The Hindu Business Line : Spin doctors working on punch lines

Bangalore, March 24 The tagline of Mr Barack Obama’s win was ‘Yes, we can’. It is anybody’s guess what will work in India, but politicians and their image makers are at it.

Branding for politicians is not something to be scoffed at. It has, in fact, become a mandatory pre-election exercise in the last few decades. But what is different is that this will be the first time when a significant majority of Indian voters will be between 18 and 35 years of age.

“Primitive branding (the basics of party symbols, colours etc.), which most parties have cultivated over the years now needs to graduate. This new audience is more literate and has already been the target of aggressive branding exercises in the market place,” says Mr Dilip Cherian, Consulting Partner, Perfect Relations, an agency that has been hired by the Congress in the past for brand consulting.

In his opinion, parties will have to focus their energies more towards newer forms of communication this year. “Like the Obama campaign, parties will also have to bring new voters to the polls rather than just focus on converting a shrinking pool of traditional voters.”

“Mr Obama, not surprisingly, has excited the imagination of many,” says brand strategy specialist Mr Harish Bijoor, Chief Executive Officer of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., who has worked in political and constituency-level strategies for the last eight years.

“But the key thing to remember is the contextuality. India is different, and so are our issues. Our electorate is different and the drivers of the electorate are very diverse and differently motivated. Therefore, while it is stylish to look for an Obama amidst us, it is impractical to run with one as a piece of strategy.”

Mr Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Member of the Rajya Sabha, who’s also active in the corporate world (currently CEO of Jupiter Capital), says, “I think politicians have begun to realise the value of reaching out to people with ‘real’ solutions rather than rhetoric and slogans, as also the power of internet and other forms of viral communication in spreading their message.”

He also begs to differ on the branding issue, “I am not sure that branding is important. I think having a set of positive ideas and solutions is important. Having real ideas and real solutions to the problems of the day is what is differentiating one politician from the other. This differentiation is what the brand is...that of a ‘different politician’.

Traditional and new issues

Indian politicians face a mix of traditional issues, such as poverty, illiteracy, and casteism, and new-age problems such as the economic slowdown and terrorism. “As there is no one issue at hand the ground level realities of the electorate take over, and the one big factor in Indian elections is caste. There is a lot of strategising done here till the day of withdrawal of nominations,” says Mr Bijoor.

Mr Cherian advises politicians to get a few key issues in focus and address them. “That’s strategy: choosing issues that both matter and are also your core offer.” Anyway, an electorate is usually predisposed towards a party by election time, so its ‘image’ has to be in accordance with this. Emotionally, the electorate is also going to connect with the personality of a leader, he feels.

But Mr Cherian thinks that parties forget that their brands rest on much more than just the election campaign. Though parties and candidates spend crores of rupees on image building just before an election, it is not really the best time to do branding. “It’s like an annual discount sale. Yet that’s when they focus their budgets and efforts entirely.”