Political marketing

1
Political marketing

• Empirical phenomenon
• Social change
• Electoral change
• Increasing importance of campaigns
• Professionalization of campaigns
• Research paradigm
• Market models of politics
• Expansion of marketing to non-commercial
  applications
• Marketing model of party behaviour
• Political marketing bureaucratic form of
  sophistry
• Parallels between professions of sophists and
  marketers
• Structure of markets and need for marketing
• Consumerism
• Ideological nature of marketing

2
Social and electoral change

• Social change
• Decreasing identifiability and relevance of
  social class
• Increasing social mobility
• Increased education
• Decreasing relevance of ideology
• Emergence of new issues/cleavages (Inglehart)
• Electoral change
• Dealignment
• Increasing electoral volatility
• Decreasing explanatory power of variables like
  age, gender, class
• Decreasing importance of projection/issue
  alignment
• Issue voting pocketbook voting retrospective
  voting

3
Increasing importance of campaigns

• Campaigns are no longer predominantly about
  mobilizing support
• With decreasing base support, voters need to be
  attracted through campaigning
• Campaign context impacts on economic, issue,
  leadership evaluations
• More floating voters to compete over
• Increasing importance of mass media (new findings
  challenging the minimal effects model providing
  campaigners with reasons to trust in
  effectiveness of electioneering)

4
Professionalization of campaigns

• Exponential increases in campaign spending
• Use of consultants, pollsters, commercial
  advertisers
• Increasing influence of campaign consultants on
  policy content of manifestos
• Policy convergence ? need for distinguishing from
  competitors
• Market research (focus groups, private polling,
  direct-marketing, database-marketing)
• Changing media focus, from coverage of issues,
  coverage of leadership, image and the race, to
  coverage of strategy, party-media interaction,
  and the role of spin

5
Market models of politics

• Schumpeter, Joseph
• Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1947)
• Elitist model of democracy
• Function of voting to restrain elites, not to
  manifest common will
• Downs, Anthony
• An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957)
• Rational choice model of voting
• Assuming material self-interest as primary
  motivation of elites and voters
• Median voter theorem party platforms will
  converge, to accommodate voter preferences
• Wellhofer Contradictions in Market Models of
  Politics the Case of Party Strategies and Voter
  Linkages', European Journal of Political
  Research 1990
• Vote production
• vs.
• Vote maximization

6
Expansion of the marketing concept

• Concept first introduced by Stanley Keller
• (Professional Public Relations and Political
  Power, 1956) understood marketing to mean
  persuasion and used it interchangeably with
  propaganda
• Expanding application of marketing disciplines
  beyond business world
• Philip Kotler (1981) Marketing for Non-profit
  Organizations
• Emphasis on strategy, marketing-mix,
  understanding of politics as a market where
  voters and candidates/parties, like sellers and
  buyers, exchange something of value
• Broadening of marketing definition by American
  Marketing Association
• Marketing is the process of planning and
  executing the conception, pricing, promotion and
  distribution of ideas, goods and services to
  create exchanges that satisfy individual and
  organisational objectives (1985)

7
Marketing and political science

• Use of marketing expertise by campaigning
  parties/candidates
• The observable practice of marketing in political
  competition prompted the entry of the concept of
  marketing into political science
• Early political marketing literature
• Descriptive and anecdotical
• Marketing as a scientific approach to campaigning
• Mauser (Political Marketing, 1983) defines
  political marketing as the
• science of influencing mass behaviour in
  competitive situations

8
Marketing model of party behaviour

• Three-stage development of modern business
  practice applied to evolution of organizational
  behaviour of political parties
• Parties may simply stand for what they believe
  in, or focus on persuading voters to agree with
  them, or change their behaviour to follow voters
  opinions (Jennifer Lees-Marshment, 2001 p. 701)
• Product-oriented party
• Sales-oriented party
• Market-oriented party

9

• Product-oriented party
• Ideological
• Representing/leading social movement
• Unresponsive to social change
• Electoral success not an objective in itself
• Electoral goal vote production/supporter
  mobilization
• Sales-oriented party
• Ideological
• Intra-organizational choice of policies,
  leadership
• Using market research, advertising, communication
  techniques to sell itself, its policies
• Electoral goal persuasion
• Market-oriented party
• Using market intelligence to identify voter
  demands
• Assessing deliverability of demanded policies
• Assessing intra-party acceptability of policy
  changes
• Designing product (party manifesto, leadership
  selection, etc) accordingly
• Electoral goal adapting to the market

