Prestige and personal appearance

Successful marketers and advertisers understand very well how easily people can be influenced by prestige appeal. That is why most political candidates take pains with their appearance before they come on to the platform, why a number of them wear, for example, an expensive designer suit. A designer suit is accepted quite unthinkingly by many people as an external symbol of success and respectability. Success and respectability command our admiration and, therefore, we are more prepared to believe a man dressed in an Armani suit than we are one who wears less expensively-labelled clothes. 

Besides wearing designer-label clothes to increase their prestige appeal, candidates employ electioneering agents whose duty is to bolster up the candidate’s reputation in every way possible. They also use a Chairman at every meeting, whose function is to tell the audience what a wonderful person the candidate is, again to enhance the candidate’s prestige. A convention of (false) modesty prevents the candidate from doing this themselves, and if he or she broke that convention their prestige would suffer badly in the eyes of many members of his audience. And since prestige is very important to them, the chairman device is adopted.

It is for precisely the same reason, that they wish to create a prestige appeal, that candidates try to get as many senior politicians and major celebrities as possible on to their platform to speak for them.