THE ROLE OF BRAND LOVE IN POLITICAL BRAND PREFERENCE

Abstract

In recent times of global turbulence, democracies in many countries have been tested for their resilience and there is a need to focus on determinants of political brand preference. For political parties, from political marketing strategy point of view, analyzing factors impacting voters’ party preference is becoming important for better understanding of voters to influence and predict voting behavior. Research studies propagate that consumers can experience a feeling of love for their brand (Albert et al., 2008; Batra et al., 2012). Carroll and Ahuvia, (2006) view that consumer feels love for the brand when a brand reaches both high real and desired level of integration with the consumer’s sense of self. Brand love is the degree of strong emotional attachment a satisfied consumer has for a particular brand. Brand love includes passion and declarations of love for the brand. Though brand love has been studied in the context of consumer market, we still know little about whether voters feeling of brand love for the political party they prefer. In this backdrop, in this study, we have examined impact of political brand love on voters’ preference of the political party. As brand love is a relational construct, objective is to investigate the type of causal relationship exists among brand love and the related constructs. In this study, we have taken India, largest democracy of the world, as our focal point of study. In this paper we propose to study the mediation effects of inner self (IS) and social self (SS) while estimating the relationship between brand love (BL) and brand preference (BP) and brand trust (BT) and BP. Additionally we also look at the relationship between BL and BT. The results as a whole shows that both brand trust and brand love have significant positive impact on brand preference. Higher brand trust leads to higher brand preference both directly and when both direct and indirect effects are considered as a whole. On the other hand there is no statistically significant indirect effect of brand trust on brand preference through inner self or social self. In case of brand love on the other hand all the effects are statistically significant. Higher brand love increases brand preference directly and also indirectly through inner self and social self. This implies that higher brand inner self and social self enhances the impact of brand love on brand preference.