Political Branding is a way of doing Branding. The main aim of Political Branding is to create a brand that has a promise of sustainability and legitimacy for its environment, “the society” (in other words the social, the ec0nomic eco-system, the stakeholders). The organization (e.g., profit company, NGO) has to obtain a legitimacy to exist: in the past an organization that respected the laws and that was able to try to achieve its objectives was legitimated. Today is not enough to pay taxes, it is needed to demonstrate your positive impact to the society achieving a complex number of goals (create jobs, save the environment, create technologies with a good impact on the society, support culture or arts, being committed on a series of “issues” compliant with the brand values and its “image”). You have to obtain the right to exist.

Sustainability is not only a mere issue of being green , instead it’s an issues about your overall values that have to convey ethics. You have to take a stand that must be a promise kept and have to be accepted by the society.

A company that want to do Political Branding has to develop long term projects that convey activism and social commitment that generate social legitimacy. These projects, are not an ephemeral expression of commitment, they have to be compliant with your DNA, the DNA that the brand wants to narrate. The organization cannot seem shallow, it’s not a mere issue about communicate a seasonal theme, a seasonal campaign, that’s not Political Branding. Political Branding conveys and leads organization nature, long term goals, the reason of its existence. You are telling your story, you are telling your promise, therefore you have to kept the promise, keeping the promise means doing something.

For keeping the promise you have to do something: usually making Political Branding means “doing things” that generate engagement and mimesis with the stakeholders (clients mainly) about something that is important for the segments of society that are important for the organization (core and extended targets). These issues have to be compliant with the perception of the brand because is a way of generating the perception of the brand, the commitment of the brand about these issues are part of its story telling. You have to be coherent.

About the coherence, let’s do a naïve example: if you are a brand that purchases pet food, you don’t need to do a fund raising program for seeding new threes on a cleared mountain, but you are coherent when you create a community of pet lovers that are engaged in a campaign against mistreatment of animals.

What are the social trends that are feeding the Political Branding issues? Let’s think about the client/citizen of the new worldwide post-modern society: he doesn’t buy “things”, he is not seeking for something that he needs, he’s seeking for values. Everything a brand does, says, thinks, writes or produces is a story about the brand values that are developed, enriched, conveyed. That story is the Brand Value. If you are a news media and you are doing Political Branding supporting press freedom all around the world you are perceived as more credible and, at the same time, you are choosing a target segments: people sensitive to that issue. People follow you because they do a political choice: “yes, I’m a reader of that newspaper, because I’m engaged on press freedom, when I buy this newspaper, I read about my favorite football team or about political crisis but in some way I’m committing myself about press freedom because this paper is supporting press freedom somewhere. Because the paper is a fan of Jean Leopold Dominique and Radio Haiti and me too”. The brand is linked to a set of values and your clients make a political choice when they buy the paper.

Is that target valuable? Is that way of doing Branding worthwhile? The number of people that are ready to do this kind of choice is skyrocketing.

Some years ago (2010) Amnesty International created Tyrannybook (a simple copy of Facebook) for generating engagement about the existence of a lot of tyrants that rarely appears on mainstream media and that lead countries, few people know what happens in everyday life of people that live there. In few weeks 2 million people registered an account. Unfortunately the experiment will be stopped for budget limits.

One billion hungry campaign is another example: http://twitter.com/1billionhungry.

Al Jazeera have created a repository for creative commons media stuff that can be downloaded and used by everyone that need high quality videos for documentaries for their own productions and so on (http://cc.aljazeera.net/).

What is important to understand is that when Al Jazeera is delivering these media contents for free it’s doing its mission, its job. It’s not charity. It’s the reason the brand exists for.