Constituent Elements of Political Marketing in Creating a Positive Attitude for Voiting for a Particular Candidate

This study was conducted to draw the structural model of constituent elements of political marketing in one of the large governmental organizations in Gilan of Iran. For this purpose, we randomly selected 217 subjects who completed the questionnaire. The results showed that seven major factors, economic, political, social, cultural, marketing mix, personality, and supporting individuals and factions, are involved in political marketing. Moreover, the strongest factor influencing political marketing has been economic indicators (p<0.01). Political, social, and cultural factors, as well as marketing mix with standard coefficients of 0.39, 0.30, 0.32, and 0.33, respectively, are the factors that directly predict political marketing (p<0.01), and variables such as personality and supporting individuals and factions indirectly affect political marketing.


Intoduction
In current political world, competition to achieve important positions, directly or indirectly, gained by People's votes (Abramowitz, 1989). Thus, the process of creating desirable social attitudes in area in question is very important for each candidate that determines his future in reaching the target and specific post. Various management and psychological policies are involved that lead and manage this process to achieve this goal and to win the popular vote.
Among these elements, functional positive publicities to achieve the goal and win the popular vote are of the most effective factors. One of these techniques in this process is political marketing that has specific plans to achieve specific political and management goals directly with simultaneous application of management, political, and psychological techniques (Abramson et al., 1992). The first use of political marketing is attributed to Kelly (1957). In many ways, political marketing is similar to marketing in business world. In business marketing, vendors release goods, services, and communications (advertising) to the market and in exchange for money (through customers' purchase), information (through market research), and customer loyalty (Aharony, 2012). In political campaigns, candidates offer promises, © Filodiritto Editore -Proceedings advocacy, policies, and their personal features to their voters, and in return receive votes and voluntary contributions (Andrews, Kaplan, 2015). Therefore, although these two processes have the same general principles, in enforcement of tactics sometimes use different techniques according to their goals. Political marketing is generally defined as facilitator of social process of political exchanges, whereas management of political marketing is defined as the art and the science of successful management of this exchange process (Bendle, 2014). There are different discussions and opinions about the use of political marketing in elections campaign (Bendle, Cotte, 2016). Using fields and management components in elections and political marketing is not something completely new, but combining this method with psychological skills and guiding public opinion towards advertising is something new in the area.

Differences in commercial marketing and political marketing
The first difference between commercial and political marketing is related to work load of these two areas: unlike commercial marketing, in political marketing, a few groups and small parties are active (Bendle, Nastasoiu, 2014). The second difference is in indicator of time.
Unlike commercial marketing that is done on an ongoing basis (Bendle, Ryoo, Nastasoiu, 2017), political marketing is sometimes done with long intervals. The third difference is in the need to get public opinion (Bendle, Wang, 2016). As specified, in business marketing, even one percent or much less is acceptable and sufficient, whereas in the political sphere, the effort is to achieve more than 50% of the votes and tendency of society. Concerning the most important differences between political marketing and business components, (Berenson, 2016) have referred to deployment time, cost, market, rate of control, complexity, loyalty, and change of attitude.
Political marketing encompasses a variety of traditional and modern tools. The major traditional tools in this area include the presence of celebrities, comparative advertising, destructive promotional projects, catching red handed, and so on. Some new methods include network advertising, call centers, bogus surveys, and so on. Political branding and marketing are concepts tied to the elections. Branding and political marketing are concepts that strengthen trust between the characters, leaders, political parties, media, voters, and audience. Trust plays an important role in any market whether political or commercial in connection with trade and political consumers. Thus, trust is a crucial element and this principle is important because now trust in politicians and political parties has declined (Berg, Nelson, Rietz, 2008). Several studies have investigated the role of political marketing, of which (Bode, Dalrymple, 2015) can be noted. In his study, on political marketing in Indonesia, he showed that different candidates repeatedly use techniques based on political marketing to win votes, and he considered this effective in gaining results and receiving the public votes. In studying people's attitudes towards voting for a particular candidate, based on a survey by Zaverata in Mexico, (Chang et al., 2009) showed that political marketing and proper advertising derived from this management component play a very effective and important role in the selection of candidates by people.
In a study with the aim of behavioral examining of voters in America and Poland and delineating the structural model of this series, (Collinson, 2015) showed that the set of components related to political marketing in management and psychological areas affects the behavior of voters and their choices. In a study to investigate the role of politics in trade and vice versa in a part of their study, (Conway, Kenski, Wang, 2013) showed that commercial and political variables are involved in each other and each of them is involved in another variable.
In other words, political variables manipulate trade variables, and different variables such as political marketing are involved in people's opinions and their economic and political elections.
What is identifiable from previous research and existing components of political marketing is its very influential role in the electoral process and attracting people towards the person concerned. In other words, the purpose of commercial marketing is to gain consent and receive © Filodiritto Editore -Proceedings money and material resources of the people, but in the field of political marketing, the trend is toward people's vote and selection of the concerned candidate by people

