This document provides an overview of key concepts and readings for a university course on political marketing and communications. It discusses definitions of political marketing and how it has evolved. Key topics covered include the role of political parties, tensions between politicians and the media, how politicians use symbolic capital and the media, marketing concepts like branding and value propositions, and debates around celebrity politics. Examples are provided of political marketing strategies used by parties like Labour and the Conservatives in the UK.

1. WK4 – Marketing Politics and Political
Advertising – SGM004 – Political
Communications
Dr. Carolina Matos
Lecturer in Media and Communications
Department of Sociology
City University London

2. Readings for week 4
• Required:
• Butler, P. & N, Collins (1999) 'A Conceptual framework for
Political Marketing', in B. Newman (eds.) Handbook of
Political Marketing, London: Sage.
• Negrine, R. & Stayner, J. (2007) "Marketing Politics" in The
Political Communication Reader, London: Routledge,
section 4
• Scammell. M. (2003) “Citizen Consumers: towards a new
marketing of politics?” in John Corner and Dick Pels (eds.)
Media and the Re-styling of Politics London: Sage, p.117-
137
• Additional:
• Franklin, B. (2004) Packaging Politics, 2nd Edn, Arnold
• Street, J. (1997) Politics and Popular Culture, London: Polity
Press
• Thompson, J. (2000) Political Scandal, Polity.

3. Key issues
• The changing role of political parties in democracies
• Who has more power: political actors or the media?
• Modern politics, discourse and leadership
• Political marketing: what is it?
• Citizens consumers (Scammell, 2000)
• Modern politics, discourse and leadership
• Politics and popular culture
• The “celebrity politician”
• Political scandals
• Conclusions
• Seminar questions and activities
• Readings for week 5

4. The role of political parties in democracies
• Main function of political parties is to provide countries with leaders
(Lees-Marshment, 2001)
• One of the key transformations of the political party has been the
strengthening of its leaders
• Wide range of literature on party politics discusses how parties
behave
( i.e. Catch all parties (Kirchheimer, 1966)
• Downs (1957) argued that political parties are rational actors that
change their behaviour to capture the middle ground
• Politicians will compete with each other to gain more voters (i.e.
reach out to younger publics). Thus they will start to incorporate
entertainment formats to their political platform and/or political
persona

5. Tensions between the media (journalists) and the
political world (politicians)
• The growing power of television and other media technologies means
that politicians compete with various leisure activities for the attention
of voters
• Commercial TV began to change the character of campaigns, with critics
stressing its contribution to the crisis of political parties (Mancini and
Swanson,1996;13)
• Thomas E. Patterson (1993) points to tensions between the watchdog
role of the press and its constructive task of bringing candidates and
voters together (in Graber, 209)
• Relationship of competition and cooperation

6. Politicians use the media in their struggle for
symbolic power
• Thompson draws from Bourdieu’s discussion of cultural
capital
• “…the media become the primary means by which political
leaders accumulate symbolic capital in the broader political
field. Through the management of visibility and the…
presentation of self, political leaders use the media to build up a
store of symbolic capital in the eyes of the
electorate….”(Thompson, 2000, 105).
• Reputation is an aspect of symbolic capital - a politician’s
good reputation implies that he is trusted by voters)
• Shift in political scenario from politicians debating what
they want to discussing how to implement what voters want

7. Politics and the logic of consumption (in
Scammell, 2003)
Scammell (2003) argues that there is a mismatch between
confident consumers and insecure citizens
“Empowerment” of consumers, self-realization and personal
values versus decline of citizenship rationales
“…consumerism in the sense of a more productive, less collective
public policy choice is becoming the cause of the relationship
between citizens, representatives and governments in the
electoral politics of a number of nations (Scammell, 1995;
Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999 in Bennett, 2003).
* Attacks on political marketing seem to imply that a “golden
age” of rational political debate existed once

