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Weinreich, N.K. (1999) Hands on Social Marketing-A Step by Step Guide.
A Conceptual Model of Political Market Orientation
Robert P. Ormrod
SUMMARY. This article proposes eight constructs of a conceptual model of political market orientation, taking inspiration from the business and political marketing literature. Four of the constructs are 'behavioural' in that they aim to describe the process of how information flows through the organisation. The remaining four constructs are attitudinal, designed to capture the awareness of members to the activities and importance of stakeholder groups in society, both internal and external to the organisation. The model not only allows the level of a party's political market orientation to be assessed, but also aids the party in making a context-specific decision with regard to the rcallocation-or not-of party resources in order to attain the party's long-term objectives. [Articlecopies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http:// www.HaworthPress.com> © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Political market orientation, political marketing, market orientation
Robert P. Ormrod is Research Assistant, Business Research Academy, Langvangen 8, Building 108, 8900 Randers, Denmark (E-mail: ropo@erfak.dk).
The author would like to thank Assistant Professor Joachim Scholderer at the Aarhus School of Business and two anonymous Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing reviewers for helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "A Conceptual Model of Political Market Orientation." Ormrod .Robert P. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing (Best Business Books, an imprint of The Haworth Press. Inc.) Vol. 14, No. 1/2, 2005, pp. 47-64; and: Current Issues in Political Marketing (eds: Walter W. Wymer, Jr., and Jennifer Lees-Marsltmeiit) Best Business Books, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2005, pp. 47-64. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [i -800-HA WORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com].
Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JNPSM © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J054vl4n01_04 47
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The term 'market orientation' has existed in the business marketing literature for many years, but has only since around the beginning of the 1990's been conceptualised in a way that has facilitated testing in a scientific manner (Hanison-Walker 2001), beginning with Narver and Slater (1990) and Kohli and Jaworski (1990). There has since, however, been much work dealing with various alternative conceptualisations of the constructs that make up a market orientation, varying from Deshpandé, Farley and Webster's (1993) view that a market orientation should be considered as synonymous with a customer orientation, to Hard son-Walker's (2001) behavioural/cultural conceptualisation, where Narver and Slater's (1990) 'Customer Orientation' and 'Competitor Orientation' are matched with Kohli and Jaworski's (1990) 'Intelligence Generation,' 'Intelligence Dissemination,' and 'Responsiveness' constructs, and expanded by the addition of a fourth behavioural construct, a 'Shared Interpretation of Information,' inspired by Daft and Weick (1984) and located between the dissemination and responsiveness to information.
This article introduces a conceptual model of political market orientation that is developed from business and political marketing literature. It will begin with a short review of the research to date into the concept in both the business and political marketing literature, then continue to discuss the conceptualisation of the behavioural and cultural constructs proposed by Harrison-Walker (2001) and show the way in which they can be used in the political context. The importance of an 'Internal Orientation,' loosely based on Narver and Slater' s (1990) 'Interfunctional Coordination' construct will be demonstrated, and a further construct, an 'External Orientation,' will be developed and that is argued to enhance the sensitivity of the model to the political arena. The implications of Ormrod's (2003) research lead to the final two constructs of Harrison-Walker's (2001) conceptual model being redefined, again in order to reflect the nature of the political marketplace, labelled 'Member Participation' and 'Consistent External Communication.'
THE NATURE OF A MARKET ORIENTATION
A market orientation is normally conceptualised as a point on a continuum rather than as an either/or construct (Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Kohli, Jaworski, and Kumar 1993), and this characteristic enables the firm to determine the existing level of market orientation. Several authors (e.g., Harrison-Walker 2001; Narver and Slater 1990; Slater and Narver 1994) treat a Customer and a Competitor Orientation as separate constructs, and this enables the firm to measure the relative amount of resources allocated to understanding and serving each stakeholder group, which in turn can be adjusted and used to maxi-
mise the return on investment of these resources via a "balanced external orientation" strategy (Slater and Narver 1994). An investigation into the level of a firm's market orientation is not prescriptive in the sense that it provides hard and fast guidelines for success, but rather allows the organisation to make context-specific decisions in order to maximise the return on resources employed.
