Marketing and politics: Models, behavior, and policy implications Session at the 8th Triennial Choice Symposium

The American presidential election is one of the largest, most expensive, and most comprehensive marketing efforts. Despite this fact, marketing scholars have largely ignored this campaign, as well as thousands of others for congresspersons, senators, and governors. This article describes the growth of interest in research issues related to political marketing. This emerging research area lies at the Mark Lett (2012) 23:391–403 DOI 10.1007/s11002-012-9185-2 B. R. Gordon Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. J. Lovett (*) Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Shachar Arison School of Business, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel e-mail: [email protected] K. Arceneaux Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Moorthy : D. Soberman Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M553E6, Canada S. Moorthy e-mail: [email protected] D. Soberman e-mail: [email protected] M. Peress Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] crossroads of marketing and political science, but these fields have developed largely independent of one another with little cross-fertilization of ideas. We discuss recent theoretical, empirical, and behavioral work on political campaigns, integrating perspectives from marketing and political science. Our focus is on (1) the extent to which paradigms used in goods and services marketing carry over to the institutional setting of political campaigns, (2) what changes are necessary in models and methodology to understand issues in political marketing and voter behavior, and (3) how the special setting of politics may help us gain a better understanding of certain topics central to marketing such as advertising, branding, and social networks.