8. The Structural and Process Characteristics of Political
Marketing (in Newman et al, 1999)
Structural Characteristics:
A) The product Person/party/ideology
Loyalty
Mutability
B) The organization Resource Base
Amateurism and volunteers
C) The market Regulations and restrictions
Social affirmation
The counterconsumer
Process Characteristics:
A) Value Defining Establishment of core values
Value aggregation
B) Value Developing Specification of choice
C) Value Delivering Office-policy dichotomy
Periodic market

9. A conceptual framework for political marketing (in
Newman et al, 1999)
• Basis of the framework – political marketing exhibits both “structural”
characteristics, such as the nature of the product, the organization and the
market, and “process” characteristics that define, develop and deliver value.
• Person/Party/Ideology – Nominating candidates calls into question issues
such as their competence and reasons, their past records and promises for the
future; how much loyalty they command and their mutability in the post-purchase
setting. Strategies should attempt to “brand” policies and ideas
• The political organization – Distinctive marketing characteristics of
political parties include among others the resource base and the use of
amateurs and volunteers. Political parties have varied resource bases.
• I.e. “In the US, the relatively liberal laws on campaign expenditure and the
lower reliance on mass party membership compared to that in Europe have
made money the key resource.”
• Negative Perception of Marketing - It is perceived as negative among
grassroots level in many countries, and can be seen as unethical and
trivializing. As Smith and Saunders (1990) point out, politicians might focus
on narrow short-term issues just because they are popular.

10. A conceptual framework for political marketing (in
Newman et al, 1999)
The political market – the electorate constitutes the political market.
Regulations and restrictions – In the US, a candidate can buy any time on
TV, in most markets the amount of time on TV is restricted.
Social and Ideological Affirmation – Elections are seen as a cornerstone of
civil society. Only through an understanding of the electorate - its culture,
values and expectations - will the marketer be able to avoid committing gaffes.
The counterconsumer – A particular group might be interested in preventing
another candidate from taking office.
The Process Characteristic of Political Marketing – the focus on delivered
value is important. Parties do stress core values that they have.
“We consider value-defining processes that enable the assessment of the
organization and its electorate’s concerns, value-developing processes that
enable the creation of positions and policies to meet those concerns, and value-delivering
processes that enable the transformation of policies into political
action.” (64)
* Value-Defining, Value-Developing and Value-Delivering Processes

11. Marketing Politics: definitions of concepts (in Negrine
and Stayner, 2007)
Lilleker and Negrine (2007, 129) argue that the term “professionalization” is
multifaceted and highly subjective, and not fully able to describe the complex
nature of political communications. “It can be used to identify any individual
who has a basic competence in news management techniques (Schlesinger and
Tumber, 1994: 14)”. Prefer the term “specialization of tasks”.
The politics of marketing the Labour Party – Wring (2007) discussed the
old image of the Labour Party, and how it was perceived as old fashioned,
extremist and beholden to “minorities”. There was widespread ignorance of
focus groups, and selected findings were inappropriately used to analyse the
popularity of certain policies.
Marketing research as double-edged sword: “The theory and practice of
political marketing raises important questions about the nature of modern
elections….and democratic accountability. Although it is claimed that opinion
research represents the views of a silent majority who might be ignored, this…
ambition conflicts with the primary motives of….private polling: the desire to
cultivate support and win votes.”
Health of a democracy is called into question: “marketing tends to focus
upon….short-term customer wishes….”

12. “Marketing” as a new concept in politics (in Negrine and
Stayner, 2007)
• Scammell (2007) highlights that there is no consensus over the
definition of “political marketing”, underlining the use of other
terms, such as “political management” and “promotional politics.”
• Field is still in its infancy – “Political marketing claims to offer new
of understanding modern politics.” It wants to explain the behaviour
of political actors, and shares with political science a desire to
understand underlying processes. The appropriate use of marketing is
seen as being able to have consequences for democratic practice and
for citizen engagement. (Scammell, 2007, 151)
• Political marketing is thus seen as a response to developments in
media and communication technologies. The Chartered Institute of
Marketing defines marketing as: “ those activities performed by
individuals…whether profit or non-profit, that enable…and
encourage exchange to take place…(Scammell, 2000, 7).
• Marketing versus propaganda: “The ‘marketing’ concept is key to
understanding political marketing. Without it, we are still talking
about a modern form of propaganda.

