Political marketing During Office

The unresolved question of voter relationship marketing

Dr Stephen DannSchool of Management, Marketing and International Business, ANU

Marketing and Politics

• Marketing– system of exchange between customer,

marketer, organizations and society – creates a dynamic series of transactions

• money, ideas, loyalty and benefit

• Core philosophy – provide for the individual’s needs within the

capacity restraints of the organization and society

Our (marketing) assumptions

• Permanent campaigning is a reality– Needham (2005), Newman (1999), Howard (2004)

• Separation of political party campaigns and governing party campaigns – Insufficient divide currently

• Voters are trading a vote/support for “something of value”– emotive, irrational, intelligent and calculating– imprecise purchases of uncertain future outcomes

Relationship Marketing (Nordic School)

• Marketing [which] is to establish, maintain, and enhance relationships with customers and other partners, at a profit, so that the objectives of the parties involved are met. This is achieved by a mutual exchange and fulfillment of promises [p. 138]– Grönroos (1990)

Relationship Marketing Practice

• Customer lifetime value – difference between the costs of attracting, keeping and

servicing the customer against the revenue generated by those activities (Berger and Nasr, 1998).

– explicit statement and calculation of the different value of each customer to the organization

• deliberate exclusion of low value customers – (O'Malley and Tynan, 2001; Dorrington and Goodwin 2002).

• Political applications of exclusion of low return voters could be found in the dogwhistles and wedge politics (Cottle and Bolger, 2008)

Is the Rudd Government using relationship

marketing?

Analysis 1

RM Condition Present How

ongoing or periodic desire for the product or service

Yes Election cycles

customer controls the selection of the service supplier

YesVoters elect the government through selective support of political parties

There are alternatives in the market.

Yes Multi-party political system

Brand switching is common, but can be prevented or minimized

YesDeclining party loyaltyswinging voter populations

Word of mouth is important YesCredibility of interpersonal messages ahead of party political statements

Ability to cross-sell products once the relationship is established

Yes non-campaign promise policy initiatives

Is the Rudd Government using relationship marketing?

• Example of trust, reciprocity and commitment in a single political statement:– …honours the RuddGovernment's

commitments, and allows us to look Australians in the eye and say we delivered the policies they voted for last November. We are doing what we said we would do.

Analysis 2: Tag Cloud

Recoded Cloud

Leximancer

• content analysis emulator

• machine learning protocol for textual analysis

• visualization of common themes and related concept groups from textual data – Smith, 2000

• unsupervised ontology discovery

Supervised Ontology

Commitment and the Budget Speech

Commitment

Is there a problem?

Key Takeouts

• Hallmark indicators of relationship marketing are present in the Rudd Government actions– Budget speech analysis

• Relationship marketing principles are not far removed from good government– Trust, reciprocity and commitment

• Relationship Practice is exclusionary by design– Voter Lifetime Value is not an appropriate way to

conduct government policy

Questions?