Political Marketing
For the last three decades, the field “political marketing”, despite being relatively new, has fast grown (Kotler and Armstrong, 2008), and became an extensive and widespread phenomenon. However, most of the political marketing researches have been conducted in 1st world developed countries but after the euphoria of the Arab spring started by the revolution of Tunisia in 2010 (Ali, 2011), political marketing became a contemporary and hot discipline to be studied, as becoming a growing area of academia and business era originating from various disciplines of commercial marketing, non-commercial marketing and from political science (O’Shaughnessy & Hennebeg, 2009). Today, it is very tempting for researchers from diversified disciplines outside the conventional marketing field to go through all the topics of marketing favoring applying the common marketing fundamentals on the political level. Even for political parties, they started to use the common marketing instruments as part of the activities of their election campaigns (Scammell, 1999). As for the relation between the political marketing principles and the rates of political participation in the new democracies of the 3rd world developing countries, Allam (2008) has conducted an applied research on Egypt. The study has supported Allam proposition that there is a direct positive relationship between applying effective principles of political marketing and the rate of participation in the political process. In general, political marketing is designed to influence citizens and to mobilize them towards voting in elections. According to Lock and Harris (1996, p. 21), political marketing is concerned with communicating with party members, media, and potential sources of funding as well as the people entitled to vote. In this narrower viewpoint, political marketing is considered to be the process of communicating the value of a product or service (policies, political programs, and politician’s images) to customers, whether being voters or non-voters, in order to sell that good or service, so political marketing is much more than political advertising. Emmer et al. (2012) argue that the right design of the marketing strategy not only will help a candidate to win an election, but can also help all the stakeholders to mobilize, get engaged and actively participate in the political processes.