Stakeholders in the political marketing context

Abstract

Stakeholders influence the ability of organisations to achieve their aims, but little work has been carried out into understanding the stakeholder concept as applied to political actors. This paper first discusses the contextual nature of stakeholders using normative and strategic, and broad and narrow dimensions, integrating these 2 dimensions with power asymmetries and reciprocity.This paper then argues that a broad stakeholder concept for the political marketing context reconciles strategic and normative issues, as whilst successful interactions with specific stakeholders are necessary to achieve completed political exchanges of value, all stakeholders that exist in democratic societies have some form of moral claim to representation. As each political exchange of value consists of 3 consecutive interactions, the direct stakeholders in 1 interaction become indirect stakeholders in subsequent interactions. As each interaction occurs within a "marketplace" context, interactions in previous marketplace(s) together with expectations of the impact on future marketplace(s) influence current decision-making. Finally, it is proposed that in the political marketing context, the stakeholder concept can be defined as "context-specific agents that directly or indirectly influence or are influenced by the political actor."

Political Relationship Marketing: An Examination of Internal Relationship Management in Ghanaian Political Parties

“…According to Ormrod (2020), an exchange of value in the political sphere is not a oneoff event but a three-tier process. The exchange process starts with the candidate making promises to the electorates, which can only be redeemed if voted for and having leverage on the legislature (Henneberg & Ormrod, 2013;Ormrod, 2017Ormrod, , 2020.…”

Political exchanges of value and the stakeholder concept: Implications for public affairs

“…is in fact incredibly complex due to the ambiguity of the stakeholder concept (Kaler, 2002). Normative and strategic considerations have to be reconciled (Parmar et al, 2010;Fassin, 2012), as do questions of the number and type of stakeholders that are to be included in any attempt to create a workable organisational strategy (Payne et al, 2005;Fassin, 2009), all within a legal, institutional and cultural context (Hansen et al 2004) that changes over time (Windsor, 2010;Gresko and Solodukhim, 2015) In the political marketing context, these issues are compounded by the centrality of political actors in society, that all stakeholders have a legitimate claim to be heard in democratic political systems irrespective of whether interactions have occurred with the stakeholder in question (although this may not occur in practice, see de Bussy and Kelly, 2010), and the triadic nature of the political marketing exchange process (Henneberg and Ormrod, 2013) leading to considerations about past and future events having a central role in current strategy development (Ormrod, 2017). Ormrod (2017) defines stakeholders in the political context as "context-specific agents that directly or indirectly influence or are influenced by the political actor".…”

“…The concept of exchange in the political context is one example; instead of a dyadic exchange relationship, Henneberg and Ormrod (2013) argue that each political exchange of value is triadic in structure, as promises given by political actors in the context of an election campaign can only be reciprocated if 1. the political actor is elected, 2. has influence over the legislation formulation negotiations, and 3. is in a position to deliver on these promises. In each of these three 'interaction marketplaces' (Henneberg and Ormrod 2013), political actors are indirectly influenced by stakeholders (Ormrod, 2017). These 'indirect stakeholders' are often public affairs practitioners engaged in lobbying activities in the political sphere (e.g., Brown, 2016;Bitoni and Harris, 2017;De Bruycker, 2019).…”

“…The aim of this paper is to integrate Henneberg and Ormrod's (2013) triadic interaction model of political marketing exchange with Ormrod's (2017) political marketing stakeholder concept, and to highlight how public affairs practitioners can target their efforts for maximum benefit. This aim is motivated by a need to increase our understanding of how core concepts in political marketing theory can help political actors to optimise the resources that are used on marketing activities across the electoral cycle, to help stakeholders such as commercial organisations and lobby groups plan their public affairs activities to gain the maximum of influence, and to help researchers to be more specific when selecting which actors -political or otherwise -to focus on as part of their empirical investigations.…”

Analysis of the literature on political marketing using a bibliometric approach

“…Research on the concepts related to political marketing involves adopting an open system perspective to study the complex stakeholder relationships existing in contexts influenced by economic, social, and legal forces (Ormrod, ). Political marketing discipline lacks midrange theories and contingency approaches that can guide researchers in obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the complex political phenomenon (Butler & Harris, ).…”