Three statements about politicians and the upcoming elections
The core of this article is about the influence of familiarity on all other indicators of strong (personal) brands. A strong brand, gets more customers. A politician as a strong personal brand, more votes. We investigate how the Dutch view politicians and the upcoming elections. Furthermore, we look at the role of the media and celebrities in making parties like the PVV and VVD bigger. I therefore posit the following three propositions:
People vote for the people who are the most famous, regardless of whether these people became famous(er) through positive or negative news.
People vote for people, not for programs. The content of a party program has no influence on the election results.
The media and celebrities are partly responsible for the increasing inequality between parties. They make the big bigger and the small smaller.
We use Keller's brand model. We also use a combination of free association and statements to evaluate the brand power of politicians and political parties on the strength, direction and uniqueness of associations, the attitude and resonance. We have included the ten best-known politicians of the ten largest parties, based on the average scores of the polls , with the exception of the CU and SGP. We have replaced these with DENK and Artikel 1, in order to include as much political diversity as possible in the research. In the article about the Blokker brand roast you can find more information about the research methodology and interpretation of the results.
This election survey is based on research that CG hotel contact database Selecties conducted for 37ºCelsius free of charge. Just over a thousand respondents participated in this survey (n=1007), which was conducted between 10 February and 16 February 2017. The sample was evaluated for representativeness using the gold standard and ethnicity classification according to MOA.
The sample contains slightly fewer young people aged 18-29 and slightly more elderly people aged 60 and over, more highly educated respondents than low-educated respondents and more people with a high income than a low income. There were no differences in terms of gender and region. In terms of ethnicity, only Western immigrants were slightly underrepresented (CBS: immigrant with a group origin of one of the countries in Europe, excluding Turkey).
All things considered, it can be said that this sample is a representative reflection of Dutch society. The results indicate how Dutch society views politicians, political parties, the media and the upcoming elections. All statements that we make on the basis of this research have been established with the usual reliability of 95%. The vast majority of statements can be made with a higher certainty (99% or higher).