A related point is made by Kohli and Jaworski (1990), that "The orientation is useful only if the benefits it affords exceeds the cost of these resources," that is, there is an opportunity cost of resources employed. They also note that the implementation of market orientation does not automatically result in an increased performance, as "simply engaging in market-oriented activities does not ensure the quality of those activities" (Kohli and Jaworski 1990); in some circumstances it is conceivable that, for example, a product or sales orientation would be more profitable to the firm due to the nature of the competitive environment (e.g., Noble, Sinha, and Kumar 2002; Gray et al. 1998; Slater and Narver 1994; Kohli and Jaworski 1990). Whilst it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss this issue, it is proposed to be an important area for future research into the implications of adopting a political market orientation.
It is also important to note that a market orientation is not a marketing orientation. Until recently there has been some discussion in the business marketing literature as to the difference between a 'market' and a 'marketing' orientation, and as such it is important to clarify the position taken in this article with regard to the two concepts. The view accepted by the majority of business market orientation authors (e.g., Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Narver and Slater 1990; Harrison-Walker 2001; Lafferty and Hult 2001) is that the term 'market orientation' concerns the holistic, organisation-wide nature of the concept's emphasis on both internal and external stakeholder relationships, whilst a 'marketing orientation' is mainly the preserve of the marketing function and is primarily concerned with "marketing's functional role in coordinating and managing the 4P's to make companies more responsive to meeting customer needs" (Gray et al. 1998). A 'political marketing orientation' would therefore be primarily concerned with investigating the discrete exchanges that occur as a result of, for example, election campaigns, whilst the emphasis on building and maintaining stakeholder relationships by the entire organisation makes the term 'political market orientation' more appropriate to the conceptual model proposed in this article.
PREVIOUS WORK ON POLITICAL MARKET ORIENTATION
0'Cass(1996, 2001a, 2001b) proposes a semantic redefinition of the marketing management paradigm for the political context as "the analysis, plan-
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ning, implementation and control of political and electoral programs" (O'Cass 1996), but does not really discuss the differences between the business and political marketplaces. Despite the fact that various stakeholder groups' influence on political parties is acknowledged, as "significant pressures are being placed on political parties and politicians by voters, business and lobby groups" (O'Cass 2001 a), only the party/voter exchange process is investigated with the emphasis of his research being on the use of traditional marketing tools to attain party objectives. The success criteria he lays down does concern satisfying "voter needs and wants . . . within ideological bounds and parliamentary numbers rather than the percentage of the vote" (O'Cass 2001a), but his research concentrates mainly on the effects of a marketing orientation on campaign activities (O'Cass 1996,2001a, 2001b). Although noting that a market orientation is not a marketing orientation, in O'Cass (2001b) he considers it possible to use them to supplement each other in an investigation rather than acknowledging that they rest upon different paradigms, each with its own assumptions.
Lees-Marshment (2001a, 2Q01b, 2001c) describes the process that a market oriented party goes through during an electoral cycle, beginning with the generation of formal and informal market intelligence by party members and professionals alike. Lees-Marshment (2001 a) takes the view that political marketing is concerned with "the relationship between a political organisation's 'product' and the demands of the market," and that "the basic argument of a market orientation is to follow, rather than lead, voter demands."
Internal stakeholders are also considered to be of prime importance when developing and marketing the market oriented party's political product, especially grassroots party members, as their inclusion can "promote a feeling of involvement, value and worth amongst those within the party" (Lees-Marshment 2001a). The information that is generated on, for example, voter opinions should then be disseminated to all members and used to assist in the joint formulation of party policy by members and party professionals, as this will "increase co-operation and understanding between them and help to reduce the chances of an 'outsider/insider' (professional/party member) distinction arising" (Lees-Marshment 2001a).
In short, the party which adopts a market oriented approach first generates market intelligence into voter needs and wants, disseminates this intelligence throughout the party, and then "designs a product that will actually satisfy voters' demands: that meets their needs and wants, is supported and implemented by the internal organisation, and is deliverable in government" (Lees-Marshment 2001a). The political product is then communicated out to voters at all points on the electoral cycle so that come election time, "The actual election campaign is then almost superfluous to requirements but pro-
vides the last chance to convey to voters what is on offer" (Lees-Marshment 2001a). The final stage is that of delivery: should the party gain enough support to form a government then it will be able to put its policies into practice, and it is this stage that "is crucial to the ultimate success of marketing and therefore political marketing" (Lees-Marshment 2001a).
