Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Priyanka Rai analyses how the harnessing of bias, prejudice and fear has emerged as a smart marketing strategy for political parties in India


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About a quarter of a century ago, the ‘fear factor’ entered the holy citadels of marketing strategy in India, both for luring consumers to ‘buy’ your product and for luring voters to ‘buy’ your political party. Back in the 1980s, upwardly mobile urban Indians were discovering the perils of stress and cholesterol. The home grown FMCG company grabbed the lurking fear of ‘heart attack’ and parlayed it into a pioneering marketing cum advertising campaign to sell the cooking oil brand Saffola. The brand still relies on the ‘fear factor’ to lure consumers.

Around the time Marico was discovering the power of fear, the young whiz kids running the Congress election campaign for Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 were stumbling upon something similar – the cloud of fear and uncertainty that hung over the Indian electorate after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The 1984 election campaign of the Congress has now become a classic case study of how to stoke fear to win. Newspapers (there was hardly any television back then) were littered with huge ads that talked somberly of India being torn asunder by terror.

The underlying message was: buy Saffola if you want to prevent a heart attack; and buy Congress if you want to prevent a disintegration of India. Arguably, both campaigns have worked wonders for their promoters. And ever since then, fear, prejudice, bias and apprehension have become the standard tools of trade for many consumer brands and most political parties.

Of course, political parties, like consumer product companies, have mastered the art of deceptive jargon that ends up packaging their core message as positive panacea. Here is what the President of the BJP, Rajnath Singh has to say about the core competencies of Brand BJP, “We promise to give good governance, clear direction and inclusive development irrespective of caste, creed, religion and region. We will de-communalise development and we will introduce no communal angle while allotting budgets or discriminate between the populace on the basis of their religious affiliation.”

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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