A critical reading of political marketing management in the US via Gramsci’s hegemony

Political marketing merges the tenets of marketing management with politics. It is based on the presumption of parity between political activity and marketing conditions. Political organizations employ political marketing in campaigns to promote agendas. Allegedly however, political organizations today act arbitrarily to attain short-term gains and in ways that lack systematization and vision. Politicians are accused of manipulating the system to advance agendas. The weak faith in politics and politicians has led to a severe decline in political participation by the public, which poses a threat to democracy. Through conceptual analysis, the study adopts a critical approach in reading and interpreting political marketing management via Gramsci’s hegemony in the US. The critical reflection pinpoints intersections between political marketing management and hegemony in its original conception. The intersections tackle the political marketing strategy, orientation, and product. Such links make parallels with Gramsci’s hegemony by equating political consumers to subalterns given the ideology of democracy that is propagated by strategy, hence the absence of coercion. Another intersection is the deployment of media to create favorable associations and influence receivers to impose ideology and subsequently acquire consent from the masses. Political products and brands are equated with common sense in this paper that is generated by the ideology of democracy, the social mobility of media, and the psychological influence induced by political branding to the extent of identification. Spontaneity is thus elicited by powerful rather than merited political products and brands owing to potent political marketing functions and schemes despite ongoing cases of product mutability. Through utilizing Gramsci’s hegemony, these nodes shed light on problematic aspects in the paradigm adopted by political marketing practitioners, which is reflecting poorly on democracy. The paper concludes with a discussion of Gramsci’s organic intellectual as a counter-hegemony project to be embedded in the political product and contests the current hegemony in the political arena.