Mahatma Gandhi once famously said “Those who believe religion and politics are not connected don’t understand either“. Without questioning the validity of the above quote, I would like to present an extension (possibly a corollary) to this quote “Those who believe marketing and politics are not connected don’t understand either“. The objective of the article is to establish the relevance of the above mentioned statement and that will be done by exploring the applicability of marketing theories to the political strategies used in recent elections.
It doesn’t require trained eyes to see that elections use advertising as a big force in their electoral campaigns. To substantiate this argument, let’s look at this piece of data: Between 28 January and 3 February, BJP became the biggest advertiser on television with 11,563 ad insertions ahead of telecom companies like Idea Cellular Ltd and Vodafone India Ltd and fast moving consumer goods’ brands from Hindustan Unilever Ltd, Procter & Gamble and Patanjali Ayurved Ltd. BJP was followed by Petroleum Conservation Research Association which recorded 11,053 ad insertions and Idea 4G which registered 9,144 insertions during the week. (Source: BARC) While this piece of data may come as a surprise to many, this is the most direct and obvious connection of politics and marketing. But being an MBA student I want to explore the relevance of the core marketing strategies to the contemporary Indian politics.
Ask any MBA student as to how would he go about launching his product when a category is given to him. He will try to use the S-T-P framework followed by the 4-P framework in one form or the other. Here, a detour is needed to be taken to understand the basics of S-T-P. S-T-P marketing is a three-step approach to building a targeted marketing plan. The “S” stands for segmenting, the “T” for targeting and the “P” for positioning. Going through this process allows a business owner and marketing consultants or employees to formulate a marketing strategy that ties company, brand and product benefits to specific customer market segments. In the above definition, replace the terms ‘business owner and marketing consultants or employees’ with ‘political parties’ and ‘company, brand and product benefits’ with ‘party ideology and agenda’. More changes can be made but, for the time being, this much would suffice. The case in point in this article is Bihar Legislative Elections of 2015. The case study of Bihar is a unique one because of the series of unprecedented alliances and break-ups the parties went through. As in industries too, to take on a formidable market force, a firm has to resort to mergers and acquisitions as one of the strategies. This is what JDU did which had recently parted ways with BJP after elevation of Narendra Modi as the face of BJP for 2014 general elections. The general elections in which NDA won 31 out of 40 seats in Bihar had made BJP the clear market leader and the favorites for the assembly elections too. And, as would happen in any industry, this rise of BJP led to ‘market consolidation’. JDU and RJD, once arch rivals, joined hands along with Congress to take on the market disruptor, BJP. The alliance was named as ‘The Grand Alliance’ (MAHAGATHBANDHAN).
An eerie parallel can be drawn between the above-mentioned series of events and the series of events which is taking place in the telecom industry where Jio has caused Vodafone and Idea to brain-storm a merger to fight Jio’s might. Now let’s do a congruence test of strategic approach taken by The Grand Alliance and the STP approach in 2015 Bihar legislative assembly elections.
- Segmentation: This is the part which makes the elections an infamous affair in Bihar as the segmentation criteria used is a Demographic one where the caste plays an important role. The votes have been polled in the name of caste since ages. Only recently, the trend has shown some sign of change where the criteria has changed to a need based segmentation, which was masterfully exploited by BJP (or rather Narendra Modi) in the 2014 General Assembly elections. The need which was evoked by BJP was the need for development. This is where the shrewdness of Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and Prashant Kishore came into the picture. The segmentation strategy they embarked upon was sum of need based, Demographic-1 (D-1) and Demographic-2 (D-2). The need based part is clear as water where Nitish Kumar took to the plank of development riding on his pro-development face. But the catch was the two different demographic segmentation strategies used by the Grand Alliance. Demographic-1 refers to the caste based segmentation which was championed by Lalu Yadav (and tacitly by Nitish Kumar too). Demographic-2 refers to the gender based segmentation where Nitish Kumar offered generous perks for women like 50% reservation in Panchayati Raj Institutions in India and promise of further continuation of the same stance like liquor ban if voted into power.
