Abstract:

Political parties and their candidates have often claimed to be pursuing the interest of the people when they struggle for power and the control of state resources. Based on this premise, this study seeks to interrogate the interface between marketing concept which is a customer (or people) focused orientation and democratic governance. In pursuit of this objective, 100 politicians were surveyed from four (4) political parties in Nigeria. Eighty five (85) of the 100 respondents responded. After editing, 81 responses formed the data which were analysed with simple descriptive statistics (such as tables, frequencies, percentages) and inferential statistics like Pearson’s Correlation coefficient (r) and analysis of variance (ANOVA).  The finding indicates a low positive relationship between marketing concept and democratic governance. Again, politicians make promises to the electorates but fail to fulfil most of those promises when they get to power. This means that political marketers see marketing concept as a means to an end i.e. to capture the mandate of the electorate. Based on this finding, it is here recommended, among other things, that electorate should be more interested in the profile, antecedents and reputation of the politicians, rather than their promises.