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Becoming a political marketer isn’t simple, but it’s far from impossible. Bridging the gap between marketing and politics requires a deep knowledge of political systems and the marketing savvy to achieve your goals using the mainstream media. As much as we might like to think we vote based on the policy each candidate puts forward before an election, the votes we (and millions of others) place are shaped by carefully targeted and highly optimized political marketing campaigns.
From talk show appearances to direct mail leaflets, a wide variety of techniques are used to influence public opinion of a political party, policy or candidate. In this blog post, we’ll explain five of the most popular and effective political marketing tactics. Before you start marketing your party or candidate, you’ll need to prepare a public relations strategy.
The most important aspect of any political campaign is the narrative. The narrative is the story behind a candidate – their history, their beliefs, their personality and all of the traits and characteristics that make them worth voting for. Creating a narrative is a branding strategy not unlike the tactics used by companies such as Nike and Apple. Instead of a product or company becoming a brand, a party or political candidate becomes a marketable brand that people can relate to.
Social media is one of the most effective platforms for raising awareness of political issues, encouraging people to vote, and promoting political candidates. Since social media is primarily used by young people, it’s a great platform for energizing a voter demographic that’s typically uninterested in mainstream politics. Political marketers use a variety of strategies to connect with potential voters using social media. These techniques range from honest and direct – such as operating an independent Facebook page – to misleading, dishonest and manipulative. One of the most effective ways to generate support for a particular candidate using social media is to building a Facebook Page for the party or candidate. This allows a political marketer to reach thousands – or, in the case of a large party – millions of potential voters using status updates, messages and event invitations. While a Facebook Page lets you connect with people that are already interested in your party or candidate, it doesn’t allow you to expand your base easily. One of the best ways to attract new supporters is through the use of viral memes and videos. Facebook and Twitter users love to share funny images, interesting videos and other content that relates to hot political issues. By creating viral videos and pictures, you can raise awareness of your candidate – or a hot political issue – organically.
Winning an election requires your candidate getting more votes than their closest competitor. There are two ways to achieve this: bring attention to the good things your candidate will do, and bring attention to the bad things their competitor will do. Negative campaigning is a form of political marketing that focuses on convincing voters not to vote for your candidate’s competitor. The most well known form of negative campaign is the attack advertisement – ads that talk about a candidate’s record of dodgy dealings, their questionable history or their political failures. While negative campaigning might seem dirty and unsportsmanlike, it has a wide range of benefits. Since negative campaign is targeted towards those likely to vote for your competitor, it can sway these voters into changing their mind and shifting over to your candidate’s side. Negative campaigning usually takes the form of television ads, newspaper columns, political debates and direct marketing. Social media is increasingly being used as a negative campaigning platform, with “Reasons not to vote for _____”starting to show up on Facebook and Twitter during recent elections.
Although social media and television are the best platforms for connecting with the younger generation of voters, many people still respond very well to old-fashioned direct mail marketing. Brochures, leaflets, short form manifestos and other direct mail documents are all excellent tools for persuading people in a particular geographical area to vote for a certain candidate, party or policy. Since direct mail is geographically targeted, it’s an extremely powerful marketing tactic for energizing a voter base prior to a local mayoral or council election. With the right amount of leaflets, yard signs and public rallies, towns and boroughs can swing election results and give your party or candidate a significant advantage. Like all other forms of political marketing, direct mail marketing needs to reinforce the narrative you’ve created around a party, policy or candidate. It needs to focus on your benefits, your strategies for improving the community, and the advantages you and your party can offer over your competitors.
Old media platforms such as television and radio attract massive audiences, making them valuable tools in any political marketing platform. Being able to organize radio and TV appearances is one of the most important tasks of any political marketer. Connecting with media insiders might seem difficult, but it’s surprisingly easy once you start thinking of media companies as groups of individuals instead of monolithic entities. With the right pitch, the right person, and the right strategy, you can easily earn massive amounts of publicity for your policy, party or candidate.
Political marketing strategy is about how parties, candidates and governments think and plan in order to achieve their goals. It requires consideration of many different factors such as the nature of the market, history, culture, governance, stakeholders, competitors, resources and goals. It includes targeting, positioning strategies, attack and defense strategies, sales and market orientations, populist strategies, strategy and the environment, measuring and implementing strategy.
The major political parties in the developed world are beginning to embrace the marketing concept and process. The UK Conservative Party has used the services of Saatchi and Saatchi in thes, as did the Irish President, Mary Robinson in her campaign in thes (Dunnion,). The British Labour Party has incorporated focus groups in its’s activities (see Gould,). In Germany, the Green Party and SPD used marketing management techniques to defeat Helmut Kohl (Baines et al.,a). Nevertheless, marketing planning for political parties has, until now, been neglected in the literature and there appears to be a lack of consideration of the strategic components associated with political marketing campaigns (Butler and Collins,; Farrell,; O’Cass,; Baines et al.,b).