10
Assumptions of marketing model

• Downsian, rational voters
• Exogeneity and measurability of preferences,
  needs, demands
• Transferability of product/market/marketing
  metaphor to the political sphere

11
Prescriptive/normative claims

• Customer (citizen) orientation
• Superiority of market-orientation over product-
  and sales-orientation
• Prediction that market-oriented parties will
  prevail over sales- or product-oriented parties
• Recommendation for parties to embrace
  market-orientation
• Evolutionary model
• Increasing responsiveness of political parties
• Improving democracy

12
Political marketers in ancient Greece the
Sophists

• Rhetoric teachers in ancient Greece (Protagoras,
  Thrasymachus, etc.)
• Criticized by Plato for providing their
  services/rhetorical skills for whatever purpose
  and position
• Eristic arguments aimed at victory rather than
  at truth
• Anti-logic the assignment to any argument of a
  counterargument that negates it (basis of
  Hegelian dialectic)
• Never accepted as philosophers
• For their suspicion towards metaphysics
• For their pragmatism

13
Sophism, truth and morality

• Relativist definition of truth, morality
• There is no absolute truth
• Truth, or the right course of action, is what one
  can convince the audience of being true or right
• Purpose of debating is not (what would be the
  Platonic understanding) to jointly discover
  truth, but to succeed
• Morality is a cultural, hence conditional, value

14
Similar accusations

• Style over substance
• Sophistic is to legislation what beautification
  is to gymnastics and appearance to reality
  (Plato)
• Man is the measure of all things (Protagoras)
• Technicians of enticement
• Mercenaries
• The purpose of government is to be efficient and
  to succeed. This is the criterion by which it
  should be judged (Thrasymachus)
• Profane
• The uncultured whose desire is not for wisdom
  but for scoring off an opponent (Plato)

15
Techniques, goals and justifications

• Similar techniques and goals
• Empiricism
• Rhetoric
• Pragmatism
• Similar justifications
• Relativism
• Popularity replaces legitimacy
• Efficiency replaces values
• Management replaces politics
• Nothing is unjust but a justice that does not
  succeed (Thrasymachus)
• Morality and law are not absolute, collective
  values, but principles defined by those in power

16
Reconciling reputation with theory

• Reputation
• Political marketing considered to be manipulative
  (spin doctors), dishonest, close to propaganda,
  placing style over substance
• Effect
• Political marketing practice appears to turn
  people off (decreasing turnout in US since 1970s,
  collapse of turnout under New Labour since 1997)
• Public demand for politicians of conviction (but
  consider the paradox of Margaret Thatcher the
  pioneer of political marketing in UK, nonetheless
  understood as principled and ideological)
• Theory
• Positivistic, presenting political marketing as
  potentially regenerative force for democracies
  (by basing policy on public preferences)

17
Theoretical shortcoming of political marketing
model

• Neglecting departure from classic economic theory
• Markets are not perfect and do not self-regulate
• Production and pricing are not naturally
  regulated by supply/demand function
• Political markets are oligopolistic
  (concentrated, with few competitors)
• Products become secondary to the image/reputation
  of the firm
• From trader to salesman, intervening in markets
• Marketing is active intervention in markets
• Oligopolistic markets tend to produce socially
  uneconomical outcomes
• Strategic behaviour
• Pricing
• Production
• Labour relations
• Accounting

18
Consumerism

• Market intelligence
• Not just what, where and in what quantities
  consumers want
• But also why they want it
• From homo economicus to buyer motivations,
  consumer psychology
• Not just discovering demand
• But stimulating it
• Potentialities of demand
• Dormand/latent needs
• Consumers are irrational at least as often as
  rational, motivated in large degree by emotions,
  habits and prejudices differing widely in
  personality structure, in aspirations, ideals and
  buying behaviours. (Martineau, Its Time to
  Research the Consumer, 1955)

19
The ideological nature of marketing

• Reinforcing free market ideal becomes in itself a
  marketing exercise, irrespective of factual
  oligopoly in most commercial and all political
  markets
• Downsian theory of democracy
• Ideological in its use of the false analogy of
  competitive political markets, with invisible
  hand mechanism that produces socially desirable
  outcomes notwithstanding asocial nature of actors
• The essential features of political marketing
• Opinion (replacing values as more malleable
  building blocks of collective choice)
• Appearance (not whether you are a good leader, or
  your policy a good one, but whether you can make
  it appear thus, counts)
• Pragmatism (downgrading elected government to a
  management function)