The Bihar election was about branding versus rhetoric

You will always see my bylines with stories on startups and entrepreneurship, however, as an avid follower of the election scenario in our country, I almost felt compelled to tell my followers what I wanted to. And since this is something on "branding," my startup followers are free to extract perspectives that may have implications for business as well.

I have increasingly begun to believe that elections in India are becoming an exercise in branding that has to match aspirations. Else parties will fail. Thanks to strategists like Prashant Kishore who did the magic for BJP during 2014 polls and so for Nitish Kumar this time, political branding will only strengthen as a discipline here on. It’s a no-brainer that the Bihar election has proved that no old success formulae such as polarisation and the caste-divide alone will guarantee success anymore in 21st century India. The fact that the ruling BJP in the centre was routed by the Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar led combine despite the former using all its monetary might and expensive advertising campaign says a lot about how the meticulous branding that led to BJP’s win in Lok Sabha election is now falling apart. To my opinion, there is one reason that subsumes others.

The party is far-removed from what has happened on the ground over the last one and half years of its rule in terms of how people’s perceptions have changed, mostly for the worse. I need not have visited Bihar to gauge what is happening in the voter’s mind out there. Delhi is full of Biharis, the one who runs a flourishing teal stall just outside the India Today Mediaplex hails from Sivan, Bihar. The Sikh who manages traffic outside a gurudwara in Noida and thousands of auto-rickshawallas, two among whom this reporter spoke to are from Bihar. I did a mini poll, just to quell my curiosity on what is happening in the voter’s mind. The Sardar’s prediction was Nitish is going to make it because "uski chhavi acchii hai." To my surprise besides other sophisticated views on the Nitish government, he even remembered the number of jobs teachers have got in his regime. One of the auto rickshawallas I spoke to said, "Modi ayega kyuki log ek bar mauka dena chahenge(for development)." But he added, "lekin wo bade logo ka neta hai, aam logon ka nahi."

The lesson this election teaches is, no advertising campaign, even one peppered with strong re-sounding rhetoric can be a success if you fail to understand what is happening on the ground. That’s one area where you can spend all your money-might but your obsession with all that will inevitably lead to your losing focus on what your target audience is thinking about you. So that explains why Flipkart’s CEO Sachin Bansal recently decided to handle a few deliveries personally to see what really is happening and to get direct customer feedback. Today he had an option to do that, but in his startup days he did the same (door-to-door deliveries) because there wasn’t an option, there were no resources. The word "development" is something that was promised, emphatically during the Lok Sabha elections by the BJP government which created strong waves of hope which coupled with strong anti-incumbency towards the Congress government, did the magic. People bought into that "branding" because that matched "aspirations", but the incidents during the last one year have proven that there are cracks in the brand now. Recent communal incidents and those pertaining to curtailing creative and literary freedom, rising prices of food essentials and sustained debate on subjects like beef have damaged the brand BJP won the people’s mandate with.

Parties cannot buy votes via advertising, nor by showing them twisted truths, thinking they will believe it all. Information and intellect is no more the priviledge of a few, thanks to the era of communication boom we live in. The common man is extremely intelligent and can see through all veneers, is not carried away by what mainstream media reports. The voter has a mind of his own and in 21st century India, he is restless and wants progress, not just the promise but actual delivery on the ground. Social media has emerged as a strong parallel to mainstream print and television media giving people an avenue to report stories and opinions of their own besides knowing those of others, much beyond those of a select few experts, thinkers and journalists.

As a popular television anchor said, post BJP’s rout in Bihar, "Development was only a camouflage and people have awakened to the political party’s real agenda." To quote Narayana Murthy, "There can be no development without peace and harmony in the country." On the contrary, Nitish Kumar is a brand of his name, with comparatively lesser costs incurred per se on a heavy duty branding exercise. His model of development is neither politicised nor publicised much in the media if you compare it with the so-called "Gujarat model". But the important thing is that Nitish does have a model which is approved by many. His personal image as a politician is coherent with what he stands for and delivers, which is in quite consonance with what people want. And so he was voted back to power. It is now anybody’s guess whether the grand alliance will allow Nitish to sustain his development agenda. Branding anyway is a fluid exercise and not do-it-and-forget exercise. Its about sustained communication, and being constantly connected with how things are changing on the ground.