The Impact of Digital Marketing on The Outcomes of UK National Elections (GC02027)
Acknowledgment
First of all, I would like to thank my honorable supervisor who provided me suggestions and guidelines along with effective feedbacks and comments that, in turn, helped me to successfully complete this research work. Then, I bless my parents who have supported me financially and with guidance to successfully complete this course. Finally, I would appreciate to the book publishers, librarians, journalists and website publishers from where I have collected lots of resources that contributed to completing this dissertation
Abstract
The aim of this study is to understand the impact of digital marketing campaigns on the outcome of UK general elections and to recommend to the political parties how they can improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of the usages of digital marketing tools in their campaigns. As the key methodology used in this study is a survey and collect quantitative data. The finding of primary data shows that 58% of participants said they receive political messages frequently through various digital tools such as social media, email and mobile. Then, 62% of participants believe that digital marketing tools are effective to make them understand several issues related to the general election. Additionally, 59% of respondents said they can easily understand what the political parties stand for via different digital marketing tools. Then, 61% of participants are likely to interact/contact political parties and their representatives through different digital marketing tools. Further, 60% of respondents stated that they can discuss their views with political parties via digital marketing tools. However, 61% of participants think this opportunity is for only people who have similar views. The key challenges of digital marketing tools in political campaigns are data privacy, security, transparency, anonymity and confidentiality.
All the statistical tools including correlation, one-way ANOVA test and Chi-Square test shows that there are strong relations between the different age group of people and social media in term of sharing their political views with political parties. Then, 66% of respondents believe several digital marketing tools can improve the democratic process through greater access to political debates and motivating more open discussion. In addition, 66% of participants think the use of digital marketing tools can provide a better understanding of politicians and their aims and goals. This ultimately can affect the outcome of the voting. Next, 59% of participants suggest that political parties should digital marketing tools, mainly social media, to share their views, values, and policies. Then, 58% of respondents said political should use digital devices more effectively to engage the people and reply to their comments and questions. Next, 60% of respondents suggest that political parties should use digital marketing tools to collect comments and views from the constituents and use them in their decision-making. Then, 61% of respondents suggest that political representatives like MPs to have an account in social media to be connected to the followers. Finally, nearly half (48%) of participants recommend the political parties in the UK to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the use of digital marketing tools.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgment
Abstract
Chapter 1: Introduction.
1.0 Introduction.
1.1 Research Background.
1.2 Significance of the Research.
1.3 Research Aim and Objectives.
1.4 Research Question.
1.5 Research structure.
Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.0 Introduction.
2.1 Data-Driven Political Campaigning.
2.2 How a data-driven social media campaign works.
2.3 Digital marketing and UK Brexit and general election 2017.
2.4 Impact of digital media on the outcome of general elections in the UK.
2.5 Some implications of social media campaigning.
2.6 Conceptual framework.
2.7 Chapter summary.
Chapter 3: Methodologies.
3.0 Introduction.
3.1 Research Philosophy.
3.2 Research Design.
3.3 Research Approach.
3.4 Research Strategy.
3.5 Data collection methods.
3.6 Data sources.
3.7 Time horizon.
3.8 Research instruments.
3.9 Questionnaire designs as data collection methods.
3.10 Samplings methods.
3.11 Pilot test
3.12 Data analysis methods.
3.13 Research reliability and validity.
3.14 Research ethics.
Chapter 4: Finding and Analysis.
4.0 Introduction.
4.1 Finding and analysis.
4.2 Statistical data analysis.
Chapter 5: Conclusion and Recommendation.
5.1 Conclusion.
5.2 Recommendation.
5.3 Limitation.
5.4 Scope for further research.
References.
Appendix A: Research Onion.
Appendix B: Survey Questionnaire.
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.0 Introduction
Digital marketing tools are nowadays being used by almost all kinds of organizations in the present digital world (Royle and Laing (2014). Organizations can communicate with their clients very easily. Flavin (2015), said that the modern political campaign is a way of doing business. The political parties are advertising through digital media and they spend huge of money on that. They have introduced some opinion polls through some groups which work as collecting the opinion and the psychographics impression of the people (Chester and Montogomery, 2017). These operations are done with digital experts who give maximum priority to the online presence and paid promotion. In this study, various opportunities and expectations about digital marketing are described in detail. Nowadays the digital marketing has a great revolution in the area the digital advertising and political campaigns which is responsible the changing the strategies from conventional to digital (Gibson and Ward, 2009). According to Widagdo et al. (2014) gaining the trust of common people and making a great political image are hugely dependent on the perfect and effective use of digital marketing tools and techniques.
