Minor Party Campaign Advertising: A Market-Oriented Assessment

This chapter explores the manifestation of market orientation in political advertisements by New Zealand’s minor parties’ in the 2017 election. It applies an original framework, that assigns key marketing concepts with visual manifestations, to the advertising of the five minor parties seeking to return to parliament in 2017: The Green Party (Greens), New Zealand First, the Maori Party, ACT and United Future. The research demonstrates the importance of focusing on what parties do in order to gain a good understanding of what happens in elections. It finds that the parties that fared better, New Zealand First, and the Greens, demonstrated an awareness in their advertising messages that they needed to be voter oriented in order to gain popular support. But all minor parties demonstrated in their messaging a lack of awareness of the need to be more competitor oriented, and this impacted on all their fortunes.