In this question answer, all findings from a recent research investigation, which focused on developing a marketing planning model for political parties in the UK, are outlined. The research incorporates discussion of campaigning techniques with UK Members of Parliament and senior party workers and outlines a marketing planning framework for political parties. Discussion of this model includes: information gathering and constituency identification, competition and voting group determination, party positioning and voter group targeting, and post-election analysis.
Political marketing as an academic discipline is a relatively new and embryonic area. Most current definitions of political marketing (Shama,; Lock and Harris,; Wring,) identify the political marketing process as concerned more with the communication process between voters and political entities (either parties or candidates) neglecting organisational components.
The relevance of particular aspects of marketing theory for political entities has been illustrated by numerous authors, e.g. the relevance of the marketing mix for political parties (O’Leary and Iredale,), and the use of ACORN as a segmentation base for voter targeting (Yorke and Meehan,). However, as Smith and Saunders () have identified, it is through the more strategic use of marketing techniques that the target markets’ wants and needs, and the necessary policy decision-making to satisfy these wants more effectively, will truly emerge. In order to bridge the gap between what the voters want from a potential government and what candidates and parties propose (whilst still generating ideologically credible policy and image platforms), the use of marketing planning is advocated. Lock and Harris () have suggested that` `political marketing as a discipline has to develop its own frameworks, adapting those from the core marketing literature and, second, that it has to develop its own predictive and prescriptive models if it is to inform and influence political action’’. The model, put forward in this paper, which illustrates co-ordinated campaigning is intended to adhere to this theme and serve the purpose of ensuring that political parties compete for public support[1] more efficiently and effectively.
The arguments that political campaigns cannot run on a strategic level fail to recognise the significant efforts of the US Republican Party in thes, and the British Labour Party in thes ± both of which had had poor party images ± to rebuild their reputations and improve their electoral success through the combined use of polling, qualitative research, coherent advertising themes, and effective strategy teams focusing on message development and deployment, and party re-organisation. The timescale of conducting such campaigns stretches beyond the formal election campaign period (four or five weeks in the UK, one year in the USA). The UK Labour Party put together a campaign management team in for the election (Smith,).
Not surprisingly, there are aspects of the political campaigning process that are described more effectively using concepts from political science rather than marketing. Particularly pertinent examples of these phenomena include: ticket-splitting (where voters vote for a different party for two or more political offices, i.e. the USA especially); traditional, personal and tactical voting behaviour from a consumer behavior perspective (phenomenon particularly associated with the UK); canvassing (particularly in less developed countries such as Namibia); and comparative and negative advertising from a communications standpoint (stronger in the USA).
From a competitive perspective, political parties operate in situations which are relatively more akin to an oligopoly than the general consumer marketing perspective generally (though not necessarily) associated with more perfect competition. Nevertheless, there are many similarities between political marketing and traditional fast moving consumer goods marketing (FMCG) and it can be argued that the differences have been overstated (see Egan,).
Nevertheless, in the light of these apparent differences between the two subject disciplines (Butler and Collins,; Lock and Harris,), and the fact that there appears to be a high degree of synergy between political campaigning and marketing (Mandelson,; O’Cass,), there is a need to determine the area of overlap between marketing and political campaigning as techniques for informing, communicating with, ``connecting’’ with, persuading and reaching the electorate (and citizens generally) inside and outside an election cycle. Earlier political marketing
Agree With Ms. Ghada .
Thanks for the invite, I agree with the answer Mrs. Ghada
Agree with ghada evada answer
Agree with Ghada Eweda Medical sales hospital representative
It is about using marketing in order to achieve political goals .. Or it is about using politics to influence marketing plan and strategy !
Thank You
As much as we might like to think we vote based on the policy each candidate puts forward before an election, the votes we (and millions of others) place are shaped by carefully targeted and highly optimized political marketing campaigns.
From talk show appearances to direct mail leaflets, a wide variety of techniques are used to influence public opinion of a political party, policy or candidate. In this blog post, we’ll explain five of the most popular and effective political marketing tactics.
Ready to start? Before you start marketing your party or candidate, you’ll need to prepare a public relations strategy. Learn how to deal with the media and generate buzz for your political candidate in our Public Relations Rules to Live By course.
Developing a narrativeThe most important aspect of any political campaign is the narrative. The narrative is the story behind a candidate – their history, their beliefs, their personality and all of the traits and characteristics that make them worth voting for.
In the 2008 Presidential Election, two narratives competed against each other in the public arena. John McCain’s narrative was that of a proud war veteran made serious sacrifices for his country.
Barack Obama’s narrative, on the other hand, was that of a political outsider whose fresh approach and focus on creating real change would transform politics. Each of the candidates’ narratives shaped every other aspect of their political marketing.
Crafting a narrative that your voter base can relate to is one of the most important elements of running a political marketing campaign. A good narrative needs to be believable and relevant to the audience whose support you’re campaign for.
Other examples of a political narrative include the change in the brand of the UK’s Labour Party prior to the 1997 general election. Under Tony Blair, the narrative of the party changed from being an ‘old-fashioned’ left wing party to a more centrist party focused on refreshing and energizing British politics.
