Political Marketing in the United States

Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Brian Conley, Kenneth Cosgrove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136212185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Marketing in the United States explores how politicians and parties utilize marketing concepts and tools, providing an up-to-date and broad overview of how marketing permeates U.S. politics. The volume focuses on current and recent elections and leaders, and covers a range of topics, including market research, marketing parties and volunteers, strategy and branding, communications, delivery, and marketing in government.

The main themes and objectives of the book are to cover:

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• New and emerging trends in political marketing practice

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• Analysis of a broad range of political marketing aspects

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• Empirical examples as well as useful theoretical frameworks

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• Discussion of state/local level as well as presidential politics

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject available and captures the field as it is rapidly growing. It is a must-read for students and scholars of political parties, political communication, applied politics, and elections.

1
Marketing US Politics

Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Brian M. Conley, and Kenneth Cosgrove

In modern American politics, much is written and discussed about political brands, selling candidates and issues, what techniques work to get people to turn out, and the latest innovations in organizing and mobilization, but rarely do such comments integrate understanding from academic marketing theory or provide a comprehensive analysis of the different activities involved in the marketing of US politics. We know that marketing is taking place in American politics and in practice the logic, analytical tools, and techniques of marketing have become ubiquitous. Yet, there is little holistic discussion of the marketing of US politics by journalists or academics; what there is tends to be piecemeal, ad hoc, and partial rather than situated in the context of the rich and diverse scholarly field of political marketing. This book aims to change that and begin a broad conversation about the role marketing plays in America’s political life. Political marketing techniques and strategies, as well as the popular discussion of them, have become omnipresent in modern American politics. They are used by politicians, parties, groups, movements, and governments to advance a range of political goals. These goals include winning elections, gaining donations, attracting volunteers, managing reputations, and supporting the existence and advancing the agendas of interest groups and think tanks or advancing a particular cause or policy position. Americans are most familiar with the use of political marketing in campaigns, but marketing is employed by a variety of entities to inform every aspect of politics. Government departments, policy groups, and incumbent political leaders utilize concepts and techniques from marketing to advance their agendas through government and build public support for policies. Indeed, as anyone who has ever spent time in the Washington, D.C., area knows, from the moment one lands at the airport to the time one is walking around the city to time spent watching TV in the evening, one is literally in the middle of a giant b-to-b (business-to-business) marketing effort in which political marketers try to explain to those who make and implement policy, especially those in Congress around budget time, why what they support is in the national interest. Political marketing exists at all levels of government: federal, state, county, and local. It is used by presidents, governors, senators, representatives, big city mayors and councilors.

Political marketing has developed as American politics has become more professionalized. In addition to individual candidates and their campaign staffs, there exists an army of political and marketing professionals across the country working on politics and public affairs topics. The epicenter of this professionalized, marketed politics is obviously the nation’s capital, but political marketing practitioners can be found in all corners of the country. The political professionals who are involved in political marketing are a diverse lot and serve in a variety of positions inside and outside of government. They include policy staffers, campaign consultants, communications and media officers, public relations officers and strategists, lobbying firms, and those who work in the bureaucracy of government as well as the West Wing of the White House. Politicians and the professionals who serve them value political marketing because it offers modern, applied methods and approaches to help them better identify and understand their stakeholders in order to provide better service, representation, and responsiveness to their needs and desires. Understanding their constituencies are very important to politicians and political professionals. Marketing begins with a study of the audience because doing so helps the political marketer understand the needs extant in their constituency, and then formulate a brand, policies, and strategy to meet such needs. Parties, candidates, and interest groups vie to define the marketplace then win sufficient support for their products. In particular, political marketing offers a way of structuring an organization so as to satisfy internal and external stakeholders, and to communicate in a way that not only persuades and sells the political product but also forges a positive, interactive relationship between elites and their public. In doing so, politics becomes like any other product in society: it is packaged, branded, and marketed to specific audience segments. What limits its ability to serve as a manipulative tool is the existence of organizational rivals attempting to serve the same market with a different product.