Whilst it could be argued that Lees-Marshment's (2001a, 2001b, 2001c) process model of how a market oriented party should act is in fact closer to a marketing orientation rather than a market orientation, it is however similar to Kohli and Jaworski's (!990) conceptualisation of a market orientation as behaviour. There is an emphasis on generating information, disseminating it to ail party members and including all internal stakeholders-to the extent possi-ble-in the marketing and strategy formulation process as a prerequisite for party success. Lees-Marshment (2001a) also advocates an awareness of competitor actions in that it is recommended that a SWOT analysis (Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) be carried out, but fostering an attitude in the party to the possibility of cooperating with competitors, an important consideration in some political systems (Bowler and Farrell 1992), is not so apparent; nor is an explicit reference to the importance of generating information directly from other external stakeholder groups.
The conceptual model of political market orientation proposed in this article has obvious parallels to Lees-Marshment's (e.g., 2001a) work, but differs in that the possibility of cooperating with competing parties is acknowledged, as is the importance of all stakeholder groups in society. Therefore, it is proposed that a political market orientation exists when all members of a party are sensitive to internal and external stakeholders' attitudes, needs and wants, and synthesize these within a framework of constraints imposed by all stakeholders to develop policies and programmes with which to reach the party's objectives.
POLITICAL MARKET ORIENTATION AS BEHAVIOUR
Many of the previous conceptualisations of a market orientation have consisted of exclusively behavioural constructs, which is reflected in the definition of the concept as "the physical actions of [actors] that can be directly observed and measured by others" (Peter, Olsen, and Grunert 1999). The behavioural constructs of the conceptual model of political market orientation presented in this work follow closely those first proposed by Kohli and Jaworski (1990), in that the Information Generation and Information Dissemination constructs are linked with Ormrod's (2003) 'Member Participation' and 'Consistent External Communication' constructs.
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Lafferty and Hult's (2001) article, a synthesis of previous work on market orientation that resulted in four dimensions, shows Kohli and Jaworski's (1990) conceptualisation to have the most utility in explaining the behavioural constructs of the business market orientation model, as other authors have restricted it to focusing on a particular external stakeholder group (e.g., Ruekert 1992-the generation of customer information) or to the managerial level at which the information is disseminated in the firm (e.g., Shapiro 1988-upper management). Despite the fact that Kohli and Jaworski (1990) also emphasise upper management as the key facilitating group amongst employees, their conceptual model is on a more general level and stresses the 'importance of information' and of 'talcing action,' two of Lafferty and Hult's (2001) dimensions; as such it is not only applicable across a broader spectrum of industries, but also more applicable to political parties.
The use of the term 'information' instead of Kohli and Jaworski's (1990) 'intelligence' is more than merely a semantic preference—'intelligence' can be said to refer to the generation of pieces of information pertaining to sources external to the organisation, which then pass through the three remaining behavioural constructs of the conceptual model of political market orientation proposed in this article. The term 'information,' on the other hand, is broader in scope as it can also apply to the Internal Orientation construct of the political market orientation recognition of the ability of individual party members, independent of position in the party, to generate ideas and information and to participate in policy and political program development.
Finally, it must be noted that a central assumption of the conceptual model of political market orientation is that the four behavioural constructs are consecutive, as information has to be generated before it can be disseminated, disseminated before it can be interpreted, and so on. This behavioural chain (Figure 1) demonstrates the direction of information flow through the party, and should not be interpreted as indicating capability dependence; it is conceivable that a party could generate a large amount of both formal and informal information, yet not have the organisational structure necessary to disseminate this information. A final defining characteristic of the behavioural chain is its application, as a whole, to each of the attitudinal constructs (Harrison-Walker 2001; Kohli and Jaworski 1990).
