A study on the political brand and the considerations of voters about the brand identities of political parties

The main goal of political parties is to be in power. This goal, by its nature, needs reaching to mass crowds. This necessity brings political adaptation of marketing in its train. Current marketing approachs has been catalyzing to draw attraction in between the alternatives. In this regard, brand identity, as one of the marketing science practices, draws attention recently. This study aims to reveal the role which is imputed by the voters to the political parties that they feel close to. The study also aims to reveal the loyalty status of voters to political parties, and the relation between brand identity and Loyalty. The research occured in Istanbul. By the reason of the sensitive topic of this study, data was collected by the convenience sampling method and they analysed with 427 valid surveys. This study used the great effect of the scales in the literature to scale the brand identity and brand loyalty levels. Factor analysis were used for the fixation of scales' validity. Factors which are gathered for brand identity are competence, sincerity, unique, young-dinamic and distanced. Other factors that gathered for brand loyalty are satisfaction and faithfulness, alternative attractiveness, behaviour of complaint, emotional resistance to alteration, resistance to alteration of political party and computable loyalty. With the help of these factors, voters had been departmentalized by clustering analysis. By doing that, the research achieved four different voter clusters. These clusters are imperative loyals, emotional loyals, uneasy loyals and disloyals. In terms of the brand identity factors, Scheffé test was used to analyse in which way the voter clusters become different. Test results point out that the factors show significant differs from each other. It is tested that if there is a relation between the political party which the voters feel themselves close to and the voter cluster which the voters are belong to. As a result of a chi-square test, it is seen that there is a significant relation between voter cluster which the voters are belong to and the political party which they feel themselves close to. In the light of acquired results, some suggestions were offered for practitioners and researchers. Keywords: Political Brand, Brand Identity, Political Brand Identity