ABSTRACT
Political marketing – the utilization of commercial marketing techniques and concepts in politics – is being used to varying degrees around the world. Many political parties conduct market intelligence in the form of polls or focus groups and use it to inform the way they present their policies to the voting public. However, not only do parties use marketing techniques to sell themselves and their policies, they also use marketing to decide what to offer the public in the first place – what policies to adopt, which leaders to select to best present those policies, and how to best communicate policy delivery. Political marketing, then, is not just about ‘spin’ and public relations during the electoral campaign. It is much more than that. Parties can utilize a range of marketing tools including voter profiling, segmentation, micro-targeting and e-marketing to inform their communication. They can also respond to market intelligence in the way they design the political product they offer, becoming market-oriented rather than primarily sales-oriented.
