Lobbying organizations often decide to take a particular issue to the country-as Americans would say, “beyond the Washington Beltway.” In practical terms, this very often involves persuading an organization’s members or supporters at large to themselves lobby politicians by contacting them to urge that they support or oppose a policy proposal (known as grass roots lobbying). Thus, interest groups seek to market their policy preferences firstly internally within their own organization, and then externally when the group’s members themselves communicate with politicians. As one academic puts it:

Although there is no real formal definition of the tactic, popular and scholarly accounts alike consider grass roots or outside lobbying to be any type of action that attempts to influence insidethe-beltway inhabitants by influencing the attitudes or behavior of outside-the-beltway inhabitants. (Goldstein 1999, p. 3)

Grass roots campaigns tend to relate to large, national, public issues which could impact on many people, while the resolution of

more technical and detailed issues may be better suited to direct and private advocacy. Therefore, some organizations have automatic advantages-they may be based on a mass individual membership (and hence have ready access to large numbers of potential activists); their membership may be geographically spread (for instance, Gimpel (1998, p. 102) remarks that, “members of Congress are far more likely to open their doors if the grassroots organization has a chapter in their district”) thus giving legitimate access to large numbers of legislators; or their issue may be one which affects large numbers of people. However, it should be noted that most grass roots campaigns are not undertaken simply as ends in themselves, but rather as a way of supplementing and reinforcing more traditional “insider” lobbying strategies. As one academic puts it, “Direct lobbying becomes much more effective when it is supported by an articulate public” (Holtzman 1966, p. 100). Jim Donofrio, the head of the Recreational Fishing Alliance (RFA) in the United States, has told the author that:

Tip O’Neill’s book, All Politics Is Local, really tells how our system works. . . . If I go to see a Member of Congress from Oregon, the first question he will ask is, “How many members of the RFA do you have in Oregon, and do any of your members really care about the issue?” “All politics is local” means that I have to get on the phone before I go over there and get some political cover-somebody from Oregon should be sending a letter in and backing up our visit-because otherwise it does not mean anything to that Member of Congress. He wants to know how his voters feel about the issue, how it is playing back home in the district. (cited in McGrath 2005, pp. 247-248)

GRASS ROOTS CAMPAIGNS AND POLITICAL MARKETING

Political marketing has become an increasingly popular area for academic research over the last decade in both the United States and the United Kingdom. However, study of the relationship between political marketing and lobbying is a relatively small subset of this general field. A lengthy review of the political marketing literature by Scammell (1999), for instance, makes no direct mention of interest groups. In a more recent article outlining the main criticisms made of

current political marketing research, Henneberg agrees with the proposition that the field has been, “overly focused on one aspect of marketing theory (i.e., communication) as part of an election campaign. Political campaigns and political marketing activities are often exclusively defined through their communication content and the media vehicles employed” (2004, p. 235). A similar point has been made by another academic:

Pure concentration on campaigning or marketing techniques will only take us so far. While such a locus of study is a good place to go, we must be careful not to rest there too long and miss the broader (if longer) journey to apply marketing to all areas of politics. (Lees-Marshment 2003a, p. 29)

Even when political marketing does turn its attention away from electoral campaigns and media relations by political parties, its gaze tends not to be directed toward interest groups and lobbyists. As Harris has remarked (1999, p. 13): “The impact of corporate lobbying as a form of marketing communication is largely unresearched and this is rarely mentioned in the literature.” Moreover, searching through the relatively small amount of political marketing literature on lobbying reveals that even that work tends to focus on questions around the recruitment and retention of members and the provision of benefits to members by groups. Very little research indeed has been undertaken to date on how political marketing theory can explain or illustrate the representation of interests by lobbyists or their policy-influencing activities. Political marketing has been developed to a tremendous extent over the last fifteen years, and yet the gaps in this research have been described as, “like a newly discovered gold mine just waiting to be exploited” (Lees-Marshment 2003a, p. 3). The fundamental contention here is that one of the most potentially valuable seams of this mine is future research into lobbying activity.