Motivation for research

Political discourse and where it takes place have changed significantly in the past decade. Instead of only having speeches in front of crowds, political actors and organizations have adopted social media platforms such as Twitter as an additional and complementary way of communicating with their stakeholders.

(Maarek, 2014.) And this is isn’t without reason; social networking sites offer favorable circumstances to public discourse due to their relative open access and overall structure that supports networking and sharing of information (Kruse, Norris & Flinchum, 2018).

The academic credentials of political marketing are largely rooted in traditional commercial marketing theory. However, political marketing cannot be placed neither within political science nor commercial marketing in a clear-cut way. (O’Shaughnessy & Henneberg, 2002.) Traditionally political scientists have done their research on political marketing through descriptive studies and researchers of marketing science have largely approached it through normative management theory (Butler & Harris 2009). In the past, due to this fundamental philosophical difference between the two schools, both political scientists and marketers had a serious lack of interest in researching political marketing;

political scientists had not been interested in it as it is not directly connected to the democratic policy-making process and marketers had generally found politics less appealing than clearly defined products or services (O’Shaughnessy

& Henneberg, 2002).

However, this separation has been greatly diminished in the past decade, as political discourse, public relations and political marketing have seen significant change, partially due to the increased relevance and popularity of digital media, such as social media (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019.) However, further research is being called for in the sphere of political public relations, including political marketing, to utilize the strengths and knowledge of all the relevant fields and to further establish itself as an independent field removed from the corporate setting, from where many of the public relations and marketing theory have originally originated. (O’Shaughnessy & Henneberg 2002;

Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019.)

A large portion of political marketing research has been conducted in United States and from the European perspective in the United Kingdom, due to which existing theories should be more rigorously tested in different applications and geographic locations with varying demographics. (Butler & Harris, 2009.) As such, this thesis studies the narrower context of political marketing in Finland and Finnish election campaigns, which as a venue of study appears to have remained under-researched. Furthermore, this approach will answer the call of

existing literature for further research. (Leppäniemi, Karjaluoto, Lehto & Goman, 2010; Strandberg, 2009.) The Finnish political marketing environment is discussed in detail in chapter 2.3.3

O’Shaughnessy & Henneberg (2002) called for the testing and challenging of mainstream theories, so that political marketing as a field may develop beyond classic concepts like 4P. Based on the review of literature on political marketing presented in this thesis, majority of the political marketing research in the past decade has focused on the external, voter-oriented perspective of political brand building and “brand image” (Phipps, Brace-Govan & Jevons, 2008; Smith &

French, 2009; Pich & Armannsdottir, 2015). While some researchers have called for and presented frameworks for studying the internal perspective of political brand building and political brand identity, the field has remained under-studied (Armannsdottir, Carnell & Pich, 2019; Pich & Dean, 2015). Where existing studies on the internal orientation have been made, they have focused on the political brands of the parties and larger organizations, instead of individual politicians.

(Armannsdottir, Carnell & Pich, 2019). Therefore, the focus of this thesis on the internal brand perspective, brand identity and the “personal political brand” of the candidate directly addresses the call for further research (Armannsdottir et al., 2019). Personal political brand as a concept stands for the set of personal characteristics, values and beliefs of an individual candidate that are intended to be communicated to the intended target audience (Armannsdottir et al., 2019;

Labrecque, Markos & Milne, 2011). Political branding is discussed in more detail in chapter 2.2 and its subsequent subchapters. Additionally, the thesis contributes to the political marketing research in Finland, which as of writing has been relatively limited, as mentioned earlier.

In addition to an internal perspective this thesis focuses on the role of social media in personal political brand building process, more specifically the Facebook Ads platform, which is used to manage all paid advertising in both Facebook and Instagram. The effects of social media advertising on brand perception and engagement have been researched extensively (Florenthal, 2019;

Thornhill, Xie, Lee, 2017; Tran, 2017) as well as the effects and role of social media in interacting with voters (Kruikemeier, Sezgin & Boerman, 2016; Safiullah, Pathak, Singh & Ansul, 2015). The current research and perceived challenges by authors in the fields of political marketing, branding and social media sites is visualized in Figure 1 on the next page. However, no existing literature could be found that researched the role Facebook and Instagram advertising in building a personal political brand from the internal stakeholder perspective, thus a potential research gap existed. With a potential research gap identified, a research problem and the subsequent research questions could be formulated.

These are presented and discussed in the next chapter.

FIGURE 1. Call for future research in existing literature