Exploring political marketing into relationship marketing

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the influences of leaders’ attributes and policies and will explore the effective marketing activities of political leaders on the voter decision making process. Originality: This paper offers salient antecedents that affect voter intention towards candidate or political party. Theoretical Perspective: The theme of relationship marketing and elaboration likelihood model is employed into political marketing domain. Methodology: I will employ a mixed method approach. Interview findings and survey data will be gathered prior to parliamentary elections from Australia. Structural equations modeling will be used to analyze and interpret the degree of influences among the various identified leadership attributes. Findings: It is believed that many factors are liable to make voter decision making process. However, leaders’ attributes and party policies play significant role to influence voter intention. Particularly country like Australia where people and media enjoy maximum freedom of speech and information compared to developing countries where these freedoms limited to some extent. Voters may put more emphasis on media to collect and process the argument/information/campaign in the central route. Research limitations/implications: This survey research will initially be confined to Australia. Further work in other developed and developing countries would be useful to compare the findings. Practical implications: Political or marketing professionals or candidates will be able to identify various segmented voter groups and develop effective marketing strategies and positioning based on my proposed model.