Indian Politics and Digital Marketing
What a blog on digital marketing has to do with the world of Indian politics? Well, some of my connections have shared very interesting social media campaigns executed by political parties in Delhi elections.
India runs on Cricket, Bollywood, and Politics (and Digital – WhatsApp/ Facebook) in no particular order. Politics in India is probably the best example to discuss and understand the nuances of typical segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) concepts of marketing. Politicians are the holy grail when it comes to understand the psychology behind persuasion – how to influence millions of people to vote for you when the product is of questionable quality and durability 🙂 And that’s why we see some of the best creative memes and WhatsApp forwards purely based on political trends.
There is a lot of money involved in the social media campaigns run by these parties, which require the services of a professional digital media marketer.
So, irrespective of your ideology, political campaign are one hell of an opportunity to exercise the digital marketing skills – in terms of creativity, influence, and huge data potential. Understanding and analyzing the online trends and user’s sentiments and how to turn the tide in someone’s favor – are the biggest challenges to solve in a political campaign. This requires 24X7 type of support and a deep understanding of the client (political party) as well as of the competition. The US elections are a magnificent example of online campaigns that also involves issues of fake news and misleading/malicious attacks.
Readers can also check this article on Economic Times about expenditure and various campaigns in Delhi Elections.
A very interesting data is twitter accounts of the three main political parties. Check the following numbers which are only 3 for one of the party!
Also, the banner and description – who one should say that we are the official handle of XYZ party? The banner should be about philosophy and core beliefs. The Account page is the first touch point which must be captivating enough. So, there is still room for some learning and further improvements.
Professor of Marketing at Jaipuria Institute of Management, Lucknow. Ph.D. in Marketing, IIM Lucknow. Ex-assistant Prof at IIM Ranchi, visiting faculty to IIM Lucknow. Writes for ET BrandEquity, Campaign India, BusinessWorld, Times of India etc.