What happened in the QLD Election to frighten off the branded political twitter accounts? This presentation examines just how few and far between branded activity was on the Twitter accounts of sitting political party members defending their office at the election.

1. Brand on the
Run
Political affiliations and Twitter social media presence
Dr Stephen Dann
Research School of Management, ANU College of
Business & Economics
@stephendann
Stephen.dann@anu.edu.au

2. Voter Political Affiliation
 Declining voter political affiliations are an
accepted house wisdom of
contemporary political marketing strategy
 Newman, 1999; Lees-Marshment, 2001;
Kosiara-Pedersen, et al. 2014
 If people are less inclined to identify with
a political party, are parties less inclined
to identify themselves to people?

3. Politician Political Affiliation?
 Are political figures disassociating from
political parties?
 Whither the party brand?
 Where does the brand affiliation fit the
political participant?

4. Politics and Marketing
 It’s okay, we’re here to help
Marketing is not just communications
If you’re just doing communications, you’re
missing the good stuff
(annoyingly, this is a branding paper)

5. Political Marketing
 a set of activities, processes or political
institutions used by political organisations,
candidates and individuals to create,
communicate, deliver and exchange
promises of value with voter-consumers,
political party stakeholders and society at
large
 Hughes and Dann (2009)

6. Branding
 From flying the colours to wearing the
right type of rose to the war, political
groups have worked to produce
distinctive emblems that identify their
cause, followers and strongholds
 Branding is inherent in politics
 Marketing learns from politics

7. Brand Core Concepts
 brand
 identifies a product or service
 is a sellers promise to deliver a consistently
specific set of features, benefits and
services to buyers (Kotler 2000)
 four important characteristics
 attributes, benefits, values and personality
(Kapferer 1992; Keller 1993)

8. The Umbrella Brand
 Umbrella brands
 Overarching brands that connect a series of
products, sub-brands and not necessarily related
activity (Govers, 2011)
 Can political brands reconnect their candidates
with the parent brand?
 Can the local member’s personal brands and
traits be identified to the party?
 Will connecting the personal brand of the
candidate back to the party to strengthen the
party?

9. The Study: Context
 Queensland Election
 LNP with majority
 ALP with terrible odds
 Would QLD be the political Battle of
Brands?

10. The Study: Sample
 Social Media and QLD
 QLD politicians and candidates use social
media
 Prior data set from The Grand Defeat
 Nothing says generalizability problems like the
QLD 2012 election
 Except, maybe, the Grand Defeat II
 More swings that a kid’s playground manufacturer

11. Sample
 65 accounts were identified as associated
with current or former members of the
Queensland State Parliament (2012-2015)
 identified through searches of Twitter,
Google, and political party websites
 If you couldn’t be found this way, you
didn’t want to be found

12. Data Collection
 Dann (2015b)
 Twitter timeline data
 three intervals
 Campaign Week 1
 Campaign Week 3
 Election Night (Campaign Week 5)
 Twitter account profiles
 Screen capture on five sampling intervals
 Every Wednesday night + election night

13. Account Profiles
 Measure 1: Public
indicators
 number of tweets,
 follower and
following counts,
 use of favoured
tweets
 membership of lists
 Measure 2: Brand
Affiliations
 Party affiliation
 Political branding
 header photo,
 profile photo,
 bio statement
 account name

14. A slice of profile life
Four selections from the 65 studied

19. Now it gets depressing
(spoiler: it’s not good)

20. Results
Week Header Photo Profile
Any mention of the
party
1 2 1 15 16
2 3 0 13 14
3 4 0 16 17
4 3 0 14 15
5 4 0 12 14
If only there was some reason for candidates to have branded
head shots available for their twitter profile images…

21. Oh yeah

22. Well, that was a bit of a
let down
Now what?

23. How about the time lines?
Surely somebody mentioned the party

24. Who’s brand is it anyway?
ALP Top Mentions
1. Campbell Newman (18)
2. Curtis Pitt (14)
3. Neil Symes (13)
4. Michael Crandon (12)
5. Gavin King / Jackie Trad
(11)
Labor Top Mentions
1. Michael Crandon (385)
2. Annastacia Palaszczuk
(205)
3. Scott Emerson (192)
4. Mark Robinson (191)
5. Curtis Pitt (140)

25. Uh, people?
LNP Mentions
1. Curtis Pitt (344)
2. Joann Miller (331)
3. Jackie Trad (268)
4. Michael Crandon (244)
5. Annastacia Palaszczuk
(210)
Liberal
1. Jackie Trad (9)
2. Curtis Pitt (7)
3. Joann Miller (6)
4. Jon Krause (5)
5. Michael Hart (3)

26. This is not how branding works.

27. We need a goddamn
intervention

28. Getting back from this brink
 1. Brands matter
 If there’s a problem with your brand then
there’s a problem with your promise
 Fix the promise
 Brands are the canary in the coal mine
 Fix the core, replace the budgie

29. Getting back from this brink
 Brands acquire meaning through use
 If you’re not talking about your brand, why
not?
 If you’re talking about their brand, and not
your brand, who’s side are you on?
Why is your air time being donated
to their cause?

30. Conclusions
 Label up
 Brand on.
 Logo in place
 Go earn the brand’s reputation back.

31. Questions /
Comments?
@stephendann
Or
Stephen.dann@anu.edu.au