Skewed info is key to success of political brands

By Newscop

Over the next few weeks, India’s national and regional political parties will test their inherent brand strengths with the electorate. By mid-May we will have answers to questions like these: Are national brands such as Congress and BJP losing out to regional brands? Which brands are growing in strength and which ones stagnating?
At the outset, let’s be clear: while the laws of branding are the same for soap and political party, in the case of the latter, it is possible to achieve success through lies and miscommunication. One can overwhelm the customer (the voter) with a strong emotional message, as your vote is a one-time buy for a political party every five years. After that, it may metamorphose into a different party, a different brand.

It’s a bit like selling life insurance. You don’t keep buying life insurance everyday. As a one-time sale, it’s possible for a persuasive salesman to stretch the truth and convince you to buy insurance for tax advantage rather than life cover. A political party can achieve the same result by making one issue appear overwhelmingly important just before you cast your vote.

I call it the power of information asymmetry. No matter what brand gurus tell you, the essential purpose of branding is to create a positive information asymmetry — mostly emotional — in favour of your brand, so that the customer ignores your product’s functional attributes. It works particularly well when you are interested only in short-term tactical success, not long-term salience.

A Titan watch is just as good as a Rolex when it comes to telling you the time. You won’t miss a board meeting if you wear a Titan instead of a Rolex. But the Rolex brand ensures that you are not thinking about a watch’s functionality when you buy one. Its brand managers want you to think you are a sports star or celebrity when buying a Rolex. This way, the emotional message coming to you trumps the rational realisation that the Rolex is, after all, just a watch. This emotional asymmetry is what enables a Rolex to price itself 50-100 times higher than a Titan.

The purpose of political branding is to generate enough noise and information asymmetry to overwhelm the voter’s other options. Unlike a Rolex, political branding needs to work only once — and the information asymmetry required to do the trick has to appeal to your emotion for a few weeks. This is why Narendra Modi wanted his elections so soon after Godhra in 2002. His magic may not have worked in 2003, after the emotional effects of Godhra had worn off.

The Congress has chosen its election time in April-May this year because most of the bad things happening in the economy will be manifest only in the second half — more job losses, sharper slowdown, belt-tightening. To maintain the information asymmetry in its favour, the party is asking people to look back at four years of heady growth; to break the spell, the BJP prefers to talk of the dark clouds looming ahead.

To win, parties (and leaders) have to tug at one of the five major emotional chords that define human needs: the need for safety and security, the need for community, the need for clarity about the future, the need for authority, and the need for respect. Management guru Marcus Buckingham (The One Thing You Need To Know, Pocket Books, 2006) says successful leaders use one or more of these five chords to get people behind them.

The need for safety has been routinely used by “secular” parties to frighten the minorities into voting for them. This happens by painting the BJP into a Frankenstein. The BJP, for its part, uses the need for community to drum up Hindu fears about the outsider, usually the Muslim or the Christian. Caste-based parties do the same. The need for clarity is used by all parties to reduce (or increase) voters’ anxieties about the future. Modi catered to the Gujarati electorate’s need for authority and strength by references to his 56-inch chest (“chhappan ki chhati”) in the last state election. As for the need for respect, it has been used subliminally by almost all parties — NT Rama Rao fought for Telugu pride and Mayawati plays her Dalit card repeatedly — to rally people under their banners.

At the end of it all, though, it is not always possible to say which brand will win. What matters most to voters is their mood on voting day. That makes political branding a more uncertain process than product branding.