{"id":131,"date":"2014-05-06T22:05:05","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T16:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/evoc.in\/blog\/?p=131"},"modified":"2014-06-17T16:40:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T11:10:45","slug":"a-marketing-lens-on-the-2014-indian-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/2014\/05\/a-marketing-lens-on-the-2014-indian-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"A Marketing lens on the 2014 Indian elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the 2014 Indian General Elections draw to a close, now is a good time as ever to apply the marketing lens to the electoral campaigns of the leading political parties and observe their communication strategies.<\/p>\n

Indeed, all political parties are forced to think as brand marketers when it comes to running electoral campaigns. They need to identify their constituents and their grievances accurately, target an explicit set of grievances (or the opportunities for value-creation) and provide convincing and persuasive answers to the two fundamental questions of brand positioning: why should their constituents consider them for a vote (as a contender), and why should they actually vote for them.<\/p>\n

In elections as complex and long drawn as seen in India, it is near impossible to capture or analyze all communication nuances with their attendant context in a blog post. Our intent therefore is not to provide an exhaustive review; but to pick some standout campaign themes and comment on their effectiveness, with the goal of providing some useful lessons for brand marketers and communications managers. Let us therefore present nine important observations\u00a0in no particular order.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Nearly all political parties chose their own positioning with regard to their primary competitors. For principal contenders like BJP and Aam Aadmi Party AAP, this meant choosing a positioning relative to the ruling party \u2013 the Indian National Congress (Congress). With the ruling party battling pervasive perceptions of being ineffective, incompetent and corrupt, the opposition parties had a field day choosing and fine-tuning their positioning as completely opposite to Congress\u2019 image.<\/li>\n
  2. All campaigns also play a game of attacking an opposition\u2019s weak points while imitating its strong points. Great political campaigns are invariably built upon high-valued and defensible positioning. Consider how for example Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP\u2019) campaign under Narendra Modi has sought to usurp Aam Aadmi Party (AAP\u2019s) anti-corruption, \u2018clean government\u2019 positioning \u2013 diminishing AAP\u2019s campaign in return.<\/li>\n
  3. The BJP ran a focused campaign centered on its Prime Ministerial candidate \u2013 Narendra Modi. This choice was largely dictated by two reasons: a highly-lucrative positioning opportunity (anti-corruption, effective and competent governance) as mentioned in the bullet above, and the fact that Narendra Modi, as Gujarat Chief Minister, had ran a campaign with the exact positioning for many years, albeit for entirely different reasons. For BJP, it was a rare opportunity to take the valuable anti-corruption plank. Further, it simply had to take Modi\u2019s existing and successful, but localized campaign and amplify it at the national level. Marketers with a large global portfolio of brands would find this stratagem extremely familiar.<\/li>\n
  4. However, in choosing Modi as the face of its campaign, BJP ran a heavy risk of alienating a substantial section of Muslims and liberals. This was because of negative perceptual residues of Modi as a \u2018communal\u2019 administrator who allegedly oversaw the 2002 riots in Gujarat, where over 1,000 people were killed. Applying segmentation principles skillfully, the BJP appeared to have taken a bet that the size of the segments who would value Modi\u2019s positioning as head of a efficient and competent government who is also anti-corruption is significantly bigger than the segments that Modi would alienate. In other words, BJP has deliberately focused on certain segments while ignoring others \u2013 the defining hallmark of a great marketing strategy.<\/li>\n
  5. The Congress\u2019 campaign ran in stark contrast to BJP\u2019s razor sharp segmenting, targeting and positioning. Their positioning itself is built on two different planks: the first as relative to BJP (consider the message \u2018Kattar soch nahi, yuva josh\u2019) and highlighting its focus on inclusive growth (\u2018Har haath Shakti, har haath tarakki\u2019).<\/li>\n
  6. The campaign messages of the BJP and the Congress also readily reveal the voter segments they are reaching out to. The BJP\u2019s campaign messages appear to be designed for India\u2019s middle and upper classes \u2013 estimated to cross 250 million in number by the next year \u2013 with the promise of economic growth and jobs and the core theme of competent and effective governance. The Congress campaign with its \u2018\u2026Har Haath Tarakki\u2019 message and imagery appears to be targeted at rural and low-income constituents \u2013 much larger in numbers compared to the middle and upper class constituents. Purely in terms of the size of segments targeted, the Congress has a decisively upper hand.<\/li>\n
  7. The above also partly explains why BJP\u2019s print and TV media spends have dwarfed those of the Congress \u2013 for the Congress seems to have relied more on doles and payouts (channel management and BTL in marketing terms), as compared to an ATL ad blitz, to win its targeted rural or low-income constituents. This is a well-thought out strategic move.<\/li>\n
  8. Unfortunately, the above also means that whatever media spends the Congress has incurred to reach or influence the middle and upper classes have been let down by their poor positioning. In other words, the Congress has not been able to articulate a strong enough value-proposition to the middle and upper-classes, a fact betrayed by its creative strategy (consider the message: \u2018Kattar soch nahi, Yuva Josh\u2019). One big reason why this positioning falls flat is that the audience simply refuses to identify with the \u2018weak points\u2019 of BJP as highlighted by Congress (\u2018Kattar soch\u2019), or even with the differentiation that the party offers (\u2018Yuva josh\u2019). Indeed, many of the messages deployed by the Congress appear to run counter to prevailing popular beliefs and opinions.<\/li>\n
  9. The Aam Aadmi Party burst upon the political horizon with a truly disruptive positioning hinged on a single attribute \u2013 anti-corruption. It\u2019s greatest success was in introducing a completely new dimension in electoral rivalry \u2013 for all incumbent parties battled perceptions of corruption in varying degrees. Later, AAP sought to widen its positioning by taking the anti-entitlement plank. However, it also learnt the hard way the potential pitfalls of using a sharp positioning, as opinion polls clearly suggest that the segment that values this positioning is significantly overshadowed by the segment that values BJP\u2019s positioning of Narendra Modi that combines anti-corruption messaging with competence and effective governance. AAP could have been a much strong contender if only it could imitate and neutralize BJP\u2019s \u2018competent, effective governance\u2019 plank. This is why AAP\u2019s self-dissolution of its state government in Delhi earlier this year will count as a strategic blunder.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Finally, it is perceptive to see the genesis of the current BJP campaign over how the public mood had polarised over the last few years. There had been a steadily growing clamour for a competent, incorruptible, even ruthless political leader who can run a streamlined administration. In the early years, a stream of China-India comparison stories, Op-Eds and even books fueled this clamour. Steadily, this clamor grew and took form across the Indian social landscape, from the boardrooms of India\u2019s largest companies to the drawing rooms of a growing middle-class.<\/p>\n

    The greatest success of the BJP in 2014 has been to pin\u00a0this clamor down to its precise specifics and craft a product that scores very high on those very specifics\u00a0\u2013 in the form of its PM candidate. In other words, the people wanted a specific style\u00a0of leadership, and only BJP delivered it (the AAP made a good start but couldn’t sustain it). This, dear reader, is a critical marketing takeaway from the 2014 Indian Elections.<\/p>\n

    (Photo credit: India.com<\/em>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    As the 2014 Indian General Elections draw to a close, now is a good time as ever to apply the marketing lens to the electoral campaigns of the leading political parties and observe their communication strategies. Indeed, all political parties are forced to think as brand marketers when it comes to running electoral campaigns. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28],"tags":[34,39,10,15],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing-2","tag-consumer-behaviour","tag-elections","tag-marketing","tag-strategy-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Indian-elections.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4fbZd-27","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.evoc.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}