The Impact of Public Branding

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why you see brands everywhere, or why brands can easily impact a person’s coalition with public services and originations? Authors René Karens; Jasper Eshuis; Erik‐Hans Klijn and Joris Voets wrote an article about the impact of public branding, and investigates the effect of using the European Union brand on trust in policies. They wanted to test the hypothesis that adding EU brand elements to policies positively affects the trust in those policies. The experiment was tested on several international economics students in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Poland. Within the findings some evidence was shown about the effectiveness of branding for public policy.

Method

After testing out the effects on EU brands, an experimental method was used for the research to find out more about public branding used as a governance strategy, following Eshuis and Klijin, a brand could be defined as “a symbolic construct that consists of a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, created deliberately to identify a phenomenon and differentiate it from similar phenomena by adding particular meaning to it” (2012, 19) This told us that brands are invested in the importance of names, symbols, and signs and how they could to relate it to the consumers. Is public branding a deliberate governance strategy to influence their citizens perception? Government uses branding as a way of communicating with the citizens, the ultimate goal is to form a kind of close bond, so advertising things that could relate and interest the audience is a grantee for behaviors such as voting or city branding. Brands influence trust by providing assurance about quality. Having a brand also comes with its perks like reliability and credibility. Trust in government being the dependent variable when applied to the public domain may increase the trust in those policies through reshaping of perceptions.

Although argued that brands hold power to reach consumers or voters, they have limitations regardless of whether they are public or private. To test the hypothesis, The dependent variable, trust in policy, consists of multiple dimensions (adapted from McKnight, Choudhury, and Kacmar [40] ; Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer [24]). These dimensions have distinct indicators and values to be measured. In the data, the policy showed genuine interest in the well-being of citizens and crafted the policy that companies keeps their commitments. The independent variable, add cues to the policies to trigger citizens perceptions and association, and for the hypothesis to be confirmed the EU brand element should trigger an informational cue that affects trust in EU policies. To determine if experimental treatment affects trust in policy, two different policies were measured, a multivariate analysis of variance, which allowed the assessment of experimental effects on multiple dependent variables was applied, and the analysis of variance applied on both dependent variables. MANOVA was conducted before the ANOVA to prevent a Type 1 error in the latter. A Pillai’s was applied to test the equal group size within the countries and the Box’s test was applied to test the assumption of similar matrices for the dependent variables (Bray and Maxwell [8]).

To enable a randomized group and control over the circumstances, an experiment was conducted in classrooms at college…the students were randomly assigned by the researcher who was present to either the test or control group and because no pre-measures were conducted the two groups presented with the same two EU policies, resulted in a post-test-only control group design. (Morton and Williams [42])The results on EU branding on trust policy in Belgium showed a difference between a control group and experimental group. The test labeled the treatment and experiment as independent and the trust policy as dependent. In table 5 the effects of branding showed that the trust policies with an EU brand was higher than the trust in unbranded policies, usually that is typically normal because most consumers do not trust unbranded products due to the societal pressure that branded items are a must have. The results on the EU branding experiment in Poland was only one point different than that of Belgium. And in the results of the Netherlands showed a mire negative result than that of Belgium and Poland. An EU brand element triggers a more negative association in general about the EU brand.

Conclusion

The study’s purpose was to bring insight into the effect policy branding has on trust in a particular policy. The researchers wanted to know, what the effects of an EU brand has on trust policies. They wanted to test how positively an EU brand could affect people’s trust in those policies. 213 experiments in Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands were conducted, in which two groups were given two of the same EU policies. Group one was an Eu brand and Group 2 did not have a brand, through the experiment an effect of EU branding on trust policy was determined.

The experiment results were consistent. and in all three countries, the participants given an EU branded policy showed much more trust in both digital skills and air quality policy skills. In Belgium students showed more of an interest and trust in an EU brand, than that of students given without a brand. In Poland the results were in stronger, and in the Netherlands a country known for being negative towards EU brands, showed a slightly positive effect. The experiment group showed more trust than that of the control group, meaning there is a lot more trust in a public brand than that of an EU one.