Re: Gus, from what you have said, it seems to me that IPAN represents....
...the (clumsy) Americanization of Indian politics:
Date: 06 Sep. 99
Selling the BJP brand
Shuchi Bansal & Anup Jayaram
It's without doubt one of the biggest marketing campaigns the world is seeing. Only, very few know how carefully crafted it is. This is a campaign that's not only about creating an extremely valuable brand but is also about winning the hearts and minds of 600 million potential customers.
Roped into the campaign are a motley collection of people. Communications experts, media managers and space sellers are what you'd expect to encounter in such a campaign. But nuclear engineers who design power plants, retired World Bank officials, computer whizkids, newspaper editors and grassroots politicians, all together?
That's electioneering Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) style for you. Almost every tool and process that sophisticated marketmen use has been deployed to build the `tried, tested and trusted' Atal Behari Vajpayee brand and sell the saffron party: detailed market surveys, special positioning, celebrity endorsements, image building, gimmicks, the works.
[...]
Political brand-building of this kind is something the Indian voter has not had a taste of -- even in the days of Indira Gandhi when the sycophantic refrain was "India is Indira and Indira is India". But clearly, the country is going the US and UK way, although the political parties here might be miles behind their more sophisticated American and British peers. In the UK, for instance, Tony Blair led the Labour Party to a landslide victory by using experts who had worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign ( Philip Gould and Stanley Greenberg and Australian Andrew Sholl who had worked for Paul Keating, the former Australian prime minister). Sholl ran Labour's media monitoring unit, a 10-person, 24-hour commando