Political marketing strategy

Political marketing involves a number of activities, but one of the first things to learn is that it is also about strategy: how parties, candidates and governments think and plan in order to achieve their goals. As Barber (2005: 212) argued, strategy is about ‘the forming of objectives and implementing the tasks necessary to achieve those objectives with a pattern of consistency over time given the limitations of available resources’. Strategy is not easily discernible, either in business or politics. It also is rarely fixed and needs to be flexible to changing circumstances; see Practitioner perspective 3.1.