13. Marketing versus propaganda
* Scammell underlines how Nazi propagandists adapted Roman techniques for
stimulating crowds to excitement. Hitler made use of “marketing”
* Political marketing covers a multitude of activities, including advertising,
public relations and any political activity concerned with image and
persuasion
* Makes a distinction between marketing and propaganda: “It is a
common misconception that marketing equals advertising or propaganda or
image or brand-building, even though all these will almost certainly form part
of the ‘marketing mix’. (2000, 8)
Differences - such as the fact that Nazism did not borrow marketing
techniques from the business community, and that their emphasis was on
manipulation and on forcing people to believe what they wanted, whilst
political marketing is more about attending to what people say they want.
Political marketing - manipulative persuasion (individual motivation)
Totalitarian propaganda – coercive persuasion (crowd behaviour and control
of the media)
Common ground: both seek to influence public opinion, and are concerned
with ideology

14. Political parties and political marketing: what is it
all about?
• Political marketing is a new era of research, integrating political
science and management
• Lees-Marshment (2001) argues that political science and
communication scholars have not fully defined political marketing
• The author (2001, 15) shows data on how party membership has
fallen from both parties (Conservative and Labour)
• New social movements also pose a challenge to parties – voters turn
to other forms of political participation
• The objective of political campaigning is to influence the process
and outcome of governance, seeking to influence the political
decision-making process by shaping public opinion through various
forms of communication strategies, including the use of the Internet
and the media in order to avoid paid advertising.
• Concerns: what are the consequences of this new state of things for
democracy?

15. Designer Politics (Scammell, 1995; 2000)
What can be said of political marketing in Britain?
1) Marketing is entrenched in the political process
2) Does not offer magic solutions for winning elections
3) Use of political marketing needs to be closely monitored
Initial reluctance of the Left in adopting political marketing:
“Labour’s lesson of the 1992 general election was related to the
limitations of marketing and the difficulties of changing the party’s
images. For a while, it seemed as though marketing was in retreat.
Labour’s team of advertising and media advisers, the Shadow
Communications Agency (SCA), caught much of the backlash for
defeat…”(xiv)
* Author does not share the pessimism of much of the literature on
political marketing and campaigning, which claims that these
techniques subvert the democratic process, contributing to impoverish
debate; that rational political debate is reduced to advertising sound-bites
and that political image is becoming a matter of appearance.

16. Political parties, branding and political
marketing
• Lees-Marshment work comes from a management research tradition,
criticizing political communication scholars and political scientists,
attempting to offer a more defined framework to discuss political
marketing taking into consideration its 3 orientations (product, sales
and market).
• CPM (Comprehensive political marketing) - views marketing as more
than simply political communication; attempts to use marketing
concepts, not just techniques; integrating political science literature
into the analysis….(2001, 5)
• “Branding is the new form of political marketing. If market research,
spin and advertising…are associated with the key signifiers of
marketed parties and candidates in the 80’s and 90’s, “branding” is
the hallmark now. (Scammell, 2000, 177)

17. The re-branding of New Labour and Tony
Blair and the Conservatives
• Gould’s surveys found that the hostility to Blair and Labour was
highest among women
• Labour/Blair in 1997 - Risks of idealizing the brand
• Promise, a commercial consultancy specialised in brand building,
was hired to design a strategy to reconnect Blair with voters for
the 2005 election
• Labour brand was undermined by media attacks (i.e. Iraq war)
• Blair’s image as a “celebrity politician” in decline. The last
elections in the UK “re-branded” the Conservatives and David
Cameron (“compassionate conservatives”)
• Video: The New Statesmen – Labour of Love
• (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2slwy1YBXMU)

