Practices of ethnical marketi̇ng in political communication: 2015 general election campaigns of AK Party and HDP

After the World War II, the dramatic growth of human population resulted in that ethnic and minority populations in countries around the globe have increased. With the rapid development of technology, the needs of people have diversified with the changes that have taken place in many fields of life such as interaction, communication, transportation and education, which highlighted the importance of marketing. In time, concepts of marketing have changed and developed because people saw the effectiveness of marketing. Subsequently, political and ethnic marketing have aroused. Although ethnic marketing was used for only commercial purposes at the beginning, it is usually used for political interests nowadays, mainly in election campaigns. Countries that comprised from different ethnic groups are more favorable and vulnerable to ethnic marketing and many studies have shown that ethnic marketing have densely used in such countries. For instance, both the ruling party; AK Party and HDP, which describes itself a representative of Kurds, targeted Kurds which is the highest crowded ethnic group, to get more votes from them in 2015. This thesis is designed to elaborate and highlight the use of ethnic marketing in election campaigns in terms of political communication. In this context, the following concepts have been examined: how voters have influenced by ethnic marketing and how their voting behaviors have changed.