The impact of social media marketing on political brand equity

Abstract

The theory of Brand Equity has been studied intensively by researchers, stemming from its applicability on everyday consumer goods to the services industry. In recent years, the growth of social media has offered companies new ways of understanding the development of Brand Equity. It is without a doubt the social media have grown exponentially and it is said to be the next media for marketing [Yan, 2011]. At the same time, there has been a growing interest in applying marketing concepts to political parties. The idea of this application, however, is a challenging assertion to make. On the basis of several empirical studies, this study aims to gain an understanding on the effects of social media marketing on a political brand, given the landscape of Singapore’s political environment.

This study validated the relationships of the constructs to our framework through the use of a cross-sectional descriptive design and deductive reasoning. Given the limitation of resources, we defined our sampling unit as undergraduates from local universities namely Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Management University (SMU). A total of 288 responses were utilized and analysed using factor analysis, linear and multiple regression, sobel test and analysis of variance to derive to our conclusions.

The analyses of the data collected showed that Timely Information and Interaction have a significant effect on the Brand Image and Brand Equity of a political brand. At

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the same time, the data supported our hypothesis that Brand Image is mediating the effects between the independent variables and Brand Equity. It also acknowledged that Word-of-Mouth has a moderating effect on the relationship between Interactions and Brand Image. However, there was insufficient evidence to show that this holds true for the relationship between Timely Information and Brand Image