Past research increasingly highlights opportunities to learn about consumers’ attitudes and behavior from publicaly available social media data sources (e.g., Netzer et al. 2012; Culotta and Cutler 2016). In line with this evolving research stream, we show how information regarding the followers of brands and politicians on Twitter can be used to learn about the associations between politicians and brands. More specifically, we investigate which brands the followers of major politicians (e.g., Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders) and political parties (e.g., Democratic Party and GOP) follow in order to identify the political position of each brand. Building on this we then show how this information relates to predictions of people’s voting behavior based on their brand preferences and contrast with conventional demographic predictors. Finally, we relate the brand-politician associations to brand image data using Y&R Brand Asset Valuator and show how the proximity of brands and politicians based on social networking data relates to the characteristics of the brands.
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