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 Whilst this will not be published until 2006, it is possible using 2001 data and participant accounts to identify the overall funding patterns of the three major party campaigns and changes in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.     

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.     

Marketing the British Conservatives 1997-2001

During 1997-2001 the Conservative Party utilised many concepts and techniques from marketing but this yielded little success in the general election. This article explores the story behind this result: the attempts made by the leader William Hague to use political marketing and make the Party more responsive to voters, the obstacles he faced in changing the Conservatives at all levels; the final product they offered to voters in 2001, and the Party's communication efforts in the years before the election and the campaign. Overall, analysis indicates the difficulty but also the importance of marketing political parties.     

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.     

Positioning Political Parties: The 2005 UK General Election

After identifying the paucity of positioning research relating to political marketing the construct is defined and practical examples of its application in politics provided. The analysis of the 2005 election starts by considering the long term framing of political issues and concludes that this, overall, provided Labour with a competitive advantage. Next the positioning dilemmas facing the three national parties in British politics at the start of the campaign are highlighted. Using a basic positioning model, the positioning strategies followed during the campaign itself are then discussed, both in terms of policies and image/emotional positioning approaches. The attempts by the opposition parties to reposition Labour and the latter's defensive reactions are discussed at this point. Then, the way the wider positioning of the parties was targeted at electoral segments is considered. The paper concludes with an attempt to explain the election result in terms of the relative success or failure of the positioning strategies adopted.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

From Cattle and Coke to Charlie: Meeting the Challenge of Self Marketing and Personal Branding

Since the late 1990s, self marketing and personal branding have become increasingly popular as subjects of self-improvement books, Web sites and consultancy services, especially in the USA. To date, little of this interest appears to have permeated the discipline of marketing, either in terms of formal research, textbook contents or academic curricula. This paper examines the theoretical basis of self marketing and personal branding, identifies some of the conceptual, practical and ethical problems it poses for the discipline, and points to some of the challenges facing higher education in attempting to create a curricular framework within which marketing professionals can learn how to market and brand themselves effectively.     

Targeting Young Voters in a Political Campaign: Empirical Insights into an Interactive Digital Marketing Campaign in the 2007 Finnish General Election

At general elections across Europe, turnout among young people tends to be significantly lower than among older voters. Therefore, this article examines a digital marketing campaign that was targeted at young voters in the 2007 Finnish general election. More specifically, this article aims to provide insights into the creative development process of a political marketing campaign and the nature of the client-agency relationship in political campaigns. The methodology adopted in this article consisted of in-depth interviews with key informants involved in the campaign planning and implementation. The results provide new empirical insights into the challenges that political campaigner may face when they target political marketing at young voters. In addition, the results suggest that there are differences between commercial and political marketing also in a digital marketing context. Finally, the results support the view that marketing professionals have a strong role in a creative development process of a political marketing campaign. The ideas put forth herein can certainly help advertising professionals to plan political marketing campaigns that engage young people in future elections and therefore aid candidates in their quest to achieve electoral success.     

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.     

Interpreting discourse: a critical discourse analysis of the marketing of an extreme right party

Viewing marketing as an ideological discourse that places consumption in a central position in people's lives provides further insights into the construction of political marketing discourse. Politicians and political parties now follow the 'logic of the market' in their attempts to connect with voters. Critical discourse analysis can be used in general to study the nature of political marketing discourse and specifically to document the web of identities and power relations that this discourse reproduces. To illustrate this application of theory we examine the marketing of the Vlaams Blok, a successful Flemish extreme-right party. The Vlaams Blok provides a good example of how the adoption of a marketing approach is used in politics, especially in the way a political party communicates to a wide audience using market logic. The analysis echoes approaches used by advertising and marketing communications scholars and highlights the strategic use of lexical, rhetorical and other linguistic devices to brand, sell and differentiate the Vlaams Blok from other political products. The analysis demonstrates that the Vlaams Blok creates a ready-to-consume product that achieves success at the electoral 'checkout'. We set the stage for marketing scholars to help both further understand how marketing methods are deployed with increasing sophistication outside the traditional domain of marketing, and to consider the consequences of a marketing discourse in the civic sphere.     

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.     

The Past,Present and Future of Relationship Marketing

In the light of the redefinition of 'marketing' by the AMA in service/relational terms, and a recent review of the current vector of research in marketing (Littler and Tynan 2005), it seems an appropriate time to provide a substantial review of the past, present and likely future of what has become known as Relationship Marketing, together with an extensive list of key RM literature. This paper will take a reader through the origin, development and current state of RM research, with notes on the future of the research and practice of RM. The paper concludes that RM is here to stay, whether or not it is recognised as the dominant logic/paradigm of marketing.     

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.     

Marketing and Conflicting Dates for its Emergence: Hotchkiss,Bartels, the 'Fifties School' and Alternative Accounts

This paper initially examines three lines of argument on the emergence of the marketing construct: the works of Hotchkiss and of Bartels and the textual monographs that proliferated during the second half of the last century. Each puts forward a different commencement date for marketing and different subsequent periodisations. The paper then considers observations on the marketing construct from postmodernists, critical theorists, anthropologists and historians. These accounts do not share a common definition of the term 'marketing'. Scholarship both within and beyond the marketing domain may be providing deeper and more relevant insights into its origins.     

Corporate Identity and the Advent of Corporate Marketing

This paper places corporate identity studies in a historical context with the writer arguing that there have been four distinct phases in the area's evolution. Currently, there is increasing international and interdisciplinary contact between scholars engaged in identity research. Recent developments have led the writer to postulate that the literature on corporate identity, organisational identity and corporate communication may be regarded as forming the basic building blocks of a new, cognate area of management which in time may be known as Corporate Marketing.

However, the marketing mix as applied to organisations in their totality will need to be rethought. In this paper the 4Ps are extended to 10Ps with philosophy, personality, people, performance, perception and positioning complementing the existing 4Ps. In addition, the author identifies nine key interfaces, which need to be examined by managers and consultants when reviewing an organisation's identity. Such interfaces represent 'moments of truth' for an organisation's senior management when evaluating their organisation's identity.     

Co-operation and Collusion: Making the Distinction in Marketing Relationships

Co-operative relationships between organisations may create added value for the partners involved, but they can also pose a threat to the competitiveness of markets. This paper reviews the economic and legal frameworks of co-operative marketing relationships and seeks to distinguish these from collusive relationships. A model of development from competition to co-operation to collusion is proposed, in which definitions of collusion are continually evolving in response to environmental change. This paper seeks to reconcile the benefits accruing to businesses involved in co-operative relationships, with the possible welfare loss resulting from restrictive relationships. Conceptual frameworks underlying buyer-seller relationships are evaluated from the perspective of models of economic efficiency and legal frameworks. A number of recent cases are evaluated in the context of this discussion.