ABSTRACT

Political marketing strategy is about how parties, candidates and governments think and plan in order to achieve their goals. Political marketers are increasingly engaging in more and more sophisticated and data-driven approaches that allow for highly refined targeting strategies. Some states, including larger and critically important swing states, have a high proportion of seniors, and it is thus quite worthwhile for political marketers to target them. A key challenge for parties and political organisations is not only determining how to position themselves in relation to a targeted group, and, if necessary, how to counter competing narratives, but actually discerning how effective they have been in conveying the intended message. There are several models of market-orientation in politics: Bruce I. Newman’s model of political marketing based in the US, Jennifer Lees-Marshment’s Market-Oriented Party framework based in the UK and Robert P. Ormrod’s Political Market-Orientation Model, which is European.