Exploring Personal Political Brands of Iceland’s Parliamentarians

Abstract

This paper focuses on an under-researched and under-developed typology of political branding and conceptualises politicians as personal political brands. Further, this study answers explicit calls for more research devoted to exploring the development of intended brand identity particularly from a brand creator perspective. Members of Parliament from the Republic of Iceland contextualises this study. This qualitative case-study approach reveals how personal political brands create, construct and communicate their identity. Personal political brand identities were established and managed via a clear brand mantra and offline-online communication tools, which in turn revealed a degree of alignment with their party-political brand. However, this paper also demonstrates the challenges of managing the identities of personal political brands in terms of authenticity and integration particularly with coalition partners. Our paper builds on the six-staged analytical process of personal branding and proposes the Personal Political Brand Identity Appraisal Framework as an operational tool to introspectively evaluate personal political brand identity. This framework can be used by political actors across different settings and contexts to assess personal political brands from multiple perspectives.

Bibi and Mr. Prime Minister: do different Facebook identities imply different messages for political leaders?

“…2.1.1 Representation and image. According to a developmental model of politicians' personal brand identity (Armannsdottir et al, 2020), social media allow politicians easy access to promote specific aspects of their personality with the intention of strengthening their image and personal brand among their electorate. Another example of how using social media helps political leaders shape their political image and public identity can be seen in the work of Lalancette and Raynauld (2019), who studied Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's use of Instagram during his first year in office.…”

Evolution of Political Branding: Typologies, Diverse Settings and Future Research

“…It is encouraging to see that political marketing research continues to broaden its scope and consider different typologies of political brands beyond party leader, party and policy. For example, existing research has focused on the investigation of party leader brands (Jain and Ganesh 2019), parliamentarians (Armannsdottir, Carnell and Pich 2019), and candidates and legislators (Falkowski and Jablonska 2019;Marland and Wagner 2019) investigated used secondary research to investigate how social media marketing is often utilised to build a credible, authentic yet personal political brand image. Indeed, Jain and Ganesh ( 2019) argued that party leaders should periodically consider the strategy of crisis management along with the adopting a collaborative co-constructed multi-stakeholder approach to develop political brand image in the mind of voters.…”

“…Despite that Jain and Ganesh's ( 2019 framed their exploration with the concept of personal branding -a strategy grounded within the impression management literature designed to allow individuals to actively manage a positive identity and communicate desired impressions (Johnson 2014). Indeed, Armannsdottir et al (2019) argued that personal political brands need to project an authentic character and distinct identity, structured around tangible dimensions such as physical appearance, style, online and offline communication tools and actions, and also intangible dimensions such as lived experiences, skills, values and personality characteristics. The firsthand accounts captured by Armannsdottir et al (2019) demonstrate insight into the personal brand identity building process and allowed them to develop a theoretical model entitled the Personal Political Brand Identity Appraisal Framework, which could be used to periodically audit current identity and develop desired personal political brands of politicians and other political actors.…”

“…Their framework can be used as a mechanism to generate a greater understanding of the cultural antecedents of trust in political brand communications (Susila et al 2019). Furthermore, the systematic frameworks demonstrate the development of political marketing-branding discipline and raises the gauntlet for further academic research and highlights the practical implications of research in action (Armannsdottir et al 2019;Jain and Ganesh 2019;Susila et al 2019).…”

“…The exploration of the personal characteristics of political brands is proving a popular topic area within political marketing-branding. For instance Armannsdottir, Carnell and Pich (2019) investigated the personal political brand identities created and developed by Icelandic Parliamentarians from a brand creator [politician] perspective Armannsdottir et al (2019).…”