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Labour Was Dominated By The Left Wing At The Time And Simply Wanted To Push ...

Labour was dominated by the left wing at the time and simply wanted to push its own agenda regardless of the public mood. The resultant unpopular manifesto led to electoral defeat and a gradual realisation by the party that future product based campaigns would leave it unelectable.
A sales-oriented party is more sensitive to public opinion. It accepts the premise that voters will not give support to parties that simply appeal for votes on the premise that they are right. It wants to retain roughly the same policies and manifesto yet realises that voter might not this particularly manifesto the idea will have to be sold to them. A sales-oriented party does not particularly change its own behaviour or policies to suit the electorate, rather tries to make people want what it offers, as Lees-Marshment describes:

Using market intelligence to understand their response to its behaviour, the party employees the latest advertising and communications techniques to persuade voters that it is right. Again, the Labour Party can be used as an example here with its 1987 election campaign. There had been no real change in party policy; the left wing was still trying to push an agenda that lacked popularity with voters yet on this occasion there was a greater effort to actually persuade voters that the policies were workable and to promote Neil Kinnock as a viable leader. The Labour's Party's own view of this period supports this view, claiming of Kinnock and the new party image: His speech to the 1985 Party Conference, where he attacked Militant from the platform, was seen as a sign of the new Labour leader's courage and commitment to change.  This was followed by changes to Labour's image, headed by a new Campaigns and Communications directorate under Peter Mandelson.  A visible sign of the changes afoot was the replacement of the party's emblem - the red flag - by a red rose at the 1986 conference. 

The market-oriented party is type towards which many political parties have gradually evolved into and which appears to offer the greatest chance of electoral success. A market-oriented party is less interested in delivering its own ideas than in discovering what the electorate wants and delivering a product that satisfies public opinion and demand. As a result it produces parties that are less ideologically committed than in the past. Lees-Marshment defines a market-oriented party as one that designs its behaviour to provide voter satisfaction. It uses market intelligence to identify voter demands, and then designs its product to suit them. It does not attempt to change what people think, but to deliver what they need or want. There are a number of examples of parties successfully embracing this form of marketing. The Conservative campaign of 1979 and Labour in 1997 will be discussed as examples in chapter three.

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