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

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.

Keywords:

• political branding
• brand identity prism
• political marketing
• UK Conservative Party
• British politics

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Pich

Christopher Pich is a lecturer in marketing at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University. He has recently completed his PhD research into political branding of the UK Conservative Party and the application of marketing theory to the political environment. Christopher is an active researcher currently focusing on new political brands and research on qualitative projective techniques in political marketing.

Dianne Dean

Dianne Dean is a senior lecturer in marketing at the Hull University Business School. She has written several papers on political marketing, as well as working on other specialist areas such as contemporary family decision making and consumer studies of electronic in-home retailing. Prior to coming into academic life she worked for a number of years in a marketing consultancy, having started her marketing career in the pharmaceutical industry. She graduated from the University of Hull with a degree in politics and completed her doctorate at the University of Stirling.