Fig. 1. Conceptual model
As the model shows, overall, many factors are invloved in political marketing that given the main components forming these issues, in this study political marketing includes economic factors, supporting individuals and factions, marketing mix, personality, social, political, and cultural conditions. When slogans of political and social reform as well as the supporting factors and fractions, and the factors affecting the society support a particular person in society, they provide the ground for the selection of the candidates in question. Moreover, marketing mix and so on are involved in this process and creating a positive attitude one way or another.
In describing the model and research components about political marketing, seven factors were described as the following: Economic factors: this factor is directly involved with financial condition and people's economic power. Indices based on economic factors in community are the main indices of social welfare and welfare of people (Bode, Dalrymple, 2015). Various studies indicate the effectiveness and impact of economic factors on life satisfaction and social satisfaction in society and positive attitude towards politicians with optimal economic attitude (Andrews, Kaplan, 2015).
Supporting individuals and factions: figures and celebrities supporting are primarily divided into two main branches: politicians and artists. About art figures, in other words, advertising brands, research has demonstrated that give their votes due to the superficial and andvetising apsects of the figure in question who is supported by these people (Bendle, Cotte, 2016). If ideas, and principles of these goups and implementation history of factions and political patron supporting one person are discussed among people, and if they are appropriate to the particular person who is approved, they will vote for him (Bendle, 2014).

Supporting individuals and factions
Marketing mix

Political marketing
Positive attitude to vote for a specific candidate © Filodiritto Editore -Proceedings Marketing mix: marketing mix is the combination of different methods in this field, or it means that a systemic and coordinated attitude should be established among the members to affect the customer. In fact, in this method, the combined principles applied are based on attracting the votes of the people not retention and attraction of income. In this method based on composition, people's mind is focused on the intended candidate's by combining psychological principles (Aharony, 2012).
Personality: personality includes identifiable patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior that make up the style of the person's personal interaction with social and material environment (Bendle, Nastasoiu, 2014). About personality components of the candidates in question, it is noteworthy that according to research conducted primarily social, extroverted, and cheerful figures are more charming and attract people more. In political figures, research has shown that people show tendency towards those who are primarily steadfast, cheerful, social, and have high self-confidence (Bendle, Ryoo, Nastasoiu. 2017). Thus, character and personality factors are very important for people.
Social conditions: Social status and conditions associated with it, such as the form of education, per capita studies, social organization, and so on are of the factors influencing public opinion and their support of the ruling party and the people under their rule or against it.
In other words, this component encompasses partisan issue more rather than the person himself and people. Therefore, this component is very effective in the attitude of people (Bode, Dalrymple, 2015).
Political condition: A political party can only gain and maintain public support when the time of scheduling and decision on the nomination, it maintains its relationship with the public.
Therefore, this indirect political effect of opinions and beliefs of people with direct result of the political situation, which arose from political slogans and titles based on the relationship and policy of reform and restructuring will directly affect public opinion (Collinson, 2015).
Social conditions: in a structural way, while having a clear association with social and political issues, cultural conditions include common principles and foundations of any society and traditional beliefs of any society (Bendle, Ryoo, Nastasoiu, 2017). In other words, people from different nationalities have definite basic cultural principles they adhere to and value their traditions and values greatly. Various studies have shown that always in the electoral process for popular vote, candidates with slogans and programs based on preservation of cultural issues have more chances to win votes and support (Bendle, Wang, 2016).

Materials and methods
In this study, according to the area, we collected the required information through field study and library methods. In the field method, research questionnaire was distributed among the research subjects and the results were obtained from analysis of questionnaire. However, in the library method, we used to take notes and referred to the library to get the most recent available resources in this field. The population in this study includes the employees of a stateowned enterprise of Gilan in iran with its subsets. We need sampling to conduct research and to complete the questionnaires. We have used Cochran's formula with error level of 5% and the result is 170. In this study, 217 employees were randomly selected and completed the questionnaire. We used a questionnaire to assess political marketing. The questionnaire has 30 questions, whose content validity was confirmed by professors, and after deleting and modifying some of the questions, the 30-question questionnaire was administered to 30 subjects as a pilot and after removing and correcting content deficiencies, the final questionnaire was conducted on the main sample. We used Spss and Amos to check the validity of the questionnaire.
First, we used factor analysis to evaluate its construct validity, and using it, we determined factor structure of the questionnaire. The adequate size of sampling, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin © Filodiritto Editore -Proceedings (KMO) is the test of variance within the data, which can be explained by factors. As KMO value is closer to one, it is better. According to Kesser, KMO higher than 0.9 is excellent, 0.8 is qualified, 0.7 is better than average, 0.6 is average, 0.5 is bad, and less that is unacceptable. The KMO for political marketing questionnaire was 0.902 that is at excellent level. Thus, factor analysis showed seven main factors for the questionnaire: economic factors, supporting individuals and factions, marketing mix, personality, social, political, and cultural conditions. Internal consistency of the data for the whole test is 0.915 according to Cronbach's alpha. This measure for the sub-scales economic factors, political conditions, cultural conditions, personality, marketing mix, supporting individuals and factions, and social conditions and cultural conditions is, respectively, 0.708, 0.756, 0.830, 0.873, 0.724, 0.705, and 0.814. As the value of Cronbach's alpha for the whole questionnaire and all subscales is more than 0.7, the questionnaire is reliable and appropriate tools for measuring political marketing.

