Political Marketing, Tribal Marketing, & the Two-Way Flow of Influence

Political marketing holds that marketing has penetrated nearly all aspects of politics and that political marketers superimpose the strategies and tactics of commercial marketers onto politics. While this pattern of influence has dominated the literature, I examine the extent to which the flow of influence and innovation between commercial and political marketers may be functioning as a feedback loop. The example I use to investigate this is tribal marketing. My analysis proceeds accordingly: First, I establish the basics of tribal marketing. Second, relying upon the results from thirty-three (33) in-depth elite interviews with political marketers, market researchers, political researchers, pollsters and commercial marketers from Canada, the United States, and New Zealand, I examine how tribal marketing is becoming a more recognizable and effective way of marketing and how political marketers, being more familiar with this practice, are better at building and mobilizing tribes than are commercial marketers.