independence.

This study builds on limited existing concepts such as co-branding and political brand identity as a means of critical application. Existing research on co-branding remains a “relatively limited” and complex area of study and generally focuses on fictitious brands. Political brand identity remains an under-researched area. This in turn supports the development and advancement of political branding as an area of study. This paper highlights the opportunities of using the strategic approach of co-branding to help conceptualise “candidates-politicians” as political brands’ which up until now, “candidate-politician brands” have been difficult to define unlike the extensive research on corporate political brands.

This study has implications for practice too. Organisations and different typologies of political brands will be able to use this political co-brand identity framework as a diagnostic mechanism to investigate their co-brands current identity, assess alignment and make strategic changes or reposition the envisaged identity if desired. Similarly, organisations can use this framework, key dimensions and factors as a blueprint to design and build new political brands at a corporate and/or local level.

This study has implications for brands beyond the world of politics. Brands can adopt the political co-brand identity framework developed in this study as a pragmatic tool to investigate internally created co-brand identity and explore alignment with the corporate party brand identity. In addition, this research adds to the limited research on non-fictitious co-brands and co-branding literature at large and addresses the calls for more research on brand identity in new settings.

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of voters’ personal and societal values on presidential candidate brand personality preference. In addition, the research examines which brand personalities are deemed most and least important. This research meets the growing demand to further understand how voters develop preferences for brandidates.

Voters ranked which presidential brand personalities they deemed most important in a candidate as well as which of the two major candidates they most associated with that trait. Data were collected weeks in advance of the 2020 presidential election from a national online panel representing a balanced mix of voters by party affiliation.

The results indicate that life satisfaction, political orientation and postmaterialism are significant and provide adequate explanatory power in understanding which brand personality traits are associated with a presidential candidate. Also, using an importance-performance matrix, the authors find which candidate is most identified with various brand personality traits and how important those traits are to voters.

Using the importance-performance matrix for assessing brand/candidate personality preference by consumers/voters provides researchers with a multidimensional method for analyzing how various dimensions influence selection preference. The explanatory power of the independent variables, i.e. political orientation, comparative life satisfaction and societal values, is very low when regressed against personality attributes in general (not assigned to a candidate); however, they provide meaningful results when regressed against personality attributes when assigned to candidates. Understanding the importance of general brand personality attributes is not as important as understanding their importance when associated with a specific brand.

The importance-performance matrix for brand/candidate personality presented in this research clearly indicated and predicted voter preference for the 2020 Presidential election; thus, this tool can be effectively used by political marketers in future elections. Political orientation so strongly influences voter perception of specific candidate brand personality dimensions that they view their preferred candidate to be universally superior to other candidates. Political marketers can appeal to voters based on their political orientation to strengthen the relationship between candidates and voters.

This research investigates how personal and societal values impact voters’ preference for brand personality traits in a presidential candidate. Voter preference for presidential brand personality traits is assessed generically, i.e. not associated with a particular candidate, as well as when they are linked to a specific candidate, i.e. Biden and Trump.

Today, appearance is an integral aspect of a politician's image and personality and therefore his or her brand (Budesheim & DePaola, 1994; Sanghvi & Hodges, 2015; Smith & French, 2009). While appearance is critical to political marketing, most of the research focusing on appearance in politics is experimental in nature (Lenz & Lawson, 2011; Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005). This study investigates the importance of appearance for marketing politicians through a qualitative interpretivist framework that offers implications for theory. Moreover, this chapter offers a specific focus on the importance of appearance for female politicians.

Research shows women face greater scrutiny on their appearance (Carlin & Winfrey, 2009; Sanghvi, 2018). This chapter examines myriad of issues women in politics face based on their appearance. It also examines how women have successfully managed the issue of appearance at local, state and national levels. Thus, this study delivers a multifaceted view of the topic and facilitates the understanding of how appearance management enters into the political marketing process.

Social media has become an indispensable part of modern politics. Its rise in the political arena has coincided with the decline in trust toward mainstream media. Today, more than half of the population gets their political news and information through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Social media offers a great marketing opportunity to politicians as they allow them to bypass traditional media and communicate directly with voters, engage citizens during campaign and noncampaign periods, and create a brand image. As social media's influence in politics grows, so has the research devoted to political marketing on social media. It is against this backdrop that this chapter is written, which provides readers with an overview of the academic domain and the current state of literature. The chapter highlights the various research areas that have been explored in the literature and the implications of social media for political marketing strategy, along with the domain's current limitations and possible avenues of further research.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about how to develop a common identity of local stakeholders of places (e.g. politicians, local companies, residents). Such a common identity is regarded as an essential aspect to market a place consistently to external target groups (e.g. tourists, companies, qualified workers, students).

The paper follows a conceptual approach by transferring semiotic (symbolism) and sociological concepts (symbolic interactionism) to the concept of place branding. Moreover, a practical example of how to identify potential place symbols of cities is presented within the case study of the German town of Bremen.

Symbols are identified to be of special importance for the development of group identity of local stakeholders of places. Moreover, symbols are presented as essential aspects of a feeling of belonging to a place (place commitment).

As semiotic theory has not yet been transferred to the context of place branding this paper is opening up a new subject and needs to be understood as a first approach to constitute a theoretical framework. An empirical analyses needs to be carried out in order to proof the theories in the place branding context.

The paper explains that symbols can be established by the arrangement of public discourses like, e.g. competitions for place logos, place mascots or place songs. Moreover, it is pointed out, how already established place symbols which are not yet part of branding strategies can be identified in order to strengthen place identity.

Following the semiotic concept of symbolism the paper explains a high participation of residents as a necessity to establish and negotiate the meaning of symbols in order to strengthen place identity.

