POLITICAL BRAND MANAGEMENT: FORMS AND STRATEGIES IN MODERN PARTY POLITICS.

The concept of branding is known within the commercial world as the marketing tool that enables customers to make product and service choices using functional and emotional attributes which they find satisfactory. These functional and emotional attributes are what is conceptualized by producers as brands. Hence, the traditional notion of the brand as an identifier and differentiator is passed on to the political market, according to the literature on political branding. However, many years into the inquest of political branding as an essential part of our electoral processes, agreement on political brand development is still proving elusive. In the literature, there are different views on how the political brand is developed. Some argue for political brand identity management based on policy attributes, whereas others regard candidate attributes as the essential source. This research argues for the amalgamation of all the three political elements: the party, the policy, and the candidate as a comprehensive source of building a political brand that is responsive to prevailing political market conditions. Using a case study of a political party in Ghana, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the research aims to demonstrate how party values are considered to be an integral part to policy and candidate attributes in building a comprehensive political brand identity. Here, the study does not imply that the NPP deliberately used branding as a set of principles in managing its campaign. However, it proposes that the strategies and the tactics with which the party executed its electioneering campaign parallels the brand architecture concept in marketing, given the way it identified roles for the three political elements (the party, the candidate, and the policy) and occasionally rearranged them to reflect the broader party goals. The research therefore borrows from brand management literature the brand architecture‘ concept to guide its analysis and the eventual development of a parallel model, the political brand architecture (PBA)‘ approach for political brand management.