This conceptualisation enables the model to discern the extent to which the party is oriented to the individual stakeholder markets, and to aid the party in optimising the resource allocation to each stakeholder group in order to achieve the agreed-upon party objectives. This characteristic of the conceptual model also enables it to be used in different electoral systems and by different party structures in that it is not prescriptive in the sense that it gives answers to
FIGURE 1. The Behavioural Chain
Information , Generation '
' x; ;*
Information \ >,   Dissemination )
Member Participation ,
/   Consistent '
External '■ , Comrnunicaiicn
the resource allocation question, but rather aids the party as a whole in adjust-ing-or not-the emphasis placed on different stakeholder groups.
INFORMATION GENERATION
Kohli et al. (1993) define their concept of Intelligence Generation as being "the collection and assessment of both customer needs/preferences and the forces (i.e., task and macro environments) that influence the development and refinement of those needs," i.e., both customers and external stakeholders. They also stress the necessity of this occurring in all departments in the business, as "each has a unique market lens"; whilst political parties are generally organised as hierarchies (Dean and Croft 2001) rather than as functions, each party member has a particular perspective on society and is, to a certain extent, capable of generating information about stakeholder opinions.
The importance of the generation of information emphasised in the business market orientation literature is mirrored in the political market orientation literature, with both Lees-Marshment (2001a, 2001b, 2001c) and O'Cass
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(1996, 2001a, 2001b) regarding it as a necessary activity in order to explicate voter needs and wants. Lees-Marshment (2001a) goes further and proposes that the generation of information occurs formally (i.e., traditional market research at the party level) and informally (i.e., social exchanges at the individual level), and suggests that research should also be carried out by the party leadership on internal stakeholder opinions, as 'The party leadership needs to understand the views of all within the organisation and alter the product accordingly to ensure that it will gain the necessary level of acceptance." This formal/informal conceptualisation is considered to have some explanatory power, and therefore Information Generation is defined as the party-wide generation of formal and informal information regarding all internal and external stakeholders.
IN FORMA TION DISSEMINA TION
The second stage in Kohli and Jaworski's (1990) market orientation construct is concerned with the dissemination of information throughout the organisation. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) argue that "market intelligence need not always be disseminated by the marketing department to other departments. Intelligence may flow in the opposite direction, depending on where it is generated," that is, all individuals in the organisation are capable of generating intelligence. Kohli et al. (1993) elaborate on this conceptualisation by explicitly stating that "the dissemination of intelligence occurs both formally and informally."
This emphasis on the importance of horizontal and vertical dissemination of information is also accepted in the political market orientation research to date, in that Lees-Marshment (2001a) argues that "The results of professional research should be made fully available to them [MP's and members]," and O'Cass (2001a) considers the Kohli and Jaworski (1990) typology as being the most applicable to the study of political marketing phenomena. In the context of the conceptual model of political market orientation presented in this article, Information Dissemination is defined to be the party-wide communication and reception of information through formal and informal channels.
MEMBER PARTICIPATION
In addition to the Kohli and Jaworski (1990) Generation-Dissemination-Responsiveness typology, Harrison-Walker (2001) argued for the inclusion of a fourth behavioural construct concerning the 'Shared Interpretation of Infor-
mation,' occurring between dissemination and responsiveness, a conceptualisation inspired by Daft and Weick (1984, in Harrison-Walker 2001). Whilst Harrison-Walker (2001) places the organisational interpretation of information as occurring after the dissemination of information and being the responsibility of upper management, Kohli and Jaworski (1990) see this as occurring as part of the Information Generation stage at the individual level rather than a separate process at the collective level, although they do see the dissemination stage as providing "a shared basis for concerted actions by different departments."
Ormrod (2003) found that there was evidence to suggest that the internal and external aspects of the behavioural chain should be separated, where the internally focussed construct would consist of behaviours relating to the inclusion of all members in both making sense of the disseminated information and creating a coherent strategy from it. It must be remembered that whilst the actual result of this process of making sense of information may not be agreed upon by all members, the fact that there is an awareness of the collective interpretation facilitates a consistent message to be communicated out of the party. An example of this could be the discussions inside of a party surrounding the periodic development of a policy program; although many different views are likely to exist concerning the exact formulation of the text, there is (in most cases) only one, final document. In the conceptual model of political market orientation, the inclusive nature of political parties is captured in the definition of the Member Participation construct as the process of including all members in creating a coherent party strategy; this facilitates consistent responses which are agreed upon by all party members.