From an academic perspective, there is considerable value in studying political marketing as a holistic activity. It is important for scholars to understand the constituent parts of political marketing and the ways in which these parts affect the mechanics of their fields of endeavor, but it is also important to examine the bigger picture. This book is aimed at both the bigger picture and the practical application of political marketing concepts, and is therefore unique in the American academy in that it provides an academically informed understanding of the scope, practice, and impact of the political marketing approach that affects every area of political life from organizing to campaigning to policy making and governing. The book engages in cross-disciplinary research, adapting marketing concepts and theories to the academic analysis of politics in the same way that marketing is adapted by political practitioners in the practice of politics. The research identifies the rationale behind many visible forms of political marketing; shows what goes on behind the scenes in elections but also in government; and critiques the potential and limitations of marketing politics both from a pragmatic and normative perspective.

This chapter will outline the nature of political marketing and discuss political marketing in practice, the field of political marketing research, and gaps in the US political marketing literature. It will also explain the rationale for this book and outline its overall structure and approach. By doing so, it will give the reader a sense of what political marketing is and why it is valued by political practitioners, what constitutes its major techniques and how they work, and how political marketing is done in general, as well as what the rise of marketed politics means for the health of American representative governance. The combination of theory and practice, holistic and specific examination of the phenomenon, and writing from across the academy gives this book significant value as a guide to understanding what’s happening in contemporary American political life, and most importantly, why things happen as they do now and how they happen differently from things done in the past.

The Distinctive and Broad Scope of Political Marketing

Political marketing is the application of marketing concepts and tools by political actors and organizations to achieve their goals. Branding, market segmentation, delivery management, internal political marketing, market-oriented strategies, and positioning are just some of the tools marketing offers politics. There are four main areas of political marketing activity, though they interact and overlap with each other: researching, strategizing, organizing, and communicating; see Figure 1.1

In a political marketing approach researching includes not just polling, which is already studied in scholarship on campaigns, but a whole range of qualitative and quantitative research tools such as focus groups, role play, and co-creation where voters are asked to identify solutions and design the political product instead of just voicing their demands. Understanding the nature of the political market is crucial to strategic decisions. For example, in running for governor of Texas, one would look at the electorate overall as the market, then decide which parts of it would constitute its audience targets, taking into account the candidate’s partisan affiliation and party positions, but also identifying ways to attract new forms of support. There is no possibility that a Texas Republican could get elected on a platform of gun control, but a Texas Democrat with the right brand and market might. The market is also the number of potential consumers willing to make the political equivalent of purchasing a product via either voting or mobilizing to advocate for it. Some political products (and these can be policies or politicians) are not saleable because they lack a market.

FIGURE 1.1 Political Marketing Activity

This is why successful politicians from one part of the country often have trouble when they try to run for national office and why there is significant variance in the kinds of politicians who make up the national political parties. They represent different marketplaces, and what can work in one can assure failure in the other. Consider the problems that Mitt Romney and Rick Perry had running for the Republican presidential nomination. Both struggled outside of their home markets because they were working to adapt to markets composed of different kinds of voters. In addition, political products can be either mass or niche and can have the same kinds of adoption and life cycles as other products have. A political marketing approach is also suited for use with both quantitative and formal theoretical techniques. Researching also encompasses analysis of the market, especially voters, through tools such as segmentation and voter profiling, which breaks the market down into smaller groups. Information gathered then can be synthesized with data on voters’ lifestyles, homes, and family lives, and with political canvassing information to predict their needs and potential reactions and possibly pre-test policies, positions, and political communication through various forms of experimental marketing.

Political marketers then chose a strategy and design a product and brand in relation to the results from their research. As part of building a strategy, political marketers usually have to answer a series of questions. The most important of these is obviously, What’s our product? Is it a politician, a series of policies, a party, or something else? Should we try to follow what another politician or party is doing? Are we trying to give people what they think they want or teach them why something else might be better? Who are our strongest supporters within the market, and can we expand their levels of support and turnout within those segments or try to persuade new people to support us? What is our brand visually and emotively, and at which groups of people is it pitched? What position do we want to hold in the market and in the mind of the public (i.e., does my candidate want to be the conservative candidate or someone in favor of strong social programs or some other position)? What kind of market space and space in the mind of our audience targets do we want to occupy? And with which audiences do we want to build a long-term relationship (assuming the candidate wants to do so), and how can we go about doing that? By answering these questions, a political marketer can figure out what the candidate is trying to do, to whom they are trying to sell, and, in part, what their product is exactly. Political marketing is, then, about research, conceptualization, and, as Saturday Night Live jokingly put it, referring to the George W. Bush administration, “strategery.”

