Candidates as Experiential Brands in U.S. Presidential Elections: An Abstract

Investigating political candidates as brands is a relatively new field in the area of political marketing research (French and Smith 2010; Phipps et al. 2010; Smith 2009). As such, there are few, if any, empirical studies demonstrating that candidates do function as brands (e.g., Guzmán et al. 2015), and none relating to elections in the United States. To fill this void, data were collected over the last two U.S. presidential election cycles. Results show that not only did candidates function as brands in both the 2012 and 2016 elections, the experiential brand of a candidate is a significant predictor of voting intention. However, it was the candidate who lost the election whose experiential brand proved to be the most significant.

In the 2012 election, it appears Mitt Romney’s brand experience was more of a factor than the Barack Obama brand experience when it came to voting intention. Voters considered both candidates’ as brand experiences when considering themselves (self-assessed brand image) in relation to the two candidates. That is, voters used a cognitive short cut to assess which candidate in an election appeals to them most based on which one is most like themselves. In other words, as voters considered voting for Romney, they considered how in sync they were to the candidate’s experiential brand. There was no such effect for the Obama brand, nor was there any significance for voters’ self-brand image on the voting intention for that candidate.

The primary differences between the 2012 and 2016 elections appear in Democratic voters, who did not consider the brand of the candidate from the Republican party in 2016, but did so 4 years earlier, and Republican voters who did not consider the Obama brand when evaluating the relationship between themselves and for whom they would vote, but did consider Hillary Clinton’s experiential brand. Because Republican voters did not weigh Donald Trump’s experiential brand and their self-brand image at the same time when considering voting for that candidate, this seems to be in line with the previous researchers (e.g., Dahl et al. 2017; Kidwell et al. 2014) who argue that voters focus on the things on which they want to focus and ignore what does not align with their previous political beliefs and ideology.

It is possible that, in each election, one candidate was able to negatively affect the brand of the other by attacking the candidate’s brand early in the election cycle. And the candidate whose brand was damaged first ultimately lost.