The Phenomenon of Political Marketing

Frontmatter

1. Introduction: The Electronic Soapbox

Abstract

‘Political Marketing’ — a term we see increasingly in newspapers, a part now of the baggage of conventional orthodoxy — has come into its own with popular recognition that it is a convenient shorthand for something people recognise as central to the operations of their democracy. In 1988 the Presidential campaign confirmed yet again the magnetism of approaches that conceived of politics as a product marketing exercise, with chairmen of major advertising agencies backing top Republican candidates Dole (Gray Advertising) Kemp (BBDO) and Bush (the ex-Chairman of Young and Rubicam).

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

2. Big Lies, Little Lies: The Story of Propaganda

Abstract

Marketing is a technical term that must relate to modern practice and the body of theoretical knowledge it draws from. We define it as being all those behaviours by which the firm relates to its externalities, but in recent years, as we have seen, theory and practice have taken it well beyond this to embrace non-business organisations, and after initial resistance this more elastic conception has been generally accepted. Can it thus be called marketing? We could argue that this is a matter of self-definition: if people call themselves marketers, then they are. But it is also an analytic description of a set of distinct processes and technologies which in commerce are called marketing, and which in recent years has been applied to non-commercial areas where analogous conditions arise.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

3. Only in America

Abstract

Since political marketing is largely an American invention we must look to American history for explanations of the growth of the genre; for many themes touch the American political psyche and political marketing is sometimes their expression. Both early and recent American historical experience define the political culture and values from which contemporary political marketing draws its subject matter.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

4. Television

Abstract

Political marketing employs a constellation of mediums: but television remains the supreme gift to politicians, with their presence assured in every home, and political marketing is largely a television activity. It is even employed in minor campaigns. According to David Garth, television ‘can take someone who’s relatively unknown and make him a visible factor’.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

5. The Peevish Penmen: Direct Mail and US Elections

Abstract

Political direct mail is the best example of the transliteration of commercial ideas to political election salesmanship; it is a necessary adjunct and no campaign is complete without it, for mailings generate an independent, privatised source of campaign finance and instant if superficial loyalties. And they provide the precision targetting so crucial in modern America campaigns. Large-scale political employment of political direct mail began with Goldwater; McGovern exploited it well and since then political groupings of every tincture have assiduously sought to use it. Outside the United States British Conservatives have now made mail technology an article of their political faith. It illustrates how political merchandising techniques, once incubated in America, spread internationally.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

6. The Monopoly of Midas Congress and Political Action Committees

Abstract

Political marketing is a consequence of the gradual recognition that a consumer society, where individual personality becomes almost an aggregate of consumption experience, would accept a politics clothed with the identity of such consumption experience.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

7. High Priesthood, Low Priestcraft: The Role of Political Consultants

Abstract

Political consultants may be described as the product managers of the political world, and they made their first recognisable appearance in California in the early nineteen thirties. The success of these pioneers became legendary; their growth was rapid and by the fifties they were firmly established on the political scene. California, with no ancient political loyalties and only light party organisations, provided fertile ground for political marketing, a genre that is inherently anti-party and whose growth is intimately bound up with the demise of parties and which depends for its effectiveness on the absence of strong loyalties.¹ A total of 5000 consultants and their assistants now work on campaigns, with an extra 30 000 drafted in at peak periods.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

8. Washington’s Space Cadets: The Centrality of Polling, Computer and Other Technologies in US Politics Today

Abstract

The advent of the computer enables a greater clarity of segmentation, and illustrates both the transforming power and political consequence of the new technology and the indispensability of professional advice, with real power going to those who purvey it; the right with their business linkages became the first fully to integrate such technologies. Political marketing and its antecedent, propaganda, are really technology-led, and such technology demands the leasing of a specialised expertise which has to be paid for. The progress is towards the elusive ideal of ever-refined segmentation. For segmentation is a key element in marketing since we derive our political identity from major social groupings we belong to.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

9. Merchandising the Monarch: Reagan and the Presidential Elections

Abstract

The prerequisite of political success in America today is to conceive your election as a product marketing exercise. The marketing dynamic is not the only way to interpret elections — the play of orthodox political factors also colours and determines them — but as it explains the conceptual, tactical and technological approaches taken it is a useful one. Elections are spectacular, like a circus; they have their ringmasters and their acrobats. They are for the audience but not of them.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

10. A Licence to Export: The Spread of Political Marketing Methods to Britain

Abstract

The British have a notion of political marketing as something done simply at election time and even then grudgingly. Political rhetoric is often exclusive rather than inclusive — ameliorative perhaps for those it aims at, but infuriating to those it does not. But Britain is as yet far from intending that marketing should be part of its political culture. The parties spent £6.15 million, a diminutive sum by America’s standards, on local communication in 1983; according to R.J. Johnson it did influence the way some people voted.¹ The British notion of governing is an administrative and not a communications one, and what has already been done seems primitive by the standards of America’s campaigns: indeed, it gives to elections a rather seedy aura. But many American methods would be unsuited to British conditions, for America is a ‘sell’ culture, a sustained act of promotion, and hucksterism is not merely a means but a social value.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

11. The Selling of the President 1988

Abstract

The Bush campaign began abysmally. This was not deliberate, but it was an invaluable asset in his merchandising. It meant that core Republican supporters and contributors were galvanised out of their apathy. It meant that the public wearied of the press baiting of Bush: he attracted the sympathy of the fighting underdog, an important symbol in American myth.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

12. An Ethical Conundrum?

Abstract

And so, during his frequently occurring elections, the American citizen does not stride abroad in sturdy liberty, rather he is a dazed man under siege, and through letter-box, telephone, television, doorbell (eventually, we are reliably assured, his home computer) the empty smiles of his politicians pursue him. Politics will ooze through every fissure. Soap powder, at least, confines its vulgar brightness to the screen.

Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy

Backmatter