Who are loyal voters? - Implications for Political Marketing

As well as the customer is in the centre of marketing, the voter is (and should always be) in the centre of political marketing. It is crucial to understand voters' attitudes, needs, desires, and behavior to be able to influence their political decisions. One of the main aims of political marketing activities is to create and to retain a loyal voter. To be able to create and retain a loyal voter, it is necessary to understand their attitudes and behavior. The aim of this paper is to divide voters into clusters according to their political loyalty. The primary research was conducted in five counties from Eastern Croatia using a highly structured questionnaire. For the purposes of obtaining survey results, univariate statistics (frequencies and arithmetic mean) and cluster analysis techniques were performed with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 21.0. Results of cluster analysis provide specific socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics of each segment obtained (inactive floating voters, inactive stabile voters, and active loyal voters). These results deliver valuable insights for political parties and candidates regarding political marketing voter segmentation. The limitations of this research are referred to the sample because only one Croatian region was covered. Based on that, the recommendations for further research would be to expand the research nationally and also to include some additional segmentation variables.