Populism and political marketing: Is the discipline still relevant?

This article offers a conceptual analysis of the response of political marketing scholarship to the rise of populism across the globe. It starts with the premise that, as it first emerged as a discipline, political marketing scholarship was closely allied to political science. For nearly 30 years, between the mid-1980s and mid-2010s, political marketing scholarship offered lessons to political science and communication studies about campaigning. It moved us from the how parties communicate to the why . The analytical power of the marketing approach provided insight that complemented conventional political communication approaches, which have been clustered around two basic ideas: the increasing institutional media power relative to politics and the transformative capacities of communication technology. Instead, analysing party campaigning behaviour as competitive marketing highlighted hitherto neglected areas, e.g: relationships between parties, members and voters, the significance of competitive positioning, market segmentation, and the importance of data and market research. Moreover, the brand concept broadened and deepened analytical thinking about the slippery idea of political image. However the shocks of the last 10 years – migration and economic crises, the pandemic, and the rise of populism across much of the world – have provoked soul-searching in the political science communities. Are conventional models up to the task of explaining new political realities, and above all: is democracy itself in danger? However, political marketing scholarship seems curiously detached from these urgent concerns. The article tests this by exploring the ways in which political marketing scholarship has dealt with populism. It analyses articles in the leading political marketing journal over 10 years and finds that, while these contribute to our knowledge of communication, they do not draw from specifically marketing concepts. This raises the question: is marketing is still a useful way of understanding the political world? In what ways is political marketing scholarship relevant now?.