The 2001 General Election: Factors Influencing the Brand Image of Political Parties and their Leaders

This paper considers the importance of building the brand image of parties and leaders in modern day politics. Firstly, the appropriateness of branding in the sphere of politics is considered. Then, brand image research on political parties and their leaders is identified and discussed. From this, the advertising (positive and negative), events and celebrity endorsements that affected the June 2001 election are discussed. Finally, some tentative conclusions on political image management are forwarded along with the likely future developments in this area.     

Political Marketing Funding and Expenditure in the UK General Election Campaign of 2005.

The 2005 UK General Election will be the second for which detailed data will be available from the Electoral Commission. Whilst this will not be published until 2006, it is possible using 2001 data and participant accounts to identify the overall funding patterns of the three major party campaigns and changes in the way that was spent. In broad terms, funding and expenditure changed little in money terms from 2001 to 2005, largely due to the impact of financial constraints and regulation on the parties. However, in 2005 for the first time, both the Labour and Conservative parties made significant use of direct marketing methods, notably telephone and direct mail to communicate with target voters in closely contested constituencies. The financial constraints on the parties and the strict restrictions on donations have put the question of significant state funding for political parties back on the agenda. The paper summarises the UK regulatory framework on electoral expenditure and political donations and considers the arguments for and against expanding state funding.     

Labour,Political Marketing and the 2005 Election: A Campaign of Two Halves

Labour's 2005 election campaign was extensively underpinned by political marketing. This resulted in a campaign of unequal halves; generic and populist at national level; focused and individualised at local level. This article describes the text of Labour's campaign, and its response to its environment, focusing upon its image management strategies in response to the political and media environment within which it operated. This also included the Conservatives and an increasing overlap between politics and celebrity culture. This campaign saw a continuation and sophistication of marketing strategies and technologies, enabling parties to target individual, strategically important, voters. A specific personalised message was presented to 2% of the electorate, while a broad image was promoted to the rest of the populace. With an election focused on a targeted minority of the electorate, it is argued that far from being a force to enhance democracy, marketing at the 2005 election challenges the ideals upon which the democratic process of politics is premised.     

Fear,Negative Campaigning and Loathing: The Case of the UK Election Campaign

Fear has for some time been used in marketing communications particularly in social and health marketing. This paper explores how fear was used in the General Election Campaign and uses Aristotle's concept of rhetoric as a basis for understanding how messages are conveyed to the electorate. It argues that fear appeals are resonant with one particular type of voter but alienates other segments.     

Grey Power,School Gate Mums and the Youth Vote: Age as a Key Factor in Voter Segmentation and Engagement in the 2005 UK General Election.

This paper seeks to examine attempts by the main political parties in the UK general election of 2005 to segment the electorate according to their age and position within the life cycle. Particular attention is given to product adjustments and the party campaigns for the votes of older people, the "grey vote", as the political market shifts profoundly driven both by demographics, the ageing of the population, as well as by electoral behaviour, the declining participation of younger voters. Consideration is also given to segmentation of voters in the first age, the "youth vote", and the second age, "Generation Jones" and "school gate mums". The paper moves on to discuss age and segmentation in the context of elections remaining essentially mass communications campaigns, and the responses within civil society to the apparent power allocated to sub-groups identified as priority targets.     

Political PR in the 2005 UK General Election: Winning and Losing,With a Little Help From Spin

The public relations of the UK general election of 2005 is examined in the light of the active promotional culture of British politics, a culture that is especially active at election time. The PR or 'spin' can be seen as a presentational trellis offering to voters, mostly via the media, glimpses of policies and politicians which are favourable to the originating party. The purpose of the trellis for the parties is to maximise their electoral advantage and to minimise their disadvantage. The major obstacle to their success is the capacity of the media to brush aside the trellis and to report on the 'other side'. Whatever the benefits and costs for democracy of this tension between partisan presentation and journalism, there is little evidence that voter disengagement with electoral politics is caused by these public relations shows. Political PR is part of the UK's promotional culture; voter disengagement relates to other systemic and more causal features of contemporary British society. A small purposive (but unrepresentative) survey of campaign observers showed key features of political PR servicing the fundamentals of party, policy and personality.     

