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

Dean, Dianne; Pich, Christopher

Abstract

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.

Citation

Dean, D., & Pich, C. (2015). 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, 31(11-12), 1353-1378. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257x.2015.1018307

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 1, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Mar 5, 2015
• Publication Date: Jul 24, 2015
• Deposit Date: Dec 3, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 23, 2017
• Journal: Journal of marketing management
• Print ISSN: 0267-257X
• Electronic ISSN: 1472-1376
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 31
• Issue: 11-12
• Pages: 1353-1378
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257x.2015.1018307
• Keywords: Political branding, Brand identity prism, Political marketing, Conservative Party (Great Britain), British politics
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/382180
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0267257X.2015.1018307
• Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of marketing management on 5th March 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0267257X.2015.1018307