Abstract
Many consider the President of the United States to be the most powerful person on earth. In order to get this “job,” the President is involved in one of the largest, most expensive and most comprehensive marketing efforts — the political campaign that leads to election day. This campaign, as well as thousands of others (e.g., congress persons, senators, governors, district attorneys), has largely been ignored by marketing scholars.
This article describes the growth of interest in research issues relating to political marketing. This emerging research area lies at the cross-roads of marketing and political science, but these fields have developed largely independent of each other with little cross-fertilization of ideas. We discuss recent theoretical, empirical, and behavioral work on political campaigns, integrating perspectives from marketing and political science. Our focus is on (1) the extent to which paradigms used in goods and services marketing carry over to the institutional setting of political campaigns, (2) what changes are necessary in models and methodology to understand issues in political marketing and voter behavior, and (3) how the special setting of politics may help us gain a better understanding of certain topics central to marketing such as advertising, branding, and social networks.
The PDF above is a preprint version of the article. The final version may be found at < http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11002-012-9185-2 >.