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This paper aims to identify both the traditional and novel forms of marketing behind New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern’s landslide victory in the 2020 New Zealand General Election during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This research analysed both qualitative and quantitative data, including over 70 primary sources, the perspectives of practitioners, polling and data from surveys with over 450,000 respondents. The qualitative data was analysed interpretively against established theoretical concepts, whereas the quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics.

This research found that COVID-19 drastically changed what the public prioritised, allowing Ardern and Labour to position themselves as guardians of government stability, while camouflaging previous delivery failures. Labour also used a more emergent market-oriented and “polite” populist political marketing strategy.

While the survey data used is not a perfect sample of the population, it is the largest public opinion survey in New Zealand and, given its convergence with other sources, provides valuable insights into political marketing during a crisis more broadly.

This research reinforces marketing’s most important aspect; the market should drive action. How decision makers respond to the market should depend on the environment. Thus, up-to-date market research becomes even more important during a crisis, as the environment changes rapidly. This leaves prior assumptions obsolete and implies strategy needs to be adaptive. Additionally, greater public attention provides governing leaders with the opportunity to present a more well-rounded leadership image.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to look at marketing while in government and election campaigning in the context of successful management of a global pandemic.

Political management is about getting things done in campaigns, parties and government. Political organizations can use management concepts such as strategic planning, human resources and organizational design to help them achieve their goals. Research into specifically how management is used by political practitioners – political staffers and politicians – in government is limited. This study aims to fill that gap.

The authors review the limited literature on political management, outline interview methodology, results and conclude with overall lessons drawn out using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo.

This study identifies the aspects of political management that political practitioners saw as the most important, the difference between managing in business and politics, and why.

This study provides suggestions for what future empirical research should focus on, noting a focus on informal behavior that relate to people and power that are not seen from outside the organization.

The perspectives of high-level practitioners help give a view to what political management really is.

As part of a research project, funded by the Manpower Services Commission, which examined how quality circles have developed within different types of environments, a study has been carried out in a health authority. The main findings of this study are reported. There is little doubt that circles have proved effective as a means of improving service quality, communication and staff morale. They have also helped to promote a multi‐disciplinary approach to health care. The point is also made that the implementation of circles in two different types of hospital resulted in very different approaches to circles being taken at each location. The health authority in question has also moulded the circle philosophy to suit its own particular organisational culture. The programme has not been without its problems ‐ caused primarily by lack of training, careless implementation and the absence of a circle steering committee. Another problem encountered was nurse management scepticism of the circle concept. However, many of these early teething troubles were a result of the organisation being the first UK health authority to implement a circle programme. Consequently, it had no model from which to learn and compare operating experiences.

Purpose: The development of service automation continues to underpin the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors providing benefits for both customers and service companies. The purpose of this chapter is to showcase the practice of self-service technology (SST) usage in the contemporary tourism and hospitality sectors and present a conceptual framework of customer SST adoption.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This chapter offers an examination of theory, research and practice in relation to SST usage in tourism, highlighting the benefits and drawbacks arising for both customers and service providers. Since the benefits are achieved only if SSTs gain effective adoption with customers, this chapter focuses on concepts underpinning the study of customer SST adoption. Drawing on SST adoption factors and SST customer roles, a conceptual framework of SST adoption is discussed.

Findings/Practical Implications: This chapter examines the principles and practice underpinning the usage of self-service technologies in the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors, with specific reference to customer SST roles in co-creation. The customer SST roles provide a more detailed and nuanced picture of the customer perspective on SST usage. These nuanced roles are captured in a conceptual framework which seeks to further refine the understanding of customer SST adoption.

Research Implications & Originality/Value: The framework provides a useful foundation for further research with a focus on customer empowerment in SSTs. The future development of service automation will require a balance between the delivery of a personalised and smarter customer experience and technology applications that are unobtrusive and which do not pose any ethical or privacy concerns.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

A postal questionnaire survey of quality circles in the UK service sector has been completed. It was revealed that there are no major differences in the characteristics of circle programmes in the service and manufacturing organisations. However, service industries need to be aware of the individuality of each organisation before adoption of programmes.

It is commonly acknowledged that history matters in strategy. However, the strategy literature mainly discusses history in terms of path dependency, leaving little room for managerial agency, despite growing anecdotal evidence that managers can actively draw on corporate history to improve decision-making. An emerging literature on how managers use the past to give sense to internal and external stakeholders has given rise to a more agent-based approach to history, but while sense-giving is commonly connected to sense-making as a driver of strategic change, the role of history in sense-making remains unexplored. Drawing on the concept of analogical reasoning, this chapter theorizes the connection between corporate archives and managerial sense-making, arguing that analogies drawn from past experience can reduce uncertainty and foster learning. This theory leads to the suggestion that consulting the corporate archive can promote strategic renewal and thus boost performance.

From a relational political brand perspective, newly elected governments are primarily concerned with maintaining the trust of the electoral coalition that brought them in office in order to secure their re-election. Hence, as Needham (2005) has suggested, governing parties tend to employ a political communication strategy aimed at promoting an effective brand consisted of six components: simplicity, uniqueness, reassurance, aspiration, values and credibility. In this context, this study examines the communication strategies of three Greek governments (PASOK, New Democracy and SYRIZA) in the period 2009–2019 that failed to be re-elected once they implemented the bail-out packages, against the six branding criteria. Following a qualitative methodological approach, this chapter analyses the key speeches of the respective prime ministers along with polling evidence and secondary data. It argues that all these three governments failed to be re-elected once they implemented the memoranda, not only because of the unpopular nature of the austerity measures but also because of their failure to fully retain their political brands in office since they hardly succeed to deliver on their promises, though it is unclear whether they employed self-consciously such a branding strategy.