Chapter 3: A Theory of Political Marketing – Political Marketing as Social Control

If political marketing is the reason our government communicates with us in salespeak, then we need to know what political marketing really is. To do this we will examine its origins and then look at how it works in theory and practice. The conclusion is that although it purports to measure public opinion and translate this opinion into policy, in reality, it takes public opinion and uses it primarily to communicate policy a certain way.

The origins of political marketing actually began with what Terrence Qualter terms the “mass age”. As he explained, “prior to the liberal ideological revolution of the 18th Century and the consequent spread of egalitarian and majoritarian ideas, it did not really much matter what the public thought” . But as these ideologies became revolutions, forming the basis of more democratic governments and the enfranchisement of millions of people, suddenly it mattered what the public thought. Governments had to at least maintain the appearance of popular support, or risk being overthrown, and the only way to do this was with increasingly sophisticated forms of manipulation .

Scammel and Lees-Marshment show how these forms of manipulation (though they would not use such a strong word) in both business and politics, went through three successive stages in the 20th Century:

1) Product oriented – The party or company puts out the best product it can and assumes it will sell.
2) Sales oriented – The party or company tries to make people want what it has to offer by using general forms of communication, including various media and advertising.
3) Market oriented – The party or company uses market intelligence to find out what the customer wants, and then creates or modifies its product to suit these wants.

Marketing became the cornerstone of business philosophy because of the shift in market power from the seller to the buyer . When marketing was applied to politics, marketing language came with it: the “consumer” or “customer” is the voter, and the “product” is the party and/or party leader, platform, and policies. The political process became an “exchange” relationship – you give them your vote, and they will give you their “product”. Their credibility is based on their ability to “deliver”.

Lees-Marshment and Lilleker conducted comparative studies of political marketing, and observed that a market-oriented party goes through nine stages :

1) Market intelligence - To find out what “consumers” want, governments and their public relations firms use mostly polls and focus groups. Polls collect the quantitative or raw data, but focus groups are needed to gauge how people feel about something.
2) Product design - The “product” is designed according to the intelligence gathered.
3) Product Adjustment - The party looks to its values, its history, and the input of its members to decide if the “product” design is suitable. It considers how this “product” will look compared to the “product” of other parties.
4) Implementation - The “product” design is accepted.
5) Communication – The “product” is put out to the public, media, members of the party, and government. Intelligence informs the style, format, content, method, and timing of this communication.
6) Campaign – The party campaigns with “targeted” voter segments in mind.
7) Election and measurement – If political marketing is successful so far, the party is elected. Then the party conducts opinion polls and focus groups to confirm positive feedback on aspects of their “product”.
8 ) “Delivery” – The party does what it says it was going to do.
9) Maintain a market orientation – The party continues to gather market intelligence and adjust the “product” as needed. Communication of the current “product” and future “products” continues, as part of what has been called the “permanent campaign” .

It is important to note that not all parties, and not all companies for that matter, are market-oriented companies, although they may participate in some marketing processes, such as accessing market intelligence. Lees-Marshment and Lilleker contend that a true market-oriented party will go through all nine stages listed above.

It is the communication stage with which we are most concerned. The same way the marketers of Apple’s iPod made sure their commercials targeted youth and not grannies, political marketers want to make sure they target people who are willing to “exchange” their vote for political representation. This process is known as segmentation. In politics, as opposed to business, it is more difficult to segment, because ideally, you want to reach everybody. This is why, as Johnson-Cartee and Copeland point out, segmentation in political marketing is simply “identifying those publics so that as communicators we can adapt our message for maximum effect” . But segmentation today goes beyond the traditional geographic and demographic methods, and since around 1990 has increasingly used psychographic / attitudinal bases to classify political markets . Once market research and segmentation are complete, it is time for “product positioning”, or more simply, the presentation of images and messages appropriate to its “target markets”. And although parties and governments still try to have a “product” for everybody – youth, working poor, “single-parent families” (single mothers), yuppies, seniors, etc, - there is evidence to suggest that they predominantly position themselves according to various points on the political spectrum . For example, Canada’s New Democratic Party, the largest left-wing party in Canada, might position itself according to segments such as “Radical left”, “moderate left”, “Green left”, “Old NDP”, “Left-leaning Liberals”, etc. This way it could garner as much of the relevant left-wing vote as possible.

Political marketing has now become a sub-discipline of political science. Many scholars who write about political marketing seem in awe of it, and treat it like a new house, excitedly exploring the rooms, arranging furniture, figuring out what goes where, and how everything will work, or should work. There are few who bother to find out how political marketing is actually working, and how it negatively affects democracy. Essentially, the sub-discipline of political marketing rarely recognizes problems with the parallel between business marketing and political marketing, and what is worse, some scholars go on to improve the process of political marketing without realizing the consequences.

Palmer finds six problems with the parallel between normal marketing and political marketing, and I have added some examples.