Components of political marketing and their relationships with each other
The key components of political marketing, as stated in the research tool, are economic factors, supporting individuals and factions, marketing mix, personality, social, political, and cultural conditions. The following table shows the relationship between the variables investigated.  Table 1, there is a significant positive correlation between all variables. From among all components of political marketing, including economic factors, supporting individuals and factions, marketing mix, personality, social, political, and cultural conditions, and political marketing, except the relationship between personality and marketing mix that is significant at 0.05 level, in other components and sub-correlation, this is 0.01. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) to evaluate the model. As advised by (Bendle, Cotte, 2016), we first evaluated all possible direct and indirect routes of independent variables (exogenous) and dependent variables (endogenous). Structural model considered in this study included 7 latent factors and economic factors, supporting individuals and factions, marketing © Filodiritto Editore -Proceedings mix, personality, social, political, and cultural conditions were evaluated as independent variables and political marketing as the dependent variable.
The purpose of this model is to study the direct and indirect effects of economic, political, social, and cultural factors on mediator variables of personality, marketing mix, and supporting individuals and factions on political marketing.   Table 2 shows the fitness of the model. SEM has fitness indices and structural modeling. The most common way to estimate the best fit in SEM is maximum likelihood method. From among five fitting statistics related to the model, we measured Adjusted Goodness of Fit Index (AGFI), Goodness of Fit Index (GFI), Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) in this model. The closer GFI and AGFI are, the more complete the fit of the model is, and low RMSEA means the utility of the model fit. As the value of this index is closer to one, CFI utility shows more comparative fitness of the model (Allen Yen, 2008). Since AGFI=0.85, GFI=0.91, and CFI=0.76 and as the fitness indices obtained are closer to 1, it shows a better fit, and RMSEA equals to 0.05, the closer it is to zero, the more appropriate the fit is. This model has a very good fit and all structures are meaningful conforming to the model.   Table 3 shows the results of economic, political, social, and cultural indicators (0.45, 0.42, 0.31, and 0.36) have a direct effect on the structure and their indirect effect are 0.12, 0.11, 0.11, and 0.09, respectively, so economic factor has greatest influence on political marketing.
Political marketing is a new variable with many components that in politics and elections is used with the aim of using techniques based on psychological marketing and management to guide public opinion and votes to the intended candidate (Bendle, 2014). In this method, principles based on business and psychology, which are mainly used in sales of merchandise, are applied to draw positive attention to a particular candidate based on clear political and managerial rules (Bendle, Nastasoiu. 2014). In other words, these managerial rules enter emotional aspects of the public opinion and thus try to push people to vote for the person concerned. In other words, the person replaces the product and customer's money is replaced by vote. Although the whole picture is similar in political and business marketing, there are certain differences in the use of techniques. In this study, based on comments and questionnaire, and the results of research, the structural model was formed of factors affecting the formation of political marketing. The results showed that seven main components of political marketing are economic, political, social, cultural factors, marketing mix, supporting individuals and factions, and personality. Moreover, results obtained from this model showed the strongest factor affecting political marketing is economic factor. Political, social, and cultural factors, as well as marketing mix are the factors that directly predict political marketing, and variables such as personality and supporting individuals and factions indirectly affect political marketing.
Moreover, the results from fitness of the model showed that the model is efficient and satisfactory. The research findings are consistent with the findings by (4)(5)(6)(7)(8). These results prove that the factors forming political marketing have general definite elements, and in many situations similar ones (according to its specific theory), by proper applying which and related solutions, one can guide the thought and public opinion in the intended direction.

In the name of God
Dear respondent

Greetings and Regards,
The questionnaire is presented to investigate a proposed research project and all information is confidential and non-numbered, and there is no need to be introduced. Thus, please have the best cooperation and honesty in completing the questionnaire to achieve the research aims.
The questionnaire consists of two parts: The first part includes demographic information: age, gender, education, and income. The second part includes questions that measure the components of political marketing. In this section, according to your personal opinion, choose one of the options from very low to very high.
Thank you in advance for your sincere cooperation.