Brand promise and reputation against the campaign of a political party

Abstract

The term “exchange” represents the core concept of marketing. Exchange occurs not only in commercial markets but also in political markets, such as electoral and government markets. Political marketing research typically focuses on electoral markets; therefore, this research integrates exchanges in electoral and government markets, which together form the permanent campaign. This model proposes that the realization of a promise affects the party’s brand reputation and permanent campaign, ultimately influencing the voter’s decision confidence and intent to support the political party. The brand promise indicator was developed from an exploratory factor analysis of Indonesian political party Twitter accounts. Tweets extracted from the 2014 electoral campaign were further analyzed using Provalis Research’s QDA Miner software. The indicators for brand reputation, permanent campaign, decision confidence, and intent to support the political party were adapted from political marketing and commercial marketing indicators. A questionnaire was created and delivered to students of three universities in Jakarta, with a total of 150 participants. The findings show that the permanent campaign variable as the process of promise realization during the term after the election has a significant influence on the voter’s intent to support a political party. The theoretical contribution of this research includes broadening the empirical results of social exchange theory studies on exchange in the government market, beyond existing research on the electoral market. The managerial implication of this research is the importance of the permanent campaign in increasing the intent to vote for a political party.