ABSTRACT
Political Marketing in the United States has demonstrated the far-reaching permeation of politics and government by marketing methods such as branding, market-oriented strategy, research, targeting, relationship marketing, and delivery management by government, parties, and candidates at the federal, congressional, and state level. Political marketing offers politicians and political organizations tools to better understand, respond to, organize, and communicate with their public— whether voters or volunteers—in order to win power but also, once in office, to implement policy. The first book dedicated to researching political marketing in the United States itself, this volume conveys the wide-ranging and multifaceted nature of how marketing influences politics. It demonstrates the distinctiveness of political marketing from campaigning and advertising, and showcases new trends—such as how different areas of political marketing overlap each other in practice. Experimental market testing of communication will always be limited in its effectiveness by the quality of the political brand; using online forms of communication is less impactful without the integration of relationship marketing concepts; and delivery marketing is necessary but constrained by the realities of government. But despite the complexities and challenges, practitioners will continue to use political marketing in every area of politics, and it is important that academic researchers study and understand their activities. Political marketing as an academic discipline offers objective, independent, and wide-ranging analysis of their activities that is not intended to support a particular party or point of view, or drive a news cycle. This concluding chapter will collate and synthesize the findings from the individual chapters as to the trends they show in US political marketing before discussing the democratic implications of political marketing and commenting on the potential for future research.
