Exploring personal political brands of Iceland's parliamentarians

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Armannsdottir, G. ORCID: 0000-0001-5458-8434, Carnell, S. ORCID: 0000-0002-3214-8339 and Pich, C. ORCID: 0000-0003-1259-2827, 2019. Exploring personal political brands of Iceland's parliamentarians. Journal of Political Marketing. ISSN 1537-7857

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2019.1680931

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.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Journal of Political Marketing

Creators:

Armannsdottir, G., Carnell, S. and Pich, C.

Publisher:

Routledge

Date:

4 November 2019

ISSN:

1537-7857