Politiker som varumärken - innan och efter digitaliseringen

Sammanfattning: Since the emergence of social media, politicians and political parties have adopted new platforms to communicate with voters. Historically, political branding has taken place in traditional media, however, as society has become more digitalized, such branding has switched platforms. The aim of this study is to examine and compare the communication of leading Swedish politicians during election campaigns of the 1970s and the 2010s, with the purpose of identifying contingent differences. The study seeks to identify branding components in communication and branding efforts from leading Swedish politicians. Previous research has focused on examining political branding from the politicians’ perspective and as of now, the research field lacks comparative studies. Thus, this study aims to fill this research gap and contribute to the existing knowledge on political branding and politicians as personal brands. Through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of news articles from 1973 and Instagram posts from 2018, the analysis identifies what branding components were used in the documents and whether the use of branding components differs between the time periods. The findings show that more political efforts can be identified in the political communication from 1973 whereas more non-political efforts can be identified in the communicative efforts from 2018. Further, the results indicate that political branding existed to a great extent in both 1973 and 2018, but that the way political branding occurs has changed. In 1973 the politicians emphasized their politics as a means to brand themselves, whereas in 2018 the politicians mainly focused on building an emotional bond to the consumer through personal content.