Page 24 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

(Mauser, 1983, p.5). Political marketing is analogous to commercial
marketing in so far as political organisations, like those in the
commercial sector, must target audiences from whom (electoral)
support is sought, using channels of mass communication, in a
competitive environment where the citizen/consumer has a choice
between more than one ‘brand’ of product. While there are obvious
differences in the nature of the political and commercial
marketplaces, and political parties measure success not in terms of
profit but in voting share and effective power, political marketing
employs many of the principles applied by the manufacturers of
goods and services as they strive for commercial success.
Political advertising, the subject of Chapter 6, is also founded on
principles originally worked out by the business sector to exploit the
presumed persuasive potential of mass media. This form of political
communication uses mass media to ‘differentiate’ political products
(i.e., parties and candidates) and give them meaning for the
‘consumer’, just as the soap manufacturer seeks to distinguish a
functionally similar brand of washing powder from another in a
crowded marketplace.
A third commercially influenced category of political
communication activity is that of public relations—media and
information management tactics designed to ensure that a party
receives maximum favourable publicity, and the minimum of negative.
Activities contained within the rubric of ‘public relations’ include
pro-active devices such as party conferences which, as we shall see,
are in contemporary politics designed principally to attract positive
media coverage of an organisation; news conferences, which permit
parties to (attempt to) set political agendas, particularly during
election campaigns; and the employment of image managers to design
a party’s (and its public leaders’) ‘look’.
Re-active political public relations techniques, in which parties
strive for damage-limitation, include the lobbying of journalists and
the ‘spinning’ of potentially damaging stories; the suppressing of
potentially damaging information, such as was attempted by the
Conservative government of John Major on numerous occasions in
the early 1990s (the Iraq arms scandal, the Pergau dam affair, etc.);
and disinformation tactics such as ‘leaking’, a device particularly
favoured by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.
The design and execution of these forms of political
communication is the province of that new professional class referred
to in the Preface—nowadays known variously as media or political
consultants, image-managers, ‘spin-doctors’ and ‘gurus’ which has

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