18. Margaret Thatcher and marketing techniques in
UK/US politics
* Margaret Thatcher and Reagan (“the New Right”) brought marketing
into political sphere
* Hiring of Saatchi and Saatchi in 1978 by Conservative Party was big
news and seen as responsible for their victory in 1979
* “Thatcher’s faith in advertising extended most controversially beyond the
purely party domain into the realm of government publicity…
Thatcherism put advertising on the map” (Scammell, 2)
* Labour Party slowly began to adopt similar practices (I.e. Peter
Mandelson as key figure behind the “velvet revolution”)
* The growth of PR began to turn politics into an expensive business – a
spin industry machine of opinion pollsters and other marketing activities

19. Political PR strategies and the Nixon
presidency
• Nixon is seen as a pioneer politician that understood TV’s value
• 1960 presidential election was a crucial moment in the development of
PR-ized and televisual politics
• Kennedy-Nixon debate became a landmark of what to do and not to do
• TV provides the perfect vehicle for politics as hype
• “Political PRs….can speak in sound-bites, sound sincere, have the
discipline and theatrical abilities to follow a script. PRs train
politicians to be televisual performers….They also teach them to dress
appropriately and improve their appearance….Politicians have
become products to be sold to “audiences” (Neuman, 1994 in Louw,
2005).

20. Key debates on celebrity politics and the
personalisation of politics (in Street, 2004)
• Core of the critique is that is it contributes to the impoverishment of the
relationship between the representative and the represented
• Anxieties concerning expert elite status of political leadership, from
Plato to Lippmann and Schumpeter
• Clash between serious politics and trivial entertainment - Politicians
are seen as stepping into the popular culture terrain
• I.e. Clinton was seen as a model celebrity politician at ease in front of
the cameras with ability to follow scripts
• According to Postman (1987, 4,129), appearance and image have
come to dominate politics, so that “we may have reached a point where
cosmetics have replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a
politician must have competent control’ (in Street, 439).

21. Celebrities doing politics, and politicians
being celebrities

22. Celebrity politicians and popular culture 2 (in
Street, 2004)
• Street identifies two types of celebrity politicians:
• 1) CP1 - The traditional politician who engages in the world of popular
culture (i.e. the German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on stage with
the Scorpions… ) and
• 2) CP2 - entertainers who claims the right to represent people and
causes (i.e. Bono from U2)
• “PR has also made politics a very expensive business because of the
cost of the spin industry machine and opinion pollsters and other
marketing activities (i.e. direct e-mail, etc), placing a burden on parties
to produce money; the result is a professionalized fund-raising
industry…”(Louw, 151).
The core of the critique – contributes to the impoverishment of the
relationship between the representative and the represented,
marginalizing issues of political substance in favour of the trivial

23. Celebrity politics as inevitable?
• Defence of contemporary celebrity is that it is an inevitable
product of social and political change
• New symbolic realities – “symbolic templates of heroes and
villains, honored values and aspirations..” (Mancini and
Swanson,1996; 9)
• “To the extent that celebrity politics is a form of marketing, then
celebrity politicians are simply making use of the techniques of
marketing, either – as with CPIs – selling themselves, or as with
CP2s, endorsing a product (a policy or a politician)” (Street,
441).

24. Political scandal and “negative” celebrity
politics (Thompson, 2000)
• Political scandals have varied over time, but since the 1960’s they
have become a feature of political life in many Western states
• Thompson (2000) attempts to articulate a more sophisticated
understanding of political scandal
• “…the critical feature of any political scandal is not the degree of
personal gain involved nor is it the normative merit of the ends
sought, but rather it is the presence of any activity that seeks to
increase political power at the expense of process and
procedure….That…is why political scandals can only take place in
liberal democracies” (2000, 92).
• In a liberal democracy, parties compete for power and in the
struggle for electoral success, reputations matter; scandals can play
into the hands of opponents and destroy careers.

