Branding 'desi' Politics

This brand of 'Desi' Politics!

By Harish Bijoor

As election fever touches a 'typhoidic’level, I keep wondering whether the Politician on the ground needs to learn from the brand manager or the Brand Manager in his air-conditioned cubicle needs to learn from the Politician in turn.

I do believe Brand Management can learn many a lesson from the politician at large on the ground. Many valuable lessons that will tell Brand Management that all it knows today is not necessarily from the market for soap and sanitary napkin alone, but from the market for votes as well!

The Politician, in many ways, is the quintessential Brand Manager. A designation that got invented well nigh nearly with the coinage of the word Politics itself! Look keenly at the politician, and let’s see who can teach whom. And who has taught whom, over all these years!

The brand is a thought. The politician is the brand. If Laloo Prasad Yadav is the politician we want to discuss in this piece, Laloo is the brand. The brand Laloo is nothing but a thought. A thought that lives in consumer heads. The brand Laloo is not what Laloo thinks he is, but what the consumer thinks Laloo is all about!

Laloo the brand then!

Mr.LP Yadav, if you please, began in the rustic world of Bihar politics as a rustic man with rustic thoughts! Laloo got it right first time round. The gent went to town reveling in his rusticity. He did everything right from day one. He kept his cows in his front yard, glamorized the 'Bihari Baniyan’ to the extent that you had ramp models in Bangalore walking in them, he milked his own cows, made the “Laaltein”(lantern) his symbol, chewed on endless ‘Banarasi Meetha” paans, spat blood-red paan-juice at every street corner and made “Thook-daans”(spitoons, to the uninitiated) regulation fixtures in government offices and the Secretariat at large!

The cognoscenti in India, that micro-percentage of folks who represent little of this country, laughed at Laloo. Felt embarrassed. And kept wondering why folk of this kind existed in Indian politics at all!

Laloo went through the process of the poll. He won. And when he could not remain a Chief Minister, he made his wife one! Laloo the brand wins!

Laloo read his market right. Bihar is one of the rare Indian states where 90 per cent of the populace is still rural. As the rest of the country passes through a creeping-growth phase of urbanization, Bihar remains a rural oasis of kinds. Laloo the politician reads his market right. He knows what a market of this kind needs. And he gives it all that it needs, with gusto!

To be fair to all the politicians who have gone by and all those who are pushing up precious diaisies, Laloo is not the first one who has read his market right and delivered what it wants. Every one of them has! VV Giri did it in his own ways with the Labour vote in mind! George Fernandez did it in his hey days with worker-rebellion as a sentiment to read, synthesize, package and re-deliver to the market.

Mrs.Gandhi! Oops! I need to clarify which one! Mrs.Indira Gandhi was the shrewdest reader of the market of them all! She read the feminine vote right first time round. She read dynasty and its merits right. She read every nitty gritty of the branding process rather keenly in her own shrewd way.

Mrs.Gandhi was so good at it that she know when to dye her hair, how much of it to dye and indeed what to wear for what occasion and to create what impact with even what she wore!

Are our modern day politicians clued on to all this? Yes, they are. Some of them are being coached by Brand spin-doctors. Is Pramod Mahajan one? Of course he is! Possibly the best Brand Manager in the country today. Managing the BJP brand at large! Putting together strategy. Putting together events that talk of “carpet-bombing the market” even! Oops! At times there is a slip in the jargon and terminology! At the end of the day, the electorate is a vast market. A market that discerns. A market that watches it all carefully before making that vital decision to cast that really valuable vote!

And some are being groomed by PR agencies. What to wear, what to say, what not to say, when to say. With what “passion” to say! This is high art! If any of you mistake the utterances of the politician at large on your television screens to be spontaneous reactions and outbursts, you are being naïve! There is a coach behind it all. There is a script behind it all. There is a purpose as well!

Branding and its many tools are being found useful aids by the politician today, as there are not too many large issues that capture the imagination of the masses at large! We don’t have a war! We don’t have issues that are so overbearing that the entire mass of people sit up and listen. Time to therefore create those issues, and depend on the impact these small issues can really cause. In comes PR! In comes Branding! And in comes Drama as well!

Every Party name commands an equity that is distinct. The Congress is about Independence heritage, the Bharatiya Janata Party is all about Hindutva, the Janata Party is all about the farmer and the list goes on!

Every party symbol is a powerful articulation of the brand and its values. Even suave Mr.Vijay Mallya is capable of getting the rub-off from the powerful party symbol of a farmer with a plough! Never mind that he has never ever ploughed a field himself!

What’s more, despite the very acute shortage of colours prominent national parties seem to swim with for their party hues, every party is able to create a distinct equity for itself with the colours it sports. Look keenly at the saffron white and green of the Congress versus the saffron and green of the BJP and the saffron and deeper-still green of the Janata Party! Or at the colours of the DMK and the AIADMK! How much can a black and red give you? Plenty, it seems!

Every concept in contemporary and modern branding is something that you can learn out of the efforts of the politician at large in India. The politician is possibly the best teacher of marketing of them all. Let’s learn form they. They are the best barometers of public sentiment we have today. They are the best direct marketers. The best door-to-door canvassers. The best specialists in one-to-one marketing and the best practitioners of mass marketing as well!

May their tribe flourish!

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com