Selling Political Brands and Building Candidate Relational Equity in American Campaign Tournaments

Abstract

The current study explored whether political candidates’ brand building through sequential campaign messages establishes degrees of candidates’ relational equity with voters in American politics. Adopting Keller’s sequential Customer-Based Brand Equity model, the current study developed the Voter-Based Candidate Brand Equity model to observe how American voters and candidates exchange political brand equity through candidates’ sequential branding. Over the course of the 2012 televised American presidential debates, three sequential panel experiments found that the candidates’ cumulative brand building created their political identities in voters’ minds, sent their political meanings to voters, and brought out voters’ responses to their campaign promises. However, candidate branding through the sequentially televised debates alone did not achieve a level of intense relational association with voters to secure their loyalty support. This voter-oriented post-hoc approach explains the progressive campaign effects that have been left unanswered by traditional ad-hoc candidate-oriented perspectives and theories.