Executive Summary
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to promote candidates close to an election, raises marketing questions relevant even beyond the 2010 midterm elections. The first is whether corporate support of one or more candidates will antagonize customers, possibly leading to a boycott, and therefore advertising dollars should simply promote products, not candidates. However, if the decision is made to promote candidates, other issues follow. One is the company’s objectives, such as signaling to sitting legislators the voter-influencing power of the corporation, of a coalition of corporations, or of the business community as a whole. Also, should a company advertise as part of a coalition or on its own? Here, one trade-off is the strength of the message, often weakened when many parties must agree on wording. Other trade-offs include which candidates to support (those in close races or sure winners), whether pro-candidate or anti-opponent ads will be the wiser choice, or whether sponsorship of special events to promote a candidacy is a wiser choice than any advertising.
These marketing questions have public policy implications, since proposed legislation to limit the effect of the Supreme Court decision is best evaluated based on understanding of corporate priorities. A key issue is transparency: whether the audience for any promotion to support or oppose a candidate knows which corporations are the sponsors, or whether their identity is hidden within a coalition. Legislation to mandate transparency that has been proposed in several forms and is summarized here.
Biography
Betsy D. Gelb is the Larry J. Sachnowitz Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship in the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. She received a Ph.D. in Management from UH and has focused her publications on advertising and on the intersection of public policy and marketing, including issues of secondary meaning and confusion for intellectual property. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and Foreign Affairs.
Darren Bush is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center. Professor Bush received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Utah, where he focused primarily on competition policy as applied to regulated industries. Professor Bush served as an Attorney General's Honor Program Trial Attorney at the Antitrust Division's Transportation, Energy, & Agriculture Section. Since returning to academia in 2001, he has written and consulted on numerous issues concerning the intersection of antitrust and regulated industries. He has testified before the U.S. House and U.S. Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittees, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Antitrust Modernization Commission, the latter with which Professor Bush consulted. His primary research interests are in antitrust and deregulated industries (and the intersection of the two, including airlines, telecommunications, electricity, and surface transportation), intellectual property, and law and economics.
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2011
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