Because of being the first paper putting the semiotic theory of symbolism in the focus of the interdisciplinary discussion of branding the originality of the paper can be regarded as high.

The purpose of this paper is to deepen and add nuance to previous explorations of the voter‐consumer analogy in order to generate new insights into wider applications of the marketing concept.

A conceptual analysis is supplemented and enriched with insights from a non‐representative case of voter responses to political advertising.

Findings suggest that limitations to the voter‐consumer analogy revolve around the differing contexts of marketing in each case and reflect differing audience responses at the micro‐level.

The empirical component of this study is not representative or generalizable. However, it is used not to verify generalizations but to add qualitative insights to the conceptual discussion. Findings suggest that research which applies the marketing concept to non‐commercial settings, especially political marketing but also possibly extending to social marketing, non‐profit and public sector marketing, should be cautious in assuming that consumers of non‐commercial marketing respond in the same way to marketing initiatives as consumers of commercial marketing.

The research has implications for the application of the marketing concept in political and other non‐commercial contexts.

The application of the marketing concept in non‐commercial settings as well as commercial settings has become so common it is often taken for granted. Yet the behaviour, attitudes and responses of consumers in these different settings may diverge in important ways at the micro‐level. Explorations of the applicability of the marketing concept in different settings are relatively rare and this paper adds a previously unpublished empirical aspect to an original conceptual analysis which aligns secondary research from disparate sources in political science and cultural studies as well as marketing.

Political parties are continuously interested to gain knowledge about the factors that influence the voter to select political candidate of his/her choice. The purpose of this paper is to examine cumulative impact of sources of associations on voters’ preference of the political party and to investigate the type of causal relationship that exists among those sources.

The authors have proposed five key sources of associations of the overall political party, namely, campaign effectiveness, image of its leaders, intensity of anti-incumbency effect, meaning and trust attached with the party. Here the authors have considered four important political parties relevant to the voters of West Bengal. Those are Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist) and All India Trinamool Congress. The authors have used SEM method for estimating the model as the same is widely used for estimating a system of equations with latent variables.

Out of the eight path coefficients six are found to be statistically significant. Political campaign impacts brand trust positively and brand trust in turn impacts party preference positively. Again political campaign’s direct impact on political party preference is found to be positive. However, the impact of political campaign on party preference also runs through brand meaning. Both the path coefficients are significantly negative showing that more the voters develop understanding about political parties through different independent sources lesser are the impact of political campaigns as they highlight positive aspects of the party and the candidate only, ignoring facts. Interestingly leadership is impacting party preference negatively. Thus individual leadership traits have negatively impacted party preference in the sample.

In the paper, the authors have identified factors impacting political brand choice in an emerging country like India. This research explores the factors that need to be considered by the political parties to influence preference of voters for political brand. As far as the authors’ knowledge goes no such studies have been carried out in the Indian context and certainly not in the context of a regime change after three decades. Additionally, the theoretical model proposed is firmly grounded in theory and its estimation is based on well-developed scales. The approach is thus unique in this area of enquiry. Finally, application of SEM in political branding context is a significant contribution of this work.

This study aims to examine brand personality and its application to political branding. This study focuses on the brand personality of a political leader from the BJP Party brand (Bharatiya Janta Party). The development of a strong political brand personality is crucial for success at the polls. Little research has been dedicated to this phenomenon particularly beyond Western political and post-election contexts.

The scope and development of the study required a qualitative approach. The theoretical frameworks of the study acted as the deductive base of the study. The insights of the respondents were the inductive base of the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with external stakeholders [voters]. In addition, semi-structured interviews were also adopted to capture the branding activities used by internal stakeholders [BJP].

The brand personality dimensions such as sincerity; agreeableness, competence, energy, openness, conscientiousness and emotional stability were clearly associated with a political leader. Negative qualities such as dictatorial attitudes and arrogance affected the political leader’s brand personality. Religious partisanship was another strong negative trait affecting the brand personality of the political leader.

The study has an actionable framework for political brand personality in the post-election context. It offers negative qualities to be avoided in the development of the political brand personality of the leader. It offers insights about the political brand personality of the leader in terms of young digitally savvy voters.

Este trabajo examina la aplicación de la personalidad de marca al ámbito del marketing político y de la marca personal política. Concretamente se centra en la personalidad de marca de un líder político del partido Bharantiya Janta Party (BJP). El desarrollo de una fuerte marca personal política es crucial para el éxito en las elecciones. Pocos trabajos se han centrado hasta el momento en este fenómeno más allá del contexto político occidental.

El alcance y desarrollo del estudio requirió la adopción de un enfoque cualitativo. El marco teórico sirvió de base deductiva al tiempo que las entrevistas realizadas sirvieron de base inductiva. Estas entrevistas fueron semi-estructuradas y dirigidas a grupos de interés externos del BJP (los votantes). Además, se realizaron entrevistas también semi-estructuradas para capturar las actividades de marca desarrolladas por los grupos de interés internos (candidatos, políticos, trabajadores y gerentes del partido).

Las dimensiones de personalidad de marca sinceridad, competencia, energía, estabilidad emocional, franqueza y escrupulosidad están claramente asociadas con un líder político. Por el contrario, rasgos negativos como las actitudes arrogantes y dictatoriales dañan la personalidad de marca de dicho líder, pero sobretodo el partidismo religioso.

El trabajo proporciona un marco de acción para la marca personal política en un contexto post-electoral. Proporciona indicaciones de los rasgos y cualidades negativas que deben de evitarse en el desarrollo de una marca personal para un líder político. Ofrece también evidencias sobre la personalidad de marca que tiene que desarrollar un líder de cara a los votantes más dinámicos y digitales.