Creating a narrative is a branding strategy not unlike the tactics used by companies such as Nike and Apple. Instead of a product or company becoming a brand, a party or political candidate becomes a marketable brand that people can relate to.
Would you like to learn more about creating a narrative that people respond to and remember? Learn the fundamentals of branding yourself or your political party with Branding: How to Brand Yourself and Your Business.
Social media marketingSocial media is one of the most effective platforms for raising awareness of political issues, encouraging people to vote, and promoting political candidates. Since social media is primarily used by young people, it’s a great platform for energizing a voter demographic that’s typically uninterested in mainstream politics.
Political marketers use a variety of strategies to connect with potential voters using social media. These techniques range from honest and direct – such as operating an independent Facebook page – to misleading, dishonest and manipulative.
One of the most effective ways to generate support for a particular candidate using social media is to building a Facebook Page for the party or candidate. This allows a political marketer to reach thousands – or, in the case of a large party – millions of potential voters using status updates, messages and event invitations.
Do you think a Facebook Page could help you connect with your voter base? Learn how to create and market a Facebook Page for your party or candidate to connect with thousands of voters in our Social Media Management course.
While a Facebook Page lets you connect with people that are already interested in your party or candidate, it doesn’t allow you to expand your base easily. One of the best ways to attract new supporters is through the use of viral memes and videos.
Facebook and Twitter users love to share funny images, interesting videos and other content that relates to hot political issues. By creating viral videos and pictures, you can raise awareness of your candidate – or a hot political issue – organically.
Engineering virality is difficult, and trying too hard to make a video or image go viral can often have the opposite of the intended effect. The best viral videos look natural – they’re neither overly positive or overly negative about their subject matter.
Do you want to generate millions of views and attract thousands of new supporters with a viral image or video? Learn how to create viral content that spreads with our course, Create Awesome Videos That Thrive on Social Media & YouTube.
Negative campaigningWinning an election requires your candidate getting more votes than their closest competitor. There are two ways to achieve this: bring attention to the good things your candidate will do, and bring attention to the bad things their competitor will do.
Negative campaigning is a form of political marketing that focuses on convincing voters not to vote for your candidate’s competitor. The most well known form of negative campaign is the attack advertisement – ads that talk about a candidate’s record of dodgy dealings, their questionable history or their political failures.
While negative campaigning might seem dirty and unsportsmanlike, it has a wide range of benefits. Since negative campaign is targeted towards those likely to vote for your competitor, it can sway these voters into changing their mind and shifting over to your candidate’s side.
Negative campaigning usually takes the form of television ads, newspaper columns, political debates and direct marketing. Social media is increasingly being used as a negative campaigning platform, with “Reasons not to vote for _____” starting to show up on Facebook and Twitter during recent elections.
Although it can be incredibly effective when done right, negative marketing can be ineffective without the positive campaign to support it. Learn how to develop a full marketing campaign that balances positive advertising and negative campaigning with our guide to Marketing Strategy.
Direct mail marketingAlthough social media and television are the best platforms for connecting with the younger generation of voters, many people still respond very well to old-fashioned direct mail marketing.
Brochures, leaflets, short form manifestos and other direct mail documents are all excellent tools for persuading people in a particular geographical area to vote for a certain candidate, party or policy.
Since direct mail is geographically targeted, it’s an extremely powerful marketing tactic for energizing a voter base prior to a local mayoral or council election. With the right amount of leaflets, yard signs and public rallies, towns and boroughs can swing election results and give your party or candidate a significant advantage.
Like all other forms of political marketing, direct mail marketing needs to reinforce the narrative you’ve created around a party, policy or candidate. It needs to focus on your benefits, your strategies for improving the community, and the advantages you and your party can offer over your competitors.
At its heart, direct mail marketing – whether it’s for a political campaign or a brand new product – is all about data. Learn how to use income data, previous vote history and other variables to craft targeted direct mail campaigns with Fundamentals of Direct Marketing: Practices That Profit.
Media and public relationsOld media platforms such as television and radio attract massive audiences, making them valuable tools in any political marketing platform. Being able to organize radio and TV appearances is one of the most important tasks of any political marketer.
Connecting with media insiders might seem difficult, but it’s surprisingly easy once you start thinking of media companies as groups of individuals instead of monolithic entities. With the right pitch, the right person, and the right strategy, you can easily earn massive amounts of publicity for your policy, party or candidate.
Are you completely new to the world of television, radio and print media? Learn the secrets to connecting with journalists, pitching your stories and earning airtime on a wide range of networks in our Media Training and Public Relations course.
How can you become a political marketer?Becoming a political marketer isn’t simple, but it’s far from impossible. Bridging the gap between marketing and politics requires a deep knowledge of political systems and the marketing savvy to achieve your goals using the mainstream media.
Agree With Mrs. Ghada for his detailed answer. Thanks
Thanks for invitation
I am apologies to answer this question because it's not my specialist field
