Marketing Strategies of Nigerian Political Parties: A Comparative Analysis

Political parties operating within a country may compete by using different competitive methods due to dissimilar political marketing orientations of party leaders and other internal distinctive competences. This implies that marketing strategies differ among political parties in Nigeria because each party employs different mixes of marketing variables to compete in our democratic politics. Accordingly, this paper examines the contents of marketing strategies employed by Nigerian political parties. In pursuit of this objective, four dominant political parties were selected out of the thirty political parties that participated in the 2003 General Elections in Nigeria, and their electorates. Quota and stratified sampling techniques were mostly used in their selection. Our questionnaire was administered on 800 respondents; out of which 626 were returned. After editing, 598 were found usable. These were analyzed with tables, frequencies, percentages, and ANOVA.The findings indicate that marketing strategies of Nigerian political parties contain product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence elements. Nigerian parties were found to be essentially product and sales-oriented in their approach. The tested hypothesis showed that there are significant differences in the contents of the marketing strategies employed by Nigerian parties. Based on these findings, it is recommended that parties should sharpen their strategies to be more issue-based and people-oriented