1.1 Research Background
According to Wymbs (2011), digital marketing is a form of marketing products and items through electronic devices and technologies to achieve their targeted customers. In the modern era, almost 3 billion people use various kinds of digital devices and technologies for digital marketing to find their desired products from anywhere and anytime (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2019). Political parties are also very smart about digital marketing as they are using it to make their communication process with the public much easier (Maarek, 2014). Digital marketing and related social networking sites work so quickly and in a larger way to complete the campaigns of the political parties (Stetka et al, 2014). Marketing techniques are very important in orienting data for elections. Private network contractors give the opportunity of the segmentation process of the target public (Bartlett et al., 2018). For every country, the election is very important from which the public representatives are selected who are taking the important decisions and agendas. All of these things are vital for the nation and are termed as the national interest (Chahal, 2013).
Political groups are really interested to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube as a way of communicating to the public. They can connect with the people of all over the country according to these (McNair, 2017). In 2017, the cost of the conservative party behind Facebook was 3.2 million pounds in Britain. The amount was 1.3 million pounds in the year 2015. The number had a great impact on the politics of the country. They spent more than the other parties as the numbers were 2.1 million pounds and 1.2 million pounds respectively in 2017 and 2015 (Sabbagh, 2018). The labor party was far behind as they spent only 5.4 k pounds in 2017(Pickard, 2018). The percentage of voters in England decreased to 0.8% in 2018. The percentage was 1.4% and 0.6% respectively for Wales and Scotland. In the case of Northern Ireland, the percentage increased to 0.6%. The reason is the age group of 16 to 17 can group can vote in Scotland (ONS, 2018). Labour Party wants to target the decrease of 45% of the overseas registered voters. Digital marketing plays a vital role to make this research successful and helps the party to plan their strategies in the right way.
1.2 Significance of the Research
Traditional political marketing can be described from the concept of relationship marketing (O’Shaughnessy, 2015). Involvement of all parties, the orientation of the voters and exchanging relationships are the concerning factors for the political marketing practitioners and academics (O’Cass, 2016). They are not successful to do these especially among young people (Scammell, 2014). This results in the failure of the election advertising campaigns as they are not able to connect with the young voters (Dermody and Scullion, 2014). Computational politics is now the operating procedure because of the use of digital technologies by the political campaigns which help top the development of sophisticated tools and techniques (Kreiss, 2016). Cross-device targeting made some breakthroughs as it was used as one of the data-driven marketing techniques from which candidates, political action committees, and other interest groups got many advantages (Tufecki, 2014).
This was a crucial factor for the election (Edelman, 2016). Electoral politics has converted into the combination of global commercial digital media and the marketing ecosystem (Bernie, 2016). It has expressed to the organizations the way of marketing the products to the customers (Schuster, 2015). New digital media, mainly the internet and social media plays a vital role to participate in the public in political activities which have a great impact on the political sectors (Norris, 2015). As a result of this political parties are giving more focuses on using the digital marketing campaign to have young voters to their side (Chahal, 2013). There are many groups that are creating various social networking sites which caretaking and arrange many political activities (Rubinstein, 2014).
Research is helpful to find out the relation between digital media and political activities especially during the election campaign (Tolbert and McNeal, 2013). But many times the common public does not have any idea or knowledge about these digital operations. The causality chain is not in a good position because research is going to perform with cross-sectional surveys (Boulianne, 2017). It is important to find out from the research which types of digital media have prominent effects on which political sectors. This research study has been done for various purposes as the main issue is to determine the effects of digital media on politics and whether these digital operations are effective for the common people (LiveRamp, 2015).
1.3 Research Aim and Objectives
Aim
The aim of this study is to understand the impact of digital marketing campaigns on the outcome of UK general elections and to recommend to the political parties how they can improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of the usages of digital marketing tools in their campaigns.
Objectives
- To understand the efficiency of digital marketing tools in UK political campaigns
- To find out the main challenges of digital marketing in UK political campaigns
- To explore the usage of digital marketing tools by political parties in the UK for their political campaign
- To understand the impact of digital marketing campaigns on UK general voting result
- To provide recommendations for political parties in the UK in terms of using digital marketing tools in their campaigns
1.4 Research Question
- What is the efficiency of digital marketing tools in UK political campaigns?
- What are the main challenges of digital marketing in UK political campaigns?
- How are being used digital marketing tools by political parties in the UK for their political campaign?
- What is the impact of digital marketing campaigns on UK general voting results?
- How can the political parties in the UK increase the efficiency and effectiveness of digital marketing tools in their campaigns?
1.5 Research structure
Chapter 1- Introduction: Introduction gives complete information about digital marketing and its necessity for campaigns in the UK. On the basis of this explanation, the following section has described the reasons and importance of this study on digital marketing. Then, the reasons and significance of this study are outlined. According to the subject, the aims, objectives and questions for the research are prepared for the survey operations……………….
Total Word: 19665
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