- Targeting: Now that the party had decided on the segmentation variables, the next step was to focus the approach and move on to the targeting part. As mentioned above, the need based segmentation was easy to achieve given the good work he had done in the last two terms (with some hiatus from the Jeetan Ram Manjhi fiasco). This segmentation covered almost the entire population of Bihar because who doesn’t want development. But a mere promise of development is a rhetoric in Bihar and has to be fortified with some other variables like the old caste based algorithm. Hence Lalu Yadav used D-1 to consolidate his famous M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) vote bank. Nitish also used this to target the non-Yadav OBCs. It would seem that D-1 was complex, but D-2 gave D-1 a run for its money as far as complexity was concerned. This could have been a masterstroke as this segmentation would target 48% of the total votes in the state. But there was a risk of the strategy backfiring as the state we were talking about was Bihar where the majority of population lived in rural areas. Traditionally, these areas have been male dominated ones and wooing the women for the same wouldn’t have made sense and could possible alienate the male population. Prashant Kishore, the poll strategist of the alliance made sure that the two segmentation strategies wouldn’t collide as he didn’t allow Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar to hold joint rallies or, for that matter, share the stage. More like HUL’s Dove and Fair & Lovely.
- Positioning: The classic approach to positioning dictates the marketer to establish a common thread in the offering which helps the product to establish the legitimacy. This feature is called Point of Parity (PoP). Another part of the positioning entails presenting the product such that it comes out as a different offering as compared to the alternatives in the market. This is the feature which would push people to buy the product or, in some cases, pay a premium for the product. This is known as Point of Difference (PoD). Extending this concept to politics is not that difficult as the PoP and PoD directly causes the voters to vote for a particular party. In the Bihar legislative assembly elections of 2015, the PoP was going to be development (and caste arithmetic in ticket distribution). In simpler terms, promising development to the voters was a hygiene factor. This would sound like but natural for any election. But for Bihar, where the elections have been fought traditionally in the name of caste, this was a change which had been brewing for the past 2 elections. This change was driven by many factors such as the presence of two pro-development faces (Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi) at the helm of the two contesting alliances. Additionally, the backdrop of this election was colored by 2014 LS elections which was fought on development and anti-corruption plank. This could be seen in some of the positioning statements of the parties where The Mahagathbandhan tried to leverage the previous work done by Nitish Kumar and NDA tried to count the failures of the Nitish Government.
As far as the PoD was concerned, Nitish Kumar played a very well thought out Bihari-vs-Bahari card where he called himself as a local champion and referred to Narendra Modi as Bahari. The BJP too played into the hands of the Grand Alliance by not declaring a CM candidate ahead of the polls. The differentiation strategy was well exploited by using Narendra Modi’s remark on Nitish’s DNA. The put it in Nitish Kumar’s words “Modi raised question mark over Bihar’s DNA and insulted the state. Nothing is wrong with Bihar’s DNA, the state has glorious history. My DNA emanates from Bihar’s soil. My DNA is the same as that of the people of Bihar.” This shows how careful once has to be with his/her words because it can cause a negative WoM for the brand.
It is easy to deduce from this article that why was JDU-RJD combine so effective in the 2015 Bihar Legislative Assembly elections. It created an edge for itself in every element of the strategy which entailed S-T-P. Combine this with effective use of marketing mix (4-Ps) and you have, for yourself, a landslide victory.
So, it can be seen easily that the application of marketing concepts is not that difficult as far as politics is concerned. This argument can be extended to the marketing mix where we can easily see the congruence of politics and marketing. But that is the topic to be discussed in the next article.
Relevant links:
- http://www.business-standard.com/elections/uttar-pradesh-assembly-elections-2017/as-up-polls-approach-bjp-has-most-ad-inserts-on-tv-in-fifth-week-of-2017-117021000746_1.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Bihar
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj_(India)#Reservation_for_women_in_PRIs_in_India
- https://bharatabharati.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/nitish-k.jpg
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