Applying Marketing Concepts to Political Campaigns
By Klein Lieu
When I was trying to come up with creative ways to help grow the viewership of www.DontGetMegd.com, I turned to researching the best marketing concepts to get an idea for how to even start a political campaign. I was not sure if this was the correct thinking, but I had a hunch that a political campaign was more or less a variant of a marketing campaign in for-profit industries. One can indeed apply marketing concepts to political campaigns, mainly: Marketing Metrics, Target Marketing, and the Tipping Point.
Scientists try to measure everything as a basis for evidence for their findings, and marketing campaigns should as well with Marketing Metrics. When I was planning out creative tactics to market Don’t Get Meg’d, I had to keep in mind what could I measure if I were to carry out this tactic. This was the only way I could effectively say a tactic was working or not. If you do not come up with something that you can measure your success by, then how will you know if you are successful?
In addition to Marketing Metrics, Target Marketing can help reduce the shear size of a marketing campaign down to measurable units. Not only can you figure out how to measure the success of your campaign through metrics, but you can also break down a regional population and target certain demographics of it accordingly. This method can help you immensely in tailoring your message to different age groups, culture groups, or regional groups. Target Marketing also helps you hone in your resources in a more effective manner by defining what groups are more receptive to your political campaign.
Finally, you can frame your thinking of how your campaign could conceivably work over time with the idea of the Tipping Point. Simply put, the Tipping Point is an idea that once a campaign has permeated through enough of a population that it will “tip” to an explosion of awareness in the rest of that population. In a political campaign, the marketing should work toward the penetration of its idea into the target market in order to reach that tipping point. You should define this target market first though, and you should figure out how to measure this penetration through the use of metrics tools.