Branding has a sweet and nasty habit of making it into every realm. Politics is incidentally one of them. In the wonderland of politics, there are people of every hue of opinion, out to establish their credentials with their potential voters. Every diverse and divergent opinion is relevant, particularly in a vibrant and living democracy like ours.
The science of branding the politician is a rather contemporary part of political science. Today, politicians who aspire to make it big invest a huge amount of time, energy and money to get their branding act right. This is done right at the beginning, just as it is done with equal passion mid-course to make those vital corrections that count.
As you look around in the market of human brands that are represented by leaders of every kind, there is a method to the madness of the politician brand you are confronted with day in and day out.
There are brands that stand tall in their imagery and those that are stunted by the day. Both personas remain brands. One is a brand that evokes awe and pride and the other is one that evokes the comic, if not the bizarre and ridiculous. The beauty, however, is the fact that nothing is permanent in the world of branding. The chemistry of it all is so ever-changing that the ridiculous can become sublime and the brand that is standing tall can get repositioned quickly.
Political science must therefore incorporate into it a solid chapter on brand management. It is a science being used by the politician today with finesse and panache.
Look behind the curtains. The politician is a brand in the fullness of it all. My definition of a brand is simple. It is a thought. The politician is a thought, a powerful one that lives in the minds of millions of people. The complexity is, of course, the fact that the very same brand is a different animal in every mind. How does Lalu Prasad Yadav occupy the high ground of being a people’s persona? How does he manage to do it right all the time? Well, nigh almost. How does he maintain his rustic charm intact in a state that celebrates the rustic and the real? How does he manage to continue to live and thrive in the mindsets of his peoples?
As a part of an exercise to assess the value of such dynamic human politician brands, I have done a brand valuation exercise on a whole host of them. This exercise views the value living and dead brands bring to the political parties in focus. It is done across the country, across sets of human politician brands that have captured the imagination of voters and non-voters alike. The idea is to add the dimension of a physical value to every human brand. The value is a number that translates itself into crores of rupees, which represents metric that can actually measure the contribution these human brands make to their political parties and fortunes to date. In many ways it is giving the devil its justifiable due.
It is heartening to see the kind of value the person in the pole position brings to the Indian National Congress. The name is one all of us know as the father of the nation: Mahatma Gandhi. To date, he has contributed valuably to the fortunes of the party and its current image. Through all its ups and downs, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi (both assassinated), and of course every other Gandhi from the party has contributed to its image. Add to it a whole host of names that belonged to the freedom movement and nudged ahead the nation. A political party is thus a function of the collective images of all its leaders. It is equally an amalgam of all the actions, inactions, acts of commission and omission of each of these leaders. Sadly, while the work of the common party worker is often forgotten, leaders thrive as brands remembered.
Jumping into every other party that has ruled the country, some of the big human brands that have really done wonders to the fortunes of the parties they represent (either directly or indirectly) have been Sardar Patel, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, the current PM Narendra Modi and a large pantheon of others. The rear-end of a list of 214 leaders I have explored include a whole lot of young Turks. Some sons and daughters of leaders and personas, and some completely new entities who have captured the collective imagination of their voters. Many belong to the realm of cinema, some are from sport and strangely very few from those that represent social service.
Brands and branding therefore counts in politics. Many do it wrong. Some shout from the rooftops and imagine being a demagogue is the prime goal of a politician. Others tend to be sober for a sober new tomorrow. And none believe in the dictum that your work must talk.
The future politician, just about taking baby steps in the wonderland of politics, needs to think hard and position himself/herself/themselves right. Contextually, the future is a rebellion against the past in this realm. What is the differentiation you must embrace? How must you not copy anyone else’s style? How much integrity must you pour into building your brand? How do you survive in a market where 9/10 of the brands have spoilt the image of the category itself? How does that one sincere brand survive, swim and eventually win?
What happens with new generations of voters? What’s the baggage they inherit? And how do they react to names they have read in their history books and never experienced? Must parties invest in the process of reviving leaders and their contribution to nation building? Can long-forgotten history play a role in boosting the brand profile of a party tomorrow? And what’s the contemporary buzz? What switches on the young?
The questions to answer are many. The one non-negotiable thing however, with the future in mind, is the position of the politician brand on integrity and the approach to it. My advice to people who come to me on this count is a simple one. If you are a wolf, look like one. Position yourself on the basis of who you are. Don’t try to be who you are not. You will fail. A wolf in sheep’s clothing works for a while, but then even these have a tendency to fall off eventually.
My research tells me there are 31 ways of positioning a politician brand today for the politics due to emerge tomorrow. Choose it right and with integrity. You don’t have to be anyone else. Just be you!
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)