25. Political marketing and the democratic process
Critiques of its impact on the quality of the democratic process:
* Democratic process is seen as being valuable and fragile, under threat in
many parts of the world.
* Marketing is seen as having contributed to the decline of ideological
commitments of parties within a Habermasian understanding of the fall
of “rational political debate”
* The decline of the quality of leaders results in a shift towards an emphasis
on their personality and character (“just like us”)
* Rise of political consultants, who become just as important as the leaders
that they serve (Scammell, 1995)
• Political marketing can be understood as the commercialisation of
politics and the extension of the relations of consumption to the
political sphere (McNair, 1995)
* “The rational citizen of classic liberal theory has become “a consumer of
politics and policies….the competing political parties present electors
with different policy options in broadly the same way as firms offer rival
products…” (McNair, 1995)

26. Politics and popular culture: political satire
and films about politics
• Politics has been a part of popular entertainment
• Some entertainment genres that deal with politics, and which
politicians use to work on their image, include:
• 1) Political satire and parody (i.e. Spitting Image)
• 2) Talk shows (i.e. Saturday Night Live)
• 3) Reality TV (i.e. Big Brother)
• 4) TV documentaries (i.e. The Trial of Tony Blair, C4, 2007)
• 5) Hollywood films which defend particular causes (i.e. Milk, Van
Sant, 2008) and/or discuss political biographies and the role of political
leaders (i.e. Nixon and W. (Stone); The Queen (Frears, 2006) and Che
(Soderbergh, 2008)

27. Some conclusions and questions for
thought
• Political marketing and celebrity politics are a feature of
contemporary politics in advanced democracies and in many
countries in the world, an inevitable consequence of social and
political change
• Celebrity politics is tied to the consumerism logic and the shift away
from citizenship towards consumer power
• Debate is not about opposite extremes - either to lament the decline
of quality political discourse due to the entry of entertainment
formats into politics, or to “celebrate” uncritically forms that can be
classifed as “populist” politics
• Relevant questions to ask would be: How can celebrity politics and
political marketing be of benefit for the democratic process?
• What political style is more appropriate to engage more citizens
without undermining quality political debate?
• Can political marketing contribute to wider civic engagement?

28. Seminar activities
• 1. Choose a politician from the list.
• 2. Discuss their political image and how he/her was portrayed in a
particular political campaign.
• 3. Using the texts that you have read, how would your company (or
party) market the candidate and/or political party better in the future?
What would your communication strategy be? How would you
design a political campaign for the next election?
• David Cameron
• Nelson Mandela
• Angela Merkel
• Dilma Rousseff
• Hillary Clinton
• Vladimir Putin
• Any other

29. Readings for week 5
Required:
•Blumler, Jay G. and Gurevitch, Michael (2001) “Americanization
Reconsidered: UK-US Campaign Comparisons Across Time” in
Bennett, W. Lance and Entman, R. M. Mediated Politics –
communication in the future of democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 380-407
•Hallin, D. and P.Mancini (2004) “Americanization, Globalization and
secularization” in F. Esser and B.Pfetsch (2004) eds. Comparing
Political Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
p.25-45
•Matos, C. (2008) “National Politics in a Global Economic World: a
Case Study of the 1994 Presidential Elections” in Journalism and
Political Democracy in Brazil, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books
•

30. Seminar activities to prepare for next
week
On top of the core readings for next week, choose one from the
following texts to make you think about campaign practices in a
particular region and/or country:
Additional:
•Espindola, Roberto (2002) “Professionalised campaigning in Latin
America”, Journal of Political Marketing 1:4 65-82.
•LeDuc, Lawrence, Richard G. Niemi and P. Norris (eds.) (2009)
Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in the 21st Century,
London: Sage Publications
•Swanson, David L. and Mancini, Paolo (1996) “Patterns of Modern
Electoral Campaigning and their Consequences” in (eds.) (1996)
Politics, Media and Modern Democracy London: Praeger, p. 247-274
•Waisbord, Silvio (1996) “Secular Politics: The Modernization of
Argentine Electioneering” in Swanson, D. & P. Mancini (eds.) Politics,
Media and Modern Democracy – an International Study of Innovations
in Electoral Campaigning and Their Consequences