Ethical positioning and political marketing: the ethical awareness and concerns of UK voters

There is clear evidence of increased voter awareness and concern for environmental and other ethical issues, leading many organisations to reappraise and communicate more effectively their ethical credentials. The manifestos of the three main political parties in the UK show clear differences in their positioning on ethical issues.

Following a qualitative investigation using in-depth discussions and ZMET, a questionnaire was developed and administered to a representative UK sample of 1,000 consumers. This included a measure of awareness, concern and action on 16 ethical issues, the scale developed from the Stages of Change concept within the transtheoretical model.

Using principal components analysis, ANOVA and chi-squared analysis, differences are identified in the ethical positions of voter groups affiliated with the three main parties. These differences are not consistent between different sets of issues, suggesting further scope for ethical targeting and positioning by political marketers.     

The Marketing Campaign: The British General Election of 2005

Political marketing was a key factor in the 2005 campaign, but more for its ineffectiveness than for its success. The use of marketing techniques such as segmentation and targeting was prolific, however the extent to which the parties adopted the marketing concept was limited. The impact of Labour's Big Conversation and 'Team Labour' campaign approach was always going to be hindered by Tony Blair's perceived dismissal of party and voter opinion on the Iraq War and top-up fees; appointing a marketing director to work on the presentation rather than the design of policy, combined with a highly negative campaign, was never going to win the election for the Tories. The lessons of electoral history – and marketing - were proved right once again: only if parties fully embrace the marketing philosophy and comprehensively design their behaviour by reflecting and responding to public demand. Nevertheless the key to future success for UK parties is to bring back ideology: market-oriented politics should also include using party principles and leadership judgement in order to be able to produce a distinctive response to the public concerns that is both popular and credible.     

An Exploration of the Advertising Ambitions and Strategies of the 2001 British General Election

This paper reports on one element of our wider study investigating the 2001 British General Election national advertising, and the attitudes and perceptions of the young British electorate to the campaigns. The discussion presented here explores the strategies and ambitions of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats' 2001 national advertising campaigns. Our analysis is based on indepth interviews with key members of the three parties advertising agencies; content analysis of the national posters, press and party election broadcasts; and secondary source information e.g. coverage in the marketing and advertising press, newspaper, radio and TV reporting. A number of issues emerge including the key role of the advertising in agenda setting and agenda control, evidence of media misrepresentation of the central advertising themes, the poor use of the Internet, and the rather limited ambitions for the advertising itself.     

Marketing UK Towns and Cities as Shopping Destinations

This paper reports the results of research into the range of actors involved in the marketing of urban places as shopping destinations and the processes by which this marketing activity is planned. The paper highlights the differences between the process of marketing planning in this context (at the interface of the public and private sectors), as opposed to processes in private sector organizations from which the majority of current marketing theory was developed. It suggests various implications as to the characteristics of what Ashworth (1993) has termed a 'special type of marketing' to be applied to urban places.     

Branded lives: The production and consumption of meaning at work

Over the last number of decades, as a result of regulatory, technological and changing consumer dynamics, many service organisations operate in an increasingly competitive and dynamic external environment. These changes have led to service companies trying to both recruit and retain profitable customers. In order to compete effectively, do companies focus on transaction and relationship marketing activities only or on the balanced delivery of both? Apart from a small body of work (Brodie et al. 1997; Coviello et al. 1997; 2002), the literature has treated transaction and relationship marketing in an isolated and non-integrated fashion. In particular there has been limited consideration of the pertinent issues facing service organisations trying to integrate these two perspectives in practice. This article describes an in-depth study of a service organisation's transaction and relationship marketing activities. In this study theory was used in the development of a conceptual model. This model was used as a framework to guide the study and data collection using one retail bank case. The data were analysed in relation to the transaction and relationship marketing focus and activities of the bank. The findings indicate that resource investment in some aspects of transaction and relationship marketing activities, in practice, was unbalanced compared to the resource investment in a wide range of support activities. The study has implications for research and theory and to those attempting to deliver both transaction and relationship marketing in the context of dynamic and competitive environments.     