1) In politics, the “product” only has symbolic value, and the range of products is very limited. For example, whereas a car company can usually offer a coupe, sedan, hatchback, different coloured cars with different features, etc, the political product is one intangible thing.
2) The political “product” makes people very emotional, whereas nobody dances on the street or protests when Pepsi releases a new soda.
3) There are negative “consumers” in politics who prefer the competition’s “product” just to deny you a “sale”. This would make about as much sense in the real consumer world as buying a bag of Hostess potato chips out of spite for Old Dutch when your real preference is Pringles.
4) It is more difficult to gauge what political “consumers” want, and the research is not very well funded. “Product positioning” in politics is more likely to fail because situations change so quickly. For example, a record company can safely release radio-friendly alternative-rock albums and feel confident that the market for radio-friendly alternative-rock will not disappear overnight. Political parties tend not to “position” themselves in any clear sense because public opinion can shift so quickly.
5) “Re-branding” in politics is complex due to the role of ideology. Changing a party logo, giving the party leader a makeover, or putting rap music in party advertisements implies that the party actually does something it did not do before. Such “re-branding” can alienate long-time party supporters. In contrast, when a company re-brands a consumer product, the re-branding is interpreted as saying “this product is for you too”.

O’Shaughnessy agrees that “marketing is fundamentally a business discipline, whose supreme relevance lies in business” and adds to the list of differences:

1) Political “products” are given a lot of time, consideration, and discussion in the media.
2) It is comparatively rare that a business or company will need so much “spin” to defend its product.
3) Political products are about identity and self-articulation .

We can contest the last point because it is well known that consumer products also sell identity. For example, when you eat a “frozen entrée”, better known as a TV dinner, you are not just somebody eating frozen food out of a cardboard envelope, you are somebody who is “on-the-go”.

The biggest difference, however, between real marketing and political marketing is this: real marketing finds out what we want, and then sells us that thing. Political marketing, as we will soon see, finds out what we want only so that parties and governments can make it look and sound like we are getting what we want.

This goes against Lees-Marshment’s assertion that political marketing “does not attempt to change what people think, but to deliver what they need and want” . And, of course, if we are not in reality getting what we want, but only getting the impression that we are getting what we want, then Lees-Marshment and Lilleker’s claim that political marketing makes politics a “more satisfying process for the electorate” is misleading.

Market-oriented parties are obviously primarily concerned with winning or holding power. In this situation, Qualter explains that ideologies become flexible, and policies are no longer moral commitments, just things that are useful in attracting voter support .

Research by Worcester and Baines, Lilleker and Negrine, and Bowler and Farrell shows that market intelligence is not being used to inform policy, it is just being used to communicate policy in different ways. As Bowler and Farrell suggest, “polls don’t ask voters what they want, they only seek reactions to what they have already decided to do” . And depending on this reaction, the words and terms used to describe the policy may change, but its substance stays the same.

In Lilleker and Negrine’s studies of British government insiders, a common theme was that political marketing was more a matter of:

developing policy and then finding out the values out there on the street, and then reflecting those values in any communication on that policy. It is taking the right language, (and) convincing voters that you share their concerns and can offer a viable solution .

Data from polls and focus groups is being used to brush up the look and feel of the policy; nothing more. We can at least be fairly certain that market intelligence does not directly affect the policy process, because as one British Conservative MP stated in an interview, “I do listen, but I don’t know how I use all the stuff I hear” . And when we seriously consider how a pure market-orientation would affect policy, the notion seems absurd. There are enough opinions out there to convince any market intelligence analyst that we want everything at once, even if the things we want contradict each other - for example, lower taxes and more or improved government services. Even for a business, a pure market orientation would be unrealistic, because the range of products would be limited by consumers’ imaginations. Evidence suggests that many products, including some of the most original and popular products like the Sony Walkman, were created in defiance of market research . And in defiance of data gathered in political marketing intelligence, our parties and governments have already prepared and “delivered” their “product”. All that is left is to make us think we got what we wanted.

The evidence should make us reconsider Lees-Marshment’s stages of political marketing. Lilleker and Negrine go so far as to say that all parties are actually product or sales-oriented . The figure below better represents what actually happens in political marketing.

Product Design –> Market Intelligence –> Communication

If our parties and governments are not actually gathering market intelligence, and then basing their policies on that data, we are not really talking about marketing at all. We are talking about trickery and manipulation; a hidden type of social control embedded in communication that acts like a mirror, reflecting our own images and desires back towards us. We have no reason to vote for another party, or to protest, because there are public communications firms, policy departments, and other experts at work making sure we think we got what we wanted. Real political marketing is therefore something that happens when the only thing that matters is getting elected or re-elected.

The idea that public opinion is not being used to affect policy is not new. Brooks studied the effect of public opinion on policy in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, and found that in most cases (58% overall, and 61% in Canada) the government does something that goes against public opinion . Judging by what our governments and parties tell us, we would never know that our opinion mattered so little. This is what makes political communication the key.

