Publication on "Government Branding"

The digital era is characterized by the difficulty of locating relevant information to make the best decision. This is due to the abundance of information on the internet and the increasing adoption rates of electronic devices. Recent research demonstrates that governments use behavioral science methods to change people’s behavior. One example is government branding, which plays an important role in shaping citizens’ attributes about the government.

Head of the Master of Business Administration, Prof. Dr. Erick Behar-Villegas, and Head of the BA in Data Science & Business, Prof. Dr. Hasan Koc from the Faculty of Business Administration wrote a paper, covering this particular topic, titled “Altering Credibility Through Short-term Government Branding: A Digital Framing Experiment”. 

Nominated for the best paper award at WI 2022 Conference, the paper presents experimental findings that imply logos with a clear political connotation can affect the credibility of information issued by experts. The case study focuses on the political logos used in the past in Bogota, Colombia, and demonstrates how short-term branding can have unforeseen repercussions when government money is prioritized over it.

Abstract

Government branding is a practice that can be tied to promoting an institution (long-term orientation) or a particular administration and its elected official (short-term orientation), using both physical and digital artifacts. Reviewing the related work in the literature, we document the existence and visibility of an administration-dependent government brand in a developing country by mining social media data and the Google 2019 Spanish corpus. We test the hypothesis that administration-dependent government iconography (e.g. a logo) can lead to a change in the perceived credibility of public information in digital environments. Using an experimental survey approach that parallels the application of framing, we find that short-term orientated government iconography can be detrimental to the credibility of government institutions, while they can also be seen as social opportunity costs, as budgets invested in them can be capitalized in later elections and not in the mission of the temporarily branded government body.

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