Political Market Orientation and Its Commercial Cousin

There is surprisingly little research on the market orientation of political parties, unlike its commercial cousin, with only three authors publishing work that concentrates on the concept (O'Cass, 1996, 2001a,b; Lees-Marshment, 2001a,b; Ormrod, 2004, 2005). This paper seeks to analyse the more recent literature on the concept of political market orientation using the four synthesised dimensions of commercial market orientation identified by Lafferty and Hult (2001) as a framework. This study also presents Lafferty and Hult's (2001) four commercial market orientation dimensions and describes the differences between the related terms of “market orientation” and “marketing orientation.” Further, the article surveys the political market orientation literature and then discusses the perspective that each approach adopts, the extent to which a distinction is made between a “political market orientation” and a “political marketing orientation,” and how the political market orientation conceptualisations are related to each of the four commercial market orientation dimensions. Future research directions are proposed.