Political strategy includes decisions about how and whether to follow or try to lead what the market wants, as well as consideration of demographics and psychographics. While the emergence of analytic marketing and big data has attracted significant attention, it is not just the data itself, but the strategic decisions made in relation to it. As Issenberg (2012: 12) noted, “[S]ome of the early decisions that shaped how the [2012] presidential race would be run were built on technical innovations invisible to the outside world.” One of the ways that political marketing is different from the older forms of political organizing with which political scientists are familiar is that political marketing places a great deal of emphasis on understanding voter demands, building voter databases and archetypes, and then designing political products that respond to and represent the concerns of the audience. In this sense, political marketing is a highly civic activity because it aims to bring the public’s opinions, wants, and needs into the design of the political product. There are of course problems in how politicians use research in that too much segmentation can lead to niche marketing that has the ability to build strong bonds within but not across segments (Turow 1997). Some might argue that both Barack Obama and George W. Bush reflected the strengths of marketing in terms of giving people a strong sense of affiliation and involvement with their campaigns and administrations, yet also the limitations of the current age of niche marketing, as neither was ever fully able to persuade the vast majority of the population to support them even while they dominated within their own targeted segments. However, more effective leaders will integrate understanding from research and strategizing into an overall brand vision for society that forges an emotional connection between them and the public, and concepts such as relationship marketing seek to build and maintain positive interactions and relationships between elites and their political market.

Political parties and politicians have found it useful to make pragmatic use of marketing tools and concepts about how to run a party or group; recruit, activate, and retain volunteers and donors; and get out the vote during campaigns and legislation. In organizing, political market research is used again to identify the needs, wants, and behavior of volunteers and donors, and segment them into smaller groups just like voters. They are also further subdivided into smaller groups just like any sales-oriented organization does with its customers. Donors often receive different access in exchange for contributions based on the amount they’ve given, the number of years they’ve given, and the frequency of the donations that they’ve made. For example, US ambassadorships in desirable locales often go to persons who have been large donors themselves or fundraisers. Volunteers are similarly accorded different levels of access based on their levels and length of involvement, just as is the case with any selling business.

Once these questions are answered, political marketers then have to figure out what needs to be done to sell the product. Having the product, the money, the volunteers, and the understanding aren’t enough unless the political marketer can explain what he or she is offering to the public. Political marketing communication is both narrow and broad, general and highly targeted, and takes place across a number of different platforms, but is most of all based on research about the market, the message, and the medium in question. It includes advertising informed by research and market-oriented strategies, targeted communications in response to market segmentation, and direct marketing in mail, DVD, email, and Internet forms as well as celebrity marketing. Political marketers understand and take advantage of the power of celebrity to sell to the general public, but also to reach specific demographic and psychographic segments with a message from someone with whom the audience feels comfortable and to whom they ascribe a high degree of credibility.

Political marketing communication is relevant to gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Marketing US Politics
• 2 The Emergence of Voter Targeting: Learning to Send the Right Message to the Right Voters
• 3 Database Political Marketing in Campaigning and Government
• 4 Boutique Populism: The Emergence of the Tea Party Movement in the Age of Digital Politics
• 5 Primary Elections and US Political Marketing
• 6 Branding the Tea Party: Political Marketing and an American Social Movement
• 7 Access Hollywood: Celebrity Endorsements in American Politics
• 8 Personal Political Branding at State Level
• 9 Brand Management and Relationship Marketing in Online Environments
• 10 Relationship Marketing in Social Media Practice: Perspectives, Limitations and Potential
• 11 Mama Grizzlies: Republican Female Candidates and the Political Marketing Dilemma
• 12 The Market Research, Testing and Targeting behind American Political Advertising
• 13 Crisis-Management, Marketing, and Money in US Campaigns
• 14 Communicating Contemporary Leadership in Government: Barack Obama
• 15 Does Obama Care? Assessing the Delivery of Health Reform in the United States
• 16 US Political Marketing Trends and Implications
• List of Contributors
• Index