Navigating “the waves”: a framework of analysis of political crisis marketing during COVID-19

The proposed paper seeks to build and use a framework for analysis of strategies and marketing tools of political crises. The approach is based on the grounds that political marketing of a government is not targeted exclusively on the crisis, but instead is perceived as a broader political marketing strategy of a political organization/party in the context of political competition and elections. The proposed approach revisits the role and tools of political marketing of political organizations in the view of a post-pandemic era. The research framework is presented through case studies focusing on the marketing strategy and communication management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the cases of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Romania, Republic of Serbia, and Turkey. From March 2020 until the time the present chapter is written, the events and evolution of the pandemic is still ongoing. In this case, a government can articulate its strategy, which essentially includes all perceptions, interpretations and actions, guided by its principles, interests and political positions, implementing on of the following three structural axes: treating the crisis as an opportunity, as a threat, or without recognizing its very existence. These communication strategies are intertwined with the processes of creating a meaning, which is triggered by the crisis itself almost automatically and takes place in a political context in which political issues of seriousness, causation, responsibility and accountability are raised. It is obvious that a crisis, such as a pandemic, requires a coherent strategy of communicating a message and conveying all the "outputs" from the government through the latter. In the opposite scenario, the concept of competition in political marketing is placed in a context of anarchic conception. The suggested approach perceives crisis not necessarily as an out of the ordinary phenomenon, but rather as part of the normal flow of political marketing of an elected government. The paper offers a tool for further use in the analysis of the results of the management during the pandemic and the subsequent assessment of the government’s response in the future and whether the strategies used, contributed to the successful or not response to the pandemic.