Today, in political marketing it had become vital to address the human behavior factor, including generational  behavior. Psychology of the emotions has become an essential ingredient in the mix of theories that contribute to a political marketing success.

For some people, the mention of emotions in the context of political marketing connotes some strong negatives: manipulation, triviality, a move away from democratic deliberation of the issues towards a politics of charisma, with its potential for demagogy and for destructive mobilizations of emotion.  

Barack Obama’s 08 election demonstrated that beyond an emotionally sensitive political marketing carries a potential for deepening and strengthening the democratic process thus bringing the people closer while bridging down the long standing walls and barriers of trust issues down.

Age of engagement and generational sciences

Today, when we speak the word politics, we refer to the term engagement. A new term that reshaped the marketing playground and gave it a new life:  the Social media Impact Just Starting.
In order to understand the impact of this term one must take into account social psychology and understand the importance of generational sciences and morphogenetic behavior of the generations in question.

So we are here in the territory of voters’ identifications, with how strongly these generation  use geography in their own narratives of who they are, and with our needs for leaders with whom we can feel some shared identity - whatever different things a ‘Southern’ identity might mean to different Southerners. Cultural identifications based on region, or on ethnicity, religion or class, are often obscure in meaning, and always emotionally charged.

So here is another policy-free and emotionally-laden area. We must note though that it is not a simple need for the leader to have the same identity as the follower. A fundamental issue in the emotional dynamics of political leadership is the tension between the wish to have leaders who (we feel) are like us, and the need for leaders who are different, who we believe can lead because of their exceptional qualities. The personality contrast between Kerry and Edwards also draws some of its meaning from this tension.

These mundane examples are typical of hundreds we could find in the contemporary political scene of well-known influences on voting decisions which can only be understood psychologically  or more specifically, which require a psychology of emotion to understand them. They are also examples of issues with which political marketing, or at least some branches of it, must be concerned.  

The management of candidates as brands, and in the case of a leader health scare, a crisis in product reputation. Why, however, might the arrival of political marketing open up these issues to the kind of depth-psychological understanding of emotion which I am advocating?

This is possible because marketing in the consumer goods sphere has been concerned throughout its history with addressing the emotionality of the consumer

So can we expect political marketing to do something for political culture comparable to what consumer marketing has done for consumer culture, that is to effect a significant emotionalization of the citizen’s experience of politics? Or may it at least bring to the study of the political process a greater awareness of the emotional dimensions of campaigning, of citizen engagement, of political literacy and of other key issues facing political parties and institutions?

Political marketing and  neuromarketing

There is a basic question about the future of political marketing. Can it offer a newly purposeful and informed reach into the imagination of the electorate, and bring political dimensions to the self-identity of the postmodern citizen, so helping to restore participation? Or will it fall victim to the culture of suspicion which now prevails, and add to the disenchantment of the distrustful citizen who fears emotional manipulation?

The time is certainly right for a full recognition of the centrality of emotions to the understanding of electoral politics.

A more fundamental concern is not with the ebb and flow of paradigms in academia, but with changes in the nature of our political life. What kind of changes might we expect from the development of a political marketing informed by a depth psychology of the emotions?

Political marketing is seen here in the same way as commercial advertising was in the many critiques of it produced in the second half of the last century . Its address to the emotions, via its concerns with symbols, images, personalities, impression-management and so on, is construed as cynical. In this scenario, political marketing degrades political culture, promoting image above value and blind sentiment above reason.

Commercial marketing contributed to widening popular emotional repertoires as well as to the maintenance of certain stereotypes; at times it encouraged the growth of self-reflexivity, though it also fed unthinking consumerism.

From a psycho-cultural viewpoint, the discourse of marketing characteristic of consumer culture plays an important role in the complex processes of emotional regulation which go on in contemporary society.

How can the positive potential of political marketing, as an appeal to the emotions of the citizen, be maximized?

It would not be possible to try to take the personalities or the cultural identities of candidates out of an election and just concentrate on ‘the issues’. A recent study confirms that news consumers want ‘candidates as people’ stories. In the Kerry-Edwards competition, one option for each campaign would have been to behave like a brand manager adjusting to the competition with a strategy of appropriating the rival’s characteristics.

Audiences are not only detached consumers of people appearing in the media. They identify with public figures. This inward, emotional connection is a major driver of our outward engagement with cognitive, rational issues in the ‘real’ world. In other words, emotion and reason are inextricably linked, and are potentially integrated rather than as intrinsically separated and opposed, as in rationalist traditions of Western philosophy.