Political Marketing, Tribal Marketing, & the Two-Way Flow of Influence

• In Event: Pretty Persuasion: Campaign Communication in a Social Media Era

Abstract

Political marketing holds that marketing has penetrated nearly all aspects of politics and that political marketers superimpose the strategies and tactics of commercial marketers onto the realm of politics. While this pattern of influence has dominated the literature, some have recently suggested that the pattern of influence between politics and marketing may well be in the process of evolving. Building on the works of Sasha Issenberg (2012), Clive Veroni (2014), Daniel Kreiss (2016) and Bruce I. Newman (2016), I examine the extent to which the flow of influence and innovation between commercial and political marketers may be bidirectional and therefore could be seen as indicative of a two-way street with bidirectional interplay between commercial and political marketers rather than as a one-way street with one-way traffic from commercial to political marketers. The example I use to investigate this subject is tribal marketing.

My analysis proceeds in the following manner: First, I establish the basics of tribal marketing. Second, relying upon the results from thirty-three (33) in-depth elite interviews with political marketers, market researchers, political researchers, pollsters and commercial marketers from Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, I examine how tribal marketing is becoming a more recognizable, commonplace and effective way of marketing and how political marketers who are more familiar with this practice are better at building and mobilizing tribes than are commercial marketers.

References:

Issenberg, S. (2012). The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. New York,
NY: Crown Publishers.

Kreiss, D. (2016). Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of
Democracy. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.

Newman, B. I. (2016). The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential
Campaigns Can Teach Us About Effective Marketing. Toronto, ON: Rotman-UTP Publishing.

Veroni, C. (2014). Spin: How Politics has the Power to Turn Marketing on Its Head. Toronto,
ON: House of Anansi Press Inc.

Author

• Simon Vodrey, Carleton University