What is political marketing?

This chapter will explain how marketing can be applied to politics, its origins in marketing literature and subsequent development, along with the main debates and differences in the field. It will also outline the basics tenets of political marketing, which will be explored in greater detail in the following chapters. Like all areas of academic literature, there is a debate about what political marketing involves. It has also suffered from conventional views that it is nothing more than spin/media management or election campaigns, even though the marketing discipline offers a far broader array of concepts and ideas that can be applied to politics, and, in practice, a much broader range of marketing permeates politics. Although the chapter is primarily theoretical, it is important that this is considered as a basis for studying political marketing, given the different sources, points of view and disciplinary perspectives covered in the rest of the book.