Abstract
Campaign Communication and Political Marketing is Philippe Maarek’s detailed guide to the anatomy, forms and functions that supplement and support the incorporation of political marketing practices into election campaign management. Maarek is a Professor of Information and Communication Sciences and co-founder of the Political Communication Department at Paris-East University. His other previous significant publications include Political Communication in a New Era (co-edited with Gadi Wolfsfeld, 2003), Communication et marketing de l’homme politique (2007) and La Communication des élections présidentielles de 2007, participation ou représentation? (2009).
Maarek’s introduction and first section is keen to stress the historical foundations of political marketing and establish the most important variables that help to explain its rise and the subsequent evolution of its forms. He argues that the first genuine manifestation of modern political marketing is to be found in 1952 through the overall strategy adopted by Dwight D Eisenhower in the US presidential campaign of that year – driven by rapid development of broadcast media and the tradition of elections to public offices at local, state and federal levels. These early sections of the book remind us that the professionalization of political communication often carries a heavy burden, being made accountable for the rise of opportunistic media relations stunts, the image management of leaders, the trivialization of the process of government as evidenced by stern advice to public figures on posture to avoid bald patches revealing themselves to television audiences, or the sight of Barack Obama’s naked torso in the Hawaiian waves. Maarek labels this the banalization of political discourse.
After the historical overview the book is divided into three other parts. Part 2 focuses on the general functional framework of political marketing strategy development moving into Part 3’s exposition of both direct and mediated communications as campaign tools. The final part closely details the actual running and infrastructure of election campaigns.
The value of this book is the precise and evidence-based exposition of the application of the political marketing process – and process is a key term here – to the development and management of election campaigning. The emphasis is on longer term systems and processes rather than the ephemera of campaigns. A good example is in Part 2’s section on the collection and analysis of data. This section argues that the best conceived campaigns are based on a thorough knowledge of the analytical tools available to the political strategist. The cycle of this particular process begins during the selection of campaign objectives, themes and targets through an assessment of previous election statistics and commissioned polls and surveys. After a period of piloting and trial initiatives the campaign plan is adjusted before entering into full campaign mode. During the election campaign itself the campaign will judge if it needs to improve or modify its positioning through regular tracking polls. There is an exploration of the research methods available to strategists and the book argues for the utility of reliability in design in these applied environments. Maarek usefully adds to this section a discussion of the direct and indirect campaign effects of the widespread use of opinion surveys. The direct effects are the transfer of awareness to sections of the electorate of which parties or candidates appear to be polling well, leading to possible underdog or bandwagon effects. The indirect effect of the irruption of opinion polls is their increasing domination of the horse race in political and media discourses alongside a diminution of many politicians’ abilities to build coherent programmes for government when on a regular basis the available poll data suggest issues which might present opportunities for shorter term traction and momentum in the weeks leading to polling day.
Over the last decade political marketing has become a dominant paradigm for studying political campaign strategies, broadening the focus of scholarship beyond the alluring campaign fireworks in the last few weeks before polling day, to the continuous longer term strategic and structural work that is being developed by campaign managers. Maarek should rightly be accorded great credit for expanding the conceptual capabilities of the political communications field, but perhaps we have to come to the stage where we should ask if political marketing as an approach is really broad enough? Certainly, in this book and more widely, political marketing omits a deeper understanding of the potential of the related field of public relations for building knowledge. Maarek only specifically addresses the role of public relations in the section on the central campaign staff in the organization of election campaigns. This section limits the role of public relations as performing the function of staging pseudo-events to maintain constant media attention and for managing day-to-day relations with journalists. On this basis Strömbäck and Kiousis’s recent book Political Public Relations (2011) would make an ideal companion to Maarek, not least for the chapter in which Lillleker and Jackson cogently argue that while political marketing’s core is an exchange of political programmes for votes, political PR orientates to wider networks of stakeholders and publics that parties may influence, or be influenced by, such as party members, other political entities and sources of economic or civic power. These forms of dialogic communication focused on longer term engagement with civic society are arguably an important dimension to building upon the achievements of Maarek and other political marketing scholars as the field moves into its next phase of development.
Maarek reminds us that the aim of political marketing is not to increase levels of political participation and civic mindedness, but to win elections and gain or maintain power – accordingly he attributes drops in voter participation as being explained by the rise of political marketing. Marketing-driven politics has lost the personal touch. Modes of campaigning that draw upon community engagement and that might assist in the building of social capital are seen as not being cost-effective. This book provides a detailed and highly valuable account of the organizational processes that are driving these trends, but with important critical insights into improving the civic efficacy of political marketing.