CONSISTENT EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION
An element that occurs explicitly in all three of the behavioural conceptualisations of market orientation surveyed by Lafferty and Hult (2001) is that of the importance of a Responsiveness to Information. Several authors (e.g., Harrison-Walker 2001; Kohli et al. 1993) note that the responsiveness construct consists of two parts, the planning and implementation of a response strategy, and Shapiro (1988) considers this to be essential to a market orientation, in that "When the implementers also do the planning, the commitment will be strong and clear."
However, as noted above under 'Member Participation,' Ormrod (2003) found that the conceptualisation of a Responsiveness to Information as both having internal and external foci may not be appropriate to the political context, as whilst only the elected politicians can actually pass laws, all party
56 CURRENT ISSUES IN POLITICAL MARKETING
members can act as 'part-time marketers' (Johansen 2002) and provide an enthusiastic base of representatives with which to build up individual relationships with external stakeholders in order to achieve the party's long-term objectives. This conceptualisation may also help combat the negative effects of "the arbitration of an independent communications power centre, the mass or 'free' media which they [parties] may be able to influence but cannot control" (O'Shaughnessy 2001). Therefore, a Consistent External Communication can be defined as the process of communicating aconsistent, agreed-upon strategy to external stakeholder groups.
POLITICAL MARKET ORIENTATION AS ATTITUDES
Several business market orientation authors (e.g., Harrison-Walker 2001; Griffiths and Grover 1998) have conceptualised a market orientation as consisting of behavioural and cultural constructs, but whilst behaviours can be observed, a 'culture' can be defined as including "the beliefs, attitudes, goals and values held by most people in a society, as well as the meanings of characteristic behaviours, rules, customs, and norms that most people follow" (Peter el al. 1999). This definition demonstrates that a 'culture' contains many diverse elements, making an operationalisation of a cultural conceptualisation extremely difficult, if not impossible. In order to increase the utility of the conceptual model of political market orientation as a statistical tool for use in real situations, it is more constructive to analyse the attitudes parly members have towards the different stakeholder groups in society. An attitude is defined as "a person's overall evaluation of a concept," consisting of "favourable and unfavourable feelings towards an object" (Peter et al. 1999), and this enables the attitude object to be made explicit and measured with comparatively more precision.
The attitudinal constructs of the conceptual model of political market orientation are not as easy to deduce from the business market orientation literature as the behavioural components outlined above, as only the Customer and Competitor Orientation constructs have been directly proposed (e.g., Narver and Slater 1990; Harrison-Walker 2001). The Internal Orientation construct proposed in this article is conceptually similar to Narver and Slater's (1990) Tnterfunctional Coordination' construct, but the construct has been contextu-ally redefined and relabelled. The inclusion of an explicit External Orientation construct expands the various conceptualisations of a business market orientation, focussing on stakeholder groups outside of the party that are not voters or competitors. The four stakeholder groups are presented in Figure 2.
Robert P. Ormrod 57 FIGURE 2. The Four Stakeholder Orientations
Voter internal s    Orientation v Orientation
Competitor External Orientation Orientation
It is important to note that Lafferty and Hult (2001) class Narver and Slater's (1990) concepts of Customer Orientation, Competitor Orientation and Interfunctional Coordination as "culturally-based behaviours," emphasising that the concepts focus on an organisational understanding of the need to collect information about customers' present and future needs and wants, and competitors' actions. However, Slater and Narver (1995) redefined their concept of market orientation and separate the culture from the behaviour, stating that the culture "provides norms for behaviour regarding the organizational development of and responsiveness to market information."
VOTER ORIENTATION
Of the five general approaches discussed by Lafferty and Hult (2001), the focus present in all conceptualisations of a business market orientation was that of a Customer Orientation. A large amount of research in political marketing has concentrated on the effects of electoral tactics and strategy on voter behaviour, and it is generally accepted in the literature that the political consumer is the voter. It is of course true that there are certain characteristics of voters which set them apart from consumers in the business sense, such as the existence of the 'counter-consumer' (Butler and Collins 1999, 1996), but there are, however, characteristics that voters and customers have in common, such as the suitability of traditional market research tools for uncovering voter opinions (e.g., Lees-Marshment 2001a; Sparrow and Turner 2001) and of marketing communication strategies (e.g., Kaid 1999; Scammell 1996), together with the conceptualisation of voting as an exchange process (e.g., O'Cass 1996).
