Is the Support for a Party Change According to the Change of Its Brand Name? The Moderating Effect of Thinking Style and Ideological Tendency

Authors

  • Kang-Sun Lee
  • Gwi-Gon Kim
  • Gantuya Narantuya

Abstract

Background/Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the changes in voter?s support according to the party?s branding strategy used by Korean political parties to resolve political crisis. In other words, this is to compare differences in voter's support changes between rebranding strategy and new-branding one. The former is changing the political party?s name without the change of its political identity, the latter is accompanying with the political identity?s change through partyseparating. Methods/Statistical analysis: We also examined how the voters' personal characteristics, ideological tendency and thinking style, are moderating the relationship between branding strategy and support for a party. For this study, recent real cases in Korea were selected as stimuli and the experiment is designed as follows: 2 (Party?s Branding strategy: rebranding vs. new-branding) * 2 (Ideological Tendency: conservative vs. progressive) * 2 (Thinking Style: holistic vs. analytic). Questionnaires were conducted for voters in Daegu and Kyungbook province and the total of 508 questionnaires were reflected in the analysis. Findings: The results of empirical analysis are as follows: 1) Voter?s support change was higher in the case of new branding strategy through party-separating, but it was not significant statistically. 2) The conservative tendency did not show a difference between the parties? brand changing strategy, but in the case of progressive tendency, the degree of support change of the new-branding strategy party was higher than that of rebranding strategy party. So, the moderating effect of ideological tendency was confirmed. 3) The moderating effect of thinking style was also confirmed. In the holistic thinkers, there was no difference in the rate of support, but in the case of analytic thinkers, the degree of voter?s support change was higher for the party of new-branding strategy than one of rebranding strategy. Improvements/Applications: The results of this study suggest that the changing strategy of party?s brand name in Korea is still effective and brand changing strategy accompanying with the party?s political identity is more effective.

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Published

2019-11-22

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Articles