Evaluating political party positioning over time: a proposed methodology

Abstract

In this article, we propose a methodology in order to measure political positioning and constituent perception. Political leaders should be able to effectively define the distinctive characteristics of their political brand and to subsequently utilize the most appropriate mechanisms of communication to promote an accurate perception of political image in the market. The specific aim of this research is to explore interrelations between a political party's positioning in two different periods in order to discover possible discrepancies and changes over time. The official blog of a political party, containing both official communication and the people's feedback, represents a perfect place in which to observe the concepts and the values on which both the political brand identity and image are founded. Leximancer, a content analysis tool, was utilized to analyze communications between a political party leader and his or her constituents. Illustrating the methodology, the blog of Beppe Grillo, founder of the Movimento 5 Stelle is analyzed. Copyright

What draws voters to brandidates and why? – Political orientation, personal satisfaction, and societal values on presidential candidates’ brand personality

“…Interaction strategic orientation involves not only listening to voters but also trying to shape voters' wants/needsthis strategy was used by the Obama campaign, where the candidates listened to the voters' needs but also shaped their policy desires. Thus, pull and push strategies are used when branding and positioning candidates and sending messages to voter-consumers, where a dynamic and synchronous relationship exists between the politicians and the voters (Bigi et al, 2016a(Bigi et al, , 2016b.…”

“…More recent research on political marketing by Bigi et al (2016a, 2016b) presented a quadrant of product and customer orientation to demonstrate how politicians can brand and position themselves to voters. The authors come up with four types of candidate strategies: Isolation (low product orientation and low customer orientation); Follower (low product orientation and high customer orientation); Shaper (high product orientation and low customer orientation); and Interaction (high product orientation and high customer orientation). …”

“…Prior research into political brand personality has been examined from myriad perspectives. The sophistication of methods to understand the impact of political branding has evolved to include brand equity/mental mapping (French and Smith, 2010), brand concept maps (Bigi et al , 2016a, 2016b; Smith and French, 2011), multidimensional scaling (Cwalina and Falkowski, 2015), candidate/voter personality [Big Five] (Caprara et al , 2002), social media (Webber, 2017), social messaging metrics (Pérez-Curiel and Limón-Naharro, 2019), brand imaging (Pich and Armannsdottir, 2018), word-association (Grimmer and Grube, 2019), alternative measures of branding (Nielsen, 2016) and developmental frameworks (Armannsdottir et al , 2020). These methods have been instrumental in identifying adverbs and adjectives to describe politicians, examine where parties/candidates are juxtaposed in relation to issues, values and other parties/candidates and propose methods for constructing brand identities.…”