Global political marketing

Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Chris Rudd, Jesper Stromback

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135261399
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There is increasing awareness of growing similarities in political marketing practices around the world. Global political marketing is a comprehensive analysis of why, how and with what affect parties use political marketing in a range of political systems - presidential, parliamentary, two and multi-party, and established and emerging democracies.

Written by a team of 25 international expert authors, the volume explores the impact of systemic features such as the party and electoral system, analysing how parties use marketing through 14 detailed country studies. The book explores the notion that political marketing is used by parties to both sell and design political products, is by no means confined to the opposition, and that many opinions besides those of the voters are considered in product design, including ideological anchors, expert opinion and party members' input.

The authors also explore how other factors impact on political marketing effectiveness, such as the ability of governments to communicate delivery, stay in touch, the role of the media and party unity and culture. Finally the work discusses the democratic implications of market-oriented parties, highlighting the need for debate about the relationship between citizens and governments and the prospects for democracy in the 21st century.

Including a practitioner perspective as well as rigorous academic analysis, this collection provides the first global comprehensive overview of how political parties market themselves, it will be of great interest to all scholars of political marketing, parties and elections and comparative politics.

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Global political marketing

Jennifer Lees-Marshment

Political marketing – the utilization of commercial marketing techniques and concepts in politics – is being used to varying degrees around the world. Many political parties conduct market intelligence in the form of polls or focus groups and use it to inform the way they present their policies to the voting public. However, not only do parties use marketing techniques to sell themselves and their policies, they also use marketing to decide what to offer the public in the first place – what policies to adopt, which leaders to select to best present those policies, and how to best communicate policy delivery. Political marketing, then, is not just about ‘spin’ and public relations during the electoral campaign. It is much more than that. Parties can utilize a range of marketing tools including voter profiling, segmentation, micro-targeting and e-marketing to inform their communication. They can also respond to market intelligence in the way they design the political product they offer, becoming market-oriented rather than primarily sales-oriented.

Whilst the spread of professionalization and modernization in campaigning has been studied extensively (Holtz-Bacha, 2002; Kavanagh, 1995; Lilleker and Negrine, 2002; Plasser and Plasser, 2002) there has never been a systematic and scientific comparative analysis of political marketing behaviour in the sales- or market-oriented sense where the ways in which tools and concepts which are specifically from marketing are considered. Concerns about the effectiveness of political advertising are commonplace, but it is only recently with the proliferation of ‘Global New Labour’ that attention has turned to the influence of marketing on the political party product. Of course, politicians may utilize tools without embracing a comprehensive market-orientation, and this book seeks to explore variance as well as convergence in empirical behaviour. Indeed, the success of e-marketing or virtual networking in the 2008 US presidential election has led parties in other countries to want to copy the new initiative. But it is important to remember that behind the US innovation is market-oriented type thinking; the internet was used not just to sell to voters but to provide engagement mechanisms that are designed to meet volunteers’ varied needs and enable them to participate in politics in the way that suits them rather than the candidate. Bryant (2008) notes how Obama’s presidential nomination bid in 2007–8 offered potential volunteers a specific goal and date (e.g., ‘1.5 million calls by Tuesday’) and made them actionable and realistic through easy-to-use online tools (e.g., ‘click on this button and make 20 calls from this list’). Furthermore there are now a number of wellknown world examples of marketing the product, with the most famous being the transfer and adaptation of the product used by Bill Clinton’s New Democrats in 1992 to Tony Blair’s New Labour in the UK in 1997, to the German SPD and Labour in New Zealand in 1999 with the use of targeting on new markets, and pledge cards to suggest delivery, representing a move away from selling ideologically driven policy to using a voter-responsive strategy. Cross-country similarities continue: in 2007 Australian Labour leader Kevin Rudd’s successful campaign was likened to Tony Blair’s (New Zealand Herald, 2007). In these cases, political marketing is employed before the electoral campaign: indeed the aim was to develop a product that people want so that, if successfully achieved, the campaign itself becomes a less important, if not a redundant, exercise.

This intrusion of marketing into the political sphere has stimulated debate about the consequences of voter-led or market-oriented politics for the democratic polity. Not everyone believes that using market intelligence before you decide on policy is desirable; there are concerns about whether the public should be so paramount in deciding how political parties formulate policy and how leaders lead (see Coleman, 2007) or that politicians should segment and target only those sections of society which are likely to influence a close election (see Savigny, 2007 and 2008 for example). A market-orientation is used by business the world over to attain and retain market share, and is the basis of capitalism; but in politics, to decisively shift responsibility to the voter for deciding policy preferences and the suitability of leaders, raises fears of populism and the abandonment of collectivist ideals informed by ideological world views. Abandoning the political direction of a country to the vagaries of the electoral marketplace has significant implications for the functioning of a representative democracy.

Given the potential consequences of Market-Oriented party (Lees-Marshment 2001a, b) behaviour, it becomes very important to understand what causes some political parties to become more market-oriented than others, and what impact this is having on the political system as a whole. The book explores the extent of political marketing, its nature, its utility, its variance across different political systems and its consequences for democracy. It will conduct academic analysis of systemic features that inhibit or facilitate the adoption of professional political marketing techniques and approaches within different nations. It will consider whether the rise of political marketing is related to the professionalization of parties, encouraging the international sharing of ideas and consultants; or to Americanization; or whether it is a natural response to the globalization of political culture and information (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Bowler and Farrell, 1992; Plasser and Plasser, 2002). We also want to know more about the effectiveness of political marketing; to explore the limitations of consultants moving from one country to another without adapting their approach to suit the new environment; to discuss the problems that sales-marketing techniques can cause; and also to raise debate about whether or not the more voter-friendly, responsive market-oriented approach is good for democracy.

Alongside country studies, two chapters provide an academic and a practitioner overview of political marketing, considering not only...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Political Communication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Global political marketing
• 2 A framework for comparing political market-orientation
• 3 Political marketing in Germany
• 4 Political market-orientation in a multi-party system
• 5 New Zealand political marketing
• 6 Australian political marketing
• 7 Political marketing in the United States
• 8 UK political marketing
• 9 The level of market-orientation of political parties in Greece
• 10 Political salesmen in Hungary1
• 11 The Czech case
• 12 Testing the market-oriented model of political parties in a non-Western context
• 13 Political marketing in Ghana
• 14 Political marketing in a weak democracy?
• 15 Political marketing techniques in Russia
• 16 Political market-orientation in Japan
• 17 Implementing and interpreting market-orientation in practice
• 18 Political marketing, party behaviour and political science
• 19 Global political marketing
• Index