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The Voter Orientation construct is defined such that an emphasis is placed upon social exchanges between individual actors complementing the utilisation of traditional marketing management tools. As such, the Voter Orientation construct can be seen as the attitudes of all party members towards being aware of voter needs and wants at the individual level through a willingness to enter into social exchanges with these voters, and an acknowledgement of the usefulness of traditional marketing tools' place in uncovering voter opinions at the party level; in short, the party-wide awareness of voter needs and wants and an acknowledgement of the importance of knowing these.
COMPETITOR ORIENTATION
A competitor orientation is considered by several authors (e.g., Harrison-Walker 2001; Narver and Slater 1990) to be essential to the business market orientation concept, and by Lecs-Marshment (e.g., 2001a) to the activities involved in a political market orientation. Bowler and Farrell (1992) discuss the behaviour of parties in different electoral systems at election time, slating that "in multi-party systems the parties have to make allowances for possible coalition partners and so temper their campaign messages," and Butler and Collins (1996) describe four market positions for political parties (market leader, challenger, follower and nicher), based on those discussed in marketing textbooks such as Kotler (1997), that can affect the strategic direction pursued by the individual party vis-á-vis other parties in the political marketplace. Interestingly, Dean and Croft (2001) do not include competing political parties in their Multiple Markets model of important stakeholder groups, although an explanation that they themselves give is that the model is based upon the British party system where coalition governments are uncommon.
A separate Competitor Orientation construct is considered necessary in a political market orientation, and that it must be conceptualised so as to take into account the nature of political competition in that it is essential in some systems to create alliances with other parties in order to pass legislation. A Competitor Orientation is therefore defined as the party-wide awareness of other parties' attitudes and behaviours, and an acknowledgement that cooperation with other parties may be necessary to attain the party's long-term objectives.
INTERNAL ORIENTATION
Narver and Slater (1990) define the concept of an Interfunctional Coordination as "the coordinated utilization of company resources in creating superior
value for target customers." Lafferty and Hult (2001) find that this construct is to a greater or lesser extent present in all of the approaches to market orientation that they identify, and that the emphasis is placed more on the 'Interfunctional' nature of the concept. The very precise definition proposed by Narver and Slater (1990) makes it difficult to apply directly to the political marketing context, and the horizontal emphasis risks overlooking the hierarchical structure of parties, in that political parties tend not to be organised as functions that contribute to the day-to-day running of the organisation, but as vertical hierarchies (Dean and Croft 2001). In a political marketing context, Narver and Slater's (1990) focus on 'company resources' should be seen as all party members, and as such it is considered to be necessary to re-label 'Interfunctional Coordination' to reflect these differences, hence 'Internal Orientation.'
The importance of party members to the functioning of political parties has been emphasised by several authors (e.g., Johansen 2002; Butler and Collins 1999; Lees-Marshment 2001b), and Lees-Marshment (2001 a) states that "Parties can get ideas about what voters want by 'keeping an ear to the ground' or talking to party activists," and underlines the importance of including grassroots members and their opinions in the formulation of party policy. This emphasis on the inclusion of all party members is reflected in the definition of an Internal Orientation, in that it is the party-wide awareness and acceptance of the value of other members' opinions, irrespective of position in the party,
EXTERNAL ORIENTA TION
Seines, Jaworski, and Kohli (1996) note that little research has explicitly addressed the nature of the exogenous environment's moderating effects on the results of a market orientation, and few authors have noted the importance of being aware of external stakeholders (e.g., Slater and Narver 1995), This is also true of the political marketing literature to date, in that whilst acknowledging the importance of the exogenous environment to political parties, research has mainly concentrated on the effects of the media (e.g., Kraus 1999; Roka 1999; O'Shaughnessy 1990) and lobby groups (Harris, Gardner, and Vetter 1999; Harris and Lock 1996).
