Encyclopedia of Political Communication

Political Marketing

Contributors: Lynda Lee Kaid & Christina Holtz-Bacha Print Pub. Date: 2008 Online Pub. Date: April 21, 2008 Print ISBN: 9781412917995 Online ISBN: 9781412953993 DOI: 10.4135/9781412953993 Print pages: 604-605 This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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10.4135/9781412953993.n516 Political marketing has developed in parallel with commercial marketing through the course of the 20th century, particularly in America and Europe, with the rise of the universal franchise, the development of broadcast media communications, and scientific methods of assessing market and public opinion, which have transformed how political campaigns are run today. The use of marketing in British political campaigns has been said to have developed over four different eras: the unsophisticated selling era (candidates promoting themselves to different social classes in the 19th century); the selling era (early 20th century, when politicians used the mass media to disseminate messages but did not research voting intentions); the sophisticated selling/nascent marketing era (the private poll was developed, allowing voter feedback into the political process); and the strategic marketing era (which has yet to emerge). The commercial world of marketing has informed the worlds of political and referendum campaigning, and to a lesser extent vice versa. Charities and other campaigning organizations are increasingly using marketing techniques to influence legislation and public opinion and so use the techniques of political marketing. With the development of globalized industries, the interplay between marketing and politics has increased further, and marketing methods associated with political campaigning are increasingly used by companies to influence legislators and regulators (e.g., in Brussels, Washington, D.C., Doha) who in turn influence the structure of, and legislation associated with, commercial markets. The underlying process in political marketing is the exchange of political support (in terms of votes, petitions, funding, resources) for political influence (in terms of legislative, regulatory or programmaticcommercial or politicalchanges). Although the use of promotional and managerial techniques in political, electoral, and commercial campaigning has long existed, the uptake of marketing techniques has rapidly increased in recent decades. Political marketing has been likened to a marketingpropaganda hybrid, particularly in America, where negative attack-style campaigning is rife. The political marketing product could be said to include party policy on important issues and party ideology and ideals, which effectively comprise political representation. Considering political representation as a political service provided to companies or voters provides a better understanding of the political party's
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raison d'tre vis--vis its target markets. In parallel to the development of marketing techniques, such as advertising and market research, there is increasing use of strategic marketing techniques such as market positioning, where the campaigning organization determines its campaign's ideal positions in the minds of those in their target markets and uses research to continually refine the difference between their actual position and their ideal position. Market segmentation is also an important marketing activity for political parties as they divide the electorate into groups of targetable voters. Parties function in representative democracies to provide the nation with guidance and information on current and potential political and economic infrastructure. This process benefits the public by improving social cohesion, democratic participation, and citizen belongingness, and ensures that politicians take account of important economic considerations associated with commercial markets. Political marketing could be argued to be increasingly important as political participation declines in Western political markets, although, ironically, its cynical overuse may [p. 604 ] well be the very cause of just such a drop in political participation. Famous examples of campaigns include Lyndon Baines Johnson's Daisy Girl television campaign against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 American presidential election, when a young girl was portrayed picking leaves off a flower to Johnson's nuclear countdown voiceover. The spot was extremely evocative, and Goldwater's campaign was damaged by it. Margaret Thatcher's use of the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi in the 1979 British general election was particularly effective, using a devastating billboard campaign around the strike-ridden Winter of Discontent, displaying a dole (unemployment office) queue and the words, Labour is not working, which kept the British Labour Party out of power for a generation (19791997). Most marketing activity for political, referendum, and public affairs campaigns has been provided by specialized marketing and PR agencies on an ad hoc basis, although increasingly political parties and multinational corporations are conducting their political marketing activity in-house. Agencies typically take the form of pollsters, lobbyists, and public relations or advertising agencies in Britain. In America, however, political consultants have a much wider remit, taking in roles such as polling, petition management, fundraising, strategy, media buying, advertising, public affairs, grassroots
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lobbying, law, donor list maintenance, and campaign software consulting. Europe is increasingly developing its own political marketing industry, geared around Brussels and Strasbourg and public affairs activity. Marketing's entry into politics has not been widely applauded, bringing disquiet to the many who believe that politics has a higher purpose than commercial profitability or who acquaint marketing with style (viz. form) rather than substance (viz. content). Public affairs activity, particularly lobbying, through which a government's commercial policy is influenced by companies, comes under particular scrutiny in an age where the multinational corporations and trade bodies become more powerful and governments around the world shift from being primarily providers of goods and services to regulators of commercial and social markets. The importance of the succinctness of political marketing is apparent when one considers that the voting public and industrial directors are subjected to limited availability of time for paying attention to public affairs, with corresponding limited understanding of political and economic issues and the technical solutions required to solve them. Thus, political parties and governments will probably never truly be market or voter oriented. There are, in any case, major ethical considerations in determining how market or voter oriented any political party or government should be since they are required, once in power, to regulate them both. Of particular concern in America is the importance of funding in elections as political campaigns become increasingly advertising focused. Around $2.2 billion was spent in total in the 2004 American election cycle by all candidates. In Britain, concerns over spending in elections were offset when an electoral commission was set up with powers under the 2000 Elections, Parties and Referendums Act to regulate spending for national party campaigns at around 20 million at that time. Around the world, political campaigns and companies operating political strategies are increasingly in vogue as companies take over the delivery of what were once considered to be government services. Paul R. Baines 10.4135/9781412953993.n516 See also
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Further Readings Dulio, D. A., & Nelson, C. J. (2005). Vital signs: Perspectives on the health of American campaigning . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. O'Shaughnessy, N. (1999). Political marketing and political propaganda . In B. I. Newman (Ed.), Handbook of political marketing (pp. 725740) . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Smith, G., Saunders, J. The application of marketing to British politics . Journal of Marketing Management vol. 5 no. (3) (1990). pp. 295306 http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.1990.9964106

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Encyclopedia of Political Communication: Political Marketing