Political Marketing aims to be relevant and may sometimes be more successful at this than some academic disciplines. If we want to be relevant it seems like there is a great opportunity to study QAnon and Political Marketing. QAnon And Academic Study If anyone does not know QAnon is a conspiracy theory popular amongst some…
Category: Public Policy
American Higher Education’s Uncertain Future
Moving to the US I thought I should get up to date with US higher education. Daniel Johnson’s book, on American Higher Education’s Uncertain Future, is a critique of where we are. I was expecting criticism of government funding levels, lack of appreciation of the benefits of academic thought, and maybe students themselves. It isn’t…
Some Advice on Calling BS
There are lots of reasons to like Bergstrom and West’s book Calling Bullshit. There is just so much BS available to anyone who wants to consume it. Calling BS is a skill we all need. Calling BS BS can pose a threat to democracy if people choose their leaders based upon things that just aren’t…
Improving Political Management; Some Of It Is A Bit Dark Ages
A co-author of mine, Jennifer Lees-Marshment, is a world expert on political marketing, (crudely put winning elections). In recent years she has turned her attention to improving political management. E.g., what politicians and their staffs have to do after they have won. Her new book, Political Management, is the result of years of painstaking work…
Improving Stakeholder Involvement In Government Decision Making
In this blog post I discuss our work on improving stakeholder involvement in government decision making. The Journal of Business Ethics published this in July 2020. Understanding The Views of Stakeholders A major problem in government is understanding the views of its stakeholders. A stakeholder is those who are impacted by, or can impact, the…
Regulation for Conservatives
How much the government should involve themselves in the lives of the public? This was been the theme of 2020 and the Covid crisis. Whatever your views it is unlikely you were totally happy. Die hard libertarians were not happy. Even in the most conservative of jurisdictions they could object. They could point to plenty…
Bias And Algorithms
As algorithms play greater and greater roles in our lives a reasonable question is: “are they fair?” The answer is often; “no, not really”. To be clear that doesn’t necessarily mean algorithms are making the world worse. If things were unfair before (and they were) then just knowing that things are unfair now can’t tell…
Corporate Political Advocacy
A fascinating question for corporations is how much they should get involved in politics. What is the role for Corporate Political Advocacy? Sometimes Politics Just Comes For You It can be hard to avoid politics sometimes; it just involves some companies by accident. I have no inside knowledge but I doubt Delta really had an…
Political Candidate Brand Strength
Beth Fossen, David Schweidel and Michael Lewis published a paper on political candidate brand strength in Customer Needs and Solutions. They used inspiration from the idea of performance premium measures of brand strength. In essence, these measures consider how a brand should be doing given certain important features. Then they look at how it is…
Marketing Strategy and Electoral Politics
As part of our special issue on political marketing, Sridhar Moorthy wrote a piece explaining marketing strategy and electoral politics. This uses ideas from competition theory. He focuses on analytical models. These are models based on mathematical theory. (Empirical models, on the other hand, are based upon observed data). Spend Does Not Necessarily Deliver Results…
