Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Political marketing arose when, in the middle of the twentieth century, the methods developed by commercial marketing specialists were adopted for political campaigning. Political marketing replaced unilateral →  propaganda exactly as commercial →  advertising has become a plain subsidiary of commercial →  marketing. Political marketing is considered as one of the most demanding applications of political communication research. It stands at the crossroads of several distinct fields of social sciences engaging in the study or practice of deliberate and purposive communication to reach set goals ( Maarek 1995, 2007 ; →  Political Communication ; Public Relations ; Strategic Communication ). It is generally accepted that political marketing started to become a cornerstone of political campaigns when, in the 1952 presidential election, the American Republican Party hired a first-rate marketing consultant, Thomas Rosser Reeves Jr., who managed Dwight D. Eisenhower's successful transformation from an army general to a civilian commander in chief ( McNair 1995 ; →  Election Campaign Communication ). The two main methods then used by Reeves in two successive steps are representative of the two main stages of a political marketing strategy. First, direct marketing by mail was extensively used in order to define Eisenhower's main campaigning themes, simplifying them according to the ... log in or subscribe to read full text