Politics as Marketing - Clive Hamilton

Faced with the increasingly untenable nature of socialism and state ownership in the post-war period, and the absence of any coherent alternative (...) many of the most influential social democrats just surrendered (...) Blair’s New Labor [was] Thatcher’s greatest triumph ...
The gap between the conservative and social democratic parties became one of product diferentiation rather than ideology and, just as product differentiation and brand loyalty are marketing concepts, so political parties began to hire marketing specialists to help them sell their messages. In the same way that clever marketing is required to persuade sceptical consumers that one brand of soap powder is radically different from other virtually identical brands, so political parties now hire experts to persuade sceptical voters that one party is radically different from its oponent.

Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish, Pluto Press, 2004, p. 131-2