No abstract

Non-commercial exchanges including social and political ones have become an accepted marketing explanandum since the broadening debate of marketing of the 1970s. In order to build a theory of political marketing, a rigorous understanding of the nature of the political exchange needs to be developed beyond the simplistic assumption of being synonymous with commercial exchange. The service characteristics of the political offering only make full sense if understood as being triadic interactions rather than dyadic exchanges. Thus, the presumptive effect of political services only comes to the fore if the interaction between candidates and voters (in the electoral market) is seen as interdependent with interactions between the candidates in the legislative assembly (in the parliamentary market) and between legislators and citizens (in the governmental market) as part of a wider political exchange system. This triadic structure of the political exchange nuances the current research focus by embedding the electoral interaction within a wider interaction system. Our article thus provides an initial attempt to develop a broadened concept on which further theory building as well as empirical analysis in political marketing can be based.

This article presents conceptual and empirical criticisms of the Lees-Marshment market-oriented party model. Conceptual criticisms are the short-term approach, the narrow focus on voters, the nature of the relationship to competitors, a tendency towards centralisation and the lack of a distinction between the related concepts of 'market orientation' and 'marketing orientation'. Empirical studies demonstrate problems with the model when applied to certain party types and electoral systems, the limitations on implementation of the model due to ideology and scarce resources, the partial application of the model in practice, and the constraints on the market-oriented party when in government.

There is surprisingly little research on the market orientation of political parties, unlike its commercial cousin, with only three authors publishing work that concentrates on the concept (O'Cass, 1996(O'Cass, , 2001a Lees-Marshment, 2001a,b;Ormrod, 2004Ormrod, , 2005. This paper seeks to analyse the more recent literature on the concept of political market orientation using the four synthesised dimensions of commercial market orientation identified by Lafferty and Hult (2001) as a framework. This study also presents Lafferty and Hult's (2001) four commercial market orientation dimensions and describes the differences between the related terms of "market orientation" and "marketing orientation." Further, the article surveys the political market orientation literature and then discusses the perspective that each approach adopts, the extent to which a distinction is made between a "political market orientation" and Robert P. a "political marketing orientation," and how the political market orientation conceptualisations are related to each of the four commercial market orientation dimensions. Future research directions are proposed.