Political brand identity: An examination of the complexities of Conservative brand and internal market engagement during the 2010 UK General Election campaign

This paper seeks to build an understanding of the importance of internal communications when building a strong political brand. Using Kapferer's brand prism as a conceptual framework, the paper explores UK Conservative Party members' attitudes towards the development of the Conservative brand as personified by David Cameron. There are clear implications for political strategists as the findings suggest that it is crucial to engage the internal market in the co-creation of the marketing communications strategy for as brand evangelists they interpret the brand promise at the local level.     

Entrepreneurial Marketing in the Public Sector: The Lessons of Headteachers as Entrepreneurs

This article argues that headteachers of primary schools have been at the forefront of the marketing/entrepreneurship interface since attempts to introduce competitive market forces into the maintained education system. It examines primary school headteachers' marketing strategies and compares them to those of owner managers of small firms. Case studies of ten schools illustrative of a variety of provision and market conditions provided the empirical data over a five year period. The headteachers shared many of the marketing problems of owner-managers of small firms. Headteachers found that the most effective marketing strategies consisted of: i) marketing to improve relationships with existing parents, staff and governors as an essential precursor to any external marketing effort; ii) parental involvement in the school which improved the likelihood of word of mouth recommendations; and iii) influencing such recommendations by marketing to improve parental and other involvement in the school. As word of mouth is also the most important source of new business for small firms, there are opportunities for lessons from the public to the private sector.     

Marketing as Cooking: The Return of the Sophists

This literature-based paper is concerned with the range of marketing in general and the world of marketing practice in particular. It notes the ahistorical nature of much reflection on marketing, shifts to the characteristics of modern marketing management and then turns to the Ancients. The emergence and subsequent ebb and flow of rhetoric are covered briefly and then the case is argued that rhetoric should be a core concept for understanding and enhancing marketing practice. The location of rhetoric in the critical literature is acknowledged but the primary knowledge claim is that rhetoric as a framing device and as an instrument for managerial action is central to a full appreciation of marketing reality.     

The Invisible Side of Political Parties: The Case of the PCdoB

The young Latin American democracies have been structuring their political parties for day-to-day management. In this context, it is important to understand how such structures could be affected by the so-called invisible side of organizations, which are composed of networks of relationships between elected politicians and then relationships between these and external militant groups, which can greatly influence the candidates’ performance and the very dynamics of the party. This article seeks to unravel some of these dimensions. We select for analysis the case of the PCdoB (Communist Party of Brazil), in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The results show the nature of the embeddedness of these actors in the political system, highlighting weaknesses and possibilities.     

The Role of Perceptions in Predicting Donor Value

Explores the role of donor perceptions in predicting the value of a donor, both to the voluntary sector as a whole and to specific organisations. Three classes of perceptual variable are examined; perceptions of the performance of the voluntary sector/specific organisations, perceptions of any exchange benefits that might accrue and in cases where a relationship already exists, perceptions of the quality of service quality provided. Drawing on results of an empirical study of 5000 donors to ten large national charities, the paper concludes that all three classes of perceptual variable have the capacity to influence donor value.     

Internal marketing: a qualitative study of culture change in the UK banking sector

This paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study carried out in the UK retail-bank sector on the implementation of Internal Marketing (IM). While the overall aim of Internal Marketing is the creation of a unified culture around the values of customer service, employee empowerment and service quality, the evidence suggests that Internal Marketing is perceived and enacted in ways that at times contradict such managerial rhetoric. The paper sheds light on what internal marketing is (its underlying principles within the organisations studied), the ways in which the banks studied use it in order to change their organisational culture as well as the difficulties encountered in implementing IM as a culture change agent. It concludes that the implementation of Internal Marketing in the banks under the study is problematic and does not result into a unified organisation culture. Indeed, implementing Internal Marketing is a process fraught with difficulty, which at times leads to divisions, ruptures and ambiguity in the newly created organisational culture.     

What Is and What Is Not Social Marketing: The Challenge of Reviewing the Evidence

This paper describes our experience in undertaking a review of the effectiveness of using social marketing to tackle nutrition problems. One of the biggest challenges was identifying programmes which could be genuinely defined as 'social marketing'. Here we describe how we applied and tested a framework for identifying and assessing legitimate social marketing research. Implications for both social marketing theory and practice are discussed.