Mapping the Landscape of Political Branding Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Branding has not been limited to businesses only but has also been applied to other sectors like politics. The concept of political branding has gained popularity after the winning of Ex- President Barack Obama and researchers, marketers and political actors around the globe have started focusing on the same. The current study emphasised on detailed investigation of political branding literature. The data was extracted from Web of Science and observed 137 documents of 205 authors over the period of 2000 to 2020 which were analysed using bibliometric analysis via the “biblioshiny” package of R Software. The study analysed the data based on sources, contributors and the concept ‘political branding’. The results reveal that the literature of political branding is evolving and has been gaining much attention since 2015. Majority of studies were researched in the UK and US which can be extended to other countries for more generalisability. Major sources in the field of political branding are Journal of Political Marketing and European Journal of Marketing and major contributors are Gareth Smith and Margaret Scammell. Party image and ideologies are the major topics of discussion in political branding. This is the first comprehensive quantitative study of the concept of political branding based on literature. The summarized outcomes will help the researchers to get well versed with the concepts of political branding, theory building and its extension.