ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the power of personal branding and how it can help politicians win in unfavorable markets, difficult strategic circumstances and/or in cases where their party has limited organizational resources. The personal brand can be of particular value to the minority party because it takes the focus off of partisanship and puts it onto personality. The personal brand is an understudied phenomenon in the political marketing literature, as is sub-national political marketing. This chapter looks at the state and local level specifically as a small step toward filling this void in the literature. Further, the study of sub-national politics in the United States is a type of comparative political analysis because significant variations exist at the sub-national level. Writing about the national level alone, then assuming that political marketing techniques and/or understanding of them will be equally applicable at the sub-national level, is a questionable assumption that fails to capture the diversity in political marketing as a profession or as a field of study in the United States.