Nonetheless, there are some scholars who not only accept the activity of political marketing as it is normally understood, but try to find ways to improve the abilities of parties and governments to conduct political marketing. Smith and Hirst, for example, believe that a new approach is needed now that we are entering the “strategic marketing era” in politics. This new approach is “strategic political segmentation”, and it involves segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) that “promises better targeted policies towards identified and attractive segments” . With this procedure, the authors are able to “segment” the British “political market” (people) into seven distinctive groupings: “Old Labour”, “Feel Gooders, “Tory Mainstreamers”, “Labour Nationalists”, “Underwhelmed Loyals”, “Light Green Lefties”, and “Champagne Socialists” . Why bother with all this? As the authors explain, this research will “offer an opportunity for each party to communicate their policies more effectively to the electorate” (emphasis added). The key word is “communicate”. While Smith and Hirst come up with better ways to conduct political marketing, they implicitly acknowledge that it is primarily about communicating policy in certain ways, not about making policy itself.

In “The Permanent Campaign: The Integration of Market Research Techniques in Developing Strategies in More Uncertain Political Climates”, Sparrow and Turner want to help political marketers bring together qualitative and quantitative intelligence gathering methods. The article, as they describe it, “attempts to show how such methods can be brought together and how parties can start to build integrated marketing strategies” . Political marketers must learn these methods to cope with the “rapidly changing” or “uncertain” political environment . It is unclear why things are so “uncertain” or “rapidly changing”; regardless, there is no speculation here about the consequences of refining market intelligence gathering methods.

To be critical about political marketing, it is crucial to understand the alternative model proposed here – where the “product” is created, market intelligence follows, and then the “product” is communicated according to market intelligence. What we are left with seems to fit Qualter’s definition of propaganda: “the deliberate attempt by the few to influence the attitudes and behaviour of the many by the manipulation of symbolic communications” . Political marketers are using what they know about us, and about what we want, to make their policies appear and sound all right.
When many academics and the media talk about political marketing, there is a tendency to have already accepted what it is, when it is something completely different. For example, Banker defends political marketing, denying that it is unethical, and asserting that it supplies the electorate with alternative perspectives for understanding political reality . Such an interpretation does not even grasp what political marketing truly is in the first place, and overcomplicates something that is actually quite simple - either our parties and politicians are telling us what they are doing and what they intend to do, or they are not. But too much of the focus is on trivial details like attack ads, election campaign fluff, and party leader image management. All of this confirms, in part, the relevance of Chomsky and Herman’s “propaganda model”, whereby the media and intellectuals ultimately serve the interests of the state, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly .

If we are going to discuss how Canadian governments and parties communicate with us, it is worthwhile to look at political marketing in Canada. In Canada, the Liberal Party has always been at the forefront of political marketing, and not coincidentally, it also formed the government for most of the 20th century. The party imported George Gallup’s opinion research methods from the U.S. in the 1940’s, and by the 1960’s they were using the newest polling methodologies, advertising strategies, and branding philosophies . The Liberals were also the first Canadian party to establish an in-house advertising agency .

In political marketing literature, the federal Canadian parties are generally divided up in the following way: brokerage parties like the Liberals, Conservatives, and the now-defunct Progressive Conservatives are primarily seen as market-oriented parties, because they try to appeal to as many Canadians with as many different ideologies as possible, and to do this requires significant experience and resources in gathering market intelligence. For example, Marland points out that during the 2000 election campaign, the Liberals’ “daily rolling cross-country opinion polls had an impressive sample of 20 000 respondents” . The Bloc Quebecois, in contrast, is considered a product and sales-oriented party because it has a very specific goal – separation – and they do not intend on finding out your opinion to change that goal, but they are willing to try and convince you that they are right. The New Democratic Party can also be considered a sales or product-oriented party, because similar to the Bloc, there is a basic knowledge of what the NDP is about – social democracy – and the NDP is not willing to compromise on this (which is probably easier to do when you have never formed the government). But they are willing to try and sell their product. This does not mean that the Bloc and NDP do not commission polls or focus groups, only that they do not have such an extensive marketing apparatus and they do not give market intelligence the same consideration in their communications. For example, a pollster hired for the NDP in the 1984 pre-campaign found “operational problems” that inhibited market intelligence, such as a party executive disagreeing with his recommendations, and then the U.S. pollster who replaced him found party staffers analyzing his data .

Therefore, although much of the research on political marketing looks at Great Britain and the U.S., we can be sure that political marketing is doing well in Canada. And it is Canadian political marketing communications we will be concerned with later.

We have established that political marketing is, in a way, not marketing at all, but a type of social control embedded in communication. But how did our parties and governments learn how to communicate in a way that makes people think they are getting what they want and requested – in salespeak?