Elections in India-The marketing playground.
Let me give you a background on how elections are in my country India. Following a multi-party system, the election commission of India (ECI) recognizes 2858 parties, with 7 national parties, 54 state parties, and 2797 unrecognized parties. Let that sink in for a moment. It’s simply a no-brainer that India hence also houses the world’s largest political party, the BJP(Bharatiya Janata Party), founded on 6th April 1980 and boasting an astounding 180 million claimed members as of 2019 that constitutes 13.3% of the nation’s population. The political party members are larger than the entire population of Bangladesh, which is the 8th largest country in terms of population.
The staggering numbers are just an insight to put forward the prospective magnitude of political affairs in India; it’s simply a massive political and economic affair, the likes of which are unique to India. Here is another instance to show you the magnitude of cash flow, India spent a staggering amount of Rs 55,000 crore or $8 billion in the 2019 Lok sabha elections, half of which was spent by the BJP, and most of the amount went towards campaigning and lets simply say “advertising” for the party.
This insane amount of money that could be spent on developing valuable assets for the country was simply spent on creating the party’s presence. Well, if this sounds familiar to you, let me assure you it is; it’s a lot similar to marketing. The money was spent to create a bias towards the political party’s brand; various major brands do it; they imprint their brand image into one’s subconscious by simply appearing everywhere. The sear presence of the brand everywhere lets a person draw natural affiliation towards it.
Like when a brand becomes popular, any goods and services it produces are treated in association with its image; we buy it simply because we know that the brand is widespread, and we are assured of our choice. Welcome to the Indian elections; let’s say elections in general, it’s simply a fact that most people vote based on the political ideologies the party endorses rather than the respective candidate they are putting forward from their region. People are unaware of the history, education, or anything in particular about the prospective candidate contesting in elections; what simply matters is the political party, the brand, the ideology that’s put forward. The persona of voting as a national affair is a misnomer. It should be a common neighborly phenomenon when one votes, one directly affects their surroundings, and the candidate brings about the immediate effect.
In marketing, we purchase the space in the people’s consciousness and implant our brand in it. Through various visual and auditory cues, the political parties spent billions doing the same. The brand of the party gets imprinted, and through it, a sense of belonging generates to the party, increasing the overall persona of the party.
Latching on to emotions through advertisement is very common take the instance of Coca-cola for example, the 2015 ad of holidays are coming, share a can campaign, and the widely popular debranding campaign known as “project connect,” where they printed top 150 names of people on to the labeling of their bottles in Australia.
All this effort is driven solely to achieve two things, the first being associating the brand’s image to a sense of euphoria or joy and becoming a brand that sells good times instead of carbonated drinks, the second being connecting to people on a personal level and becoming a standard product that must exist among the lives of people, as a necessary ritual to conduct a ceremony or an event. Similar tactics are evident in the political system. All the campaigns by parties are highly motivated to bring about the same effect. Even the motive is the same to sell their product/candidate in exchange for your money/vote.
