Political Marketing

Abstract

The first use of the term political marketing has been attributed to political scientist Stanley Kelley in his book on Professional Public Relations and Political Power (Kelley 1956, cited under Core Texts, p. 53), in which he describes the growing importance of “the public relations man” (p. vii) in political campaigns. Thus, Kelley’s book was also an early account of the rise of the new profession of political consultants and the increasing differentiation of campaign tasks. However, it took another ten to fifteen years until political marketing became gradually acknowledged as a new perspective in the field, and marketing experts such as Philip Kotler promoted the incorporation of the marketing of organizations, persons, and ideas into marketing thought and theory. The early advocates of an extension of the concept of marketing to the political realm had no doubt that commercial and political marketing followed the same principles and that alleged differences were overstated. However, political marketing soon developed into a field of its own that is informed by three parent disciplines: marketing, political science, and communication. At the same time, political marketing, which became regarded both as a discipline and as an activity, moved away from the transactional perspective of commercial marketing to exchange models, which are better adapted to the political environment. The early writings closely associated political marketing with election campaigning. Given that the field is still very much dominated by Anglo-Saxon literature, this association also meant a strong focus on the candidate-oriented US political system or the first-past-the-post voting system of the United Kingdom. With political scientists and, though still to a minor extent, communication scholars gaining more and more ground in the field, political marketing not only broadens the perspective beyond the electoral process but also opens up for other political and media systems.