There are few articles in the political marketing literature that explicitly list the important external stakeholder groups. The most notable example is that of Dean and Croft (2001), who adapt Christopher, Payne, and Ballantine's (1991) Six Markets model to the British electoral system, and define the external stakeholder groups to be trade unions and business associations, pressure groups, peer groups, and civil servants. Dean and Croft (2001) acknowledge that the inclusion of this last category "is, perhaps, a surprising one," but base
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its inclusion on the fact that it is the civil service (to be understood as public sector employees) that is responsible for the implementation of po3icy, a point that has also been made by Lees-Marshment and Laing (2002). It can be said that there is a growing focus in the political marketing literature on the influence of all external groups that have an interest in or affect the outcome of political decisions, and this is reflected in the final attitudinal construct of the conceptual model of political market orientation, an External Orientation, defined as the party-wide acknowledgement of the existence and importance of stakeholders in society that are not voters or competitors.
CONCLUSION
The four behavioural constructs of the conceptual model of political market orientation proposed in this article are Information Generation, Information Dissemination, Member Participation and Consistent External Communication. The four behavioural constructs are consecutive, in that information has to be generated before it can be disseminated, disseminated before it can be made sense of by members participating in strategy formulation, and so on. Another defining characteristic of this 'behavioural chain' is its application, as a whole, to each of the attitudinal orientation (Harrison-Walker 2001; Kohli and Jaworski 1990). The first two attitudinal constructs, a Voter and Competitor Orientation, are similar to those that already exist in the business, and to a certain extent, political marketing literature, whilst the third construct, an Internal Orientation, is a development of Narver and Slater's (1990) Interfunctional Coordination construct in order to take into account the idiosyncrasies of the political context. The fourth attitudinal construct, an External Orientation, has been proposed in order to reflect the importance of stakeholder groups in society that are external to the party and not voters or competing parties. The complete conceptual model of political market orientation is presented in Figure 3.
The conceptual model presented in this article is designed to be used by all types of political parties regardless of ideological persuasion or electoral system, and to be used independently of the position in the electoral cycle. As an analytic tool it can discern the level of a parly' s political market orientation with regard to different stakeholder groups in society, thus enabling the parly as a whole to decide whether or not resources have to be reallocated in order to achieve the party's long-term objectives, within a framework of constraints imposed by all of society. Future research into the concept of a political market orientation should investigate implementation issues, tak-
FIGURE 3. A Conceptual Model of Political Market Orientation
ing into consideration the national idiosyncrasies of political markets and political party structures, and in general it is necessary for research in this field to continue in order to generate a deeper understanding of how the concept of a business market orientation can be tailored-rather than indiscriminately ap-plied-to have utility in the political marketplace.
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The conceptual model of political market orientation presented in this article is a contribution to the field of Political Marketing that can provide an interesting perspective from which to understand political parties, their behaviours, and the attitudes of their members towards stakeholder groups in society.
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Membership Benefits, Membership Action: Why Incentives for Activism Are What Members Want
Sue Granik
SUMMARY. This article identifies the benefits of political party membership and which of these benefits also operate as incentives for participation. This exploration is conducted in the context of competing relationship marketing hypotheses, and frameworks from other relevant academic disciplines.
Exploratory empirical research identifies two purposive and three solidary benefits of membership. Values functional motivations, socialization and job satisfaction are identified as having statistically significant relationships with participation. Frequency of agreement with party policies and enhancement functional motivations do not appear to have any relationship with participation.
The article concludes that members using their membership as a vehicle for realizing solidary benefits are more likely to respond to incen-
Sue Granik is a doctoral candidate, Department of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK (E-mail: S.D. GRANIK@lse.ac.uk).
The financial assistance of the Economic and Social Research Council (Postgraduate Training Award R00429934169) is gratefully acknowledged,
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Membership Benefits, Membership Action; Why Incentives for Activism Are What Members Want." Granik, Sue. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing (Best Business Books, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 14, No. 1/2, 2005, pp. 65-89; and: Current Issues in Political Marketing (eds: Waiter W. Wyiuer. Jr., and Jennifer Lees-Marshment) Best Business Books, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2005, pp. 65-89. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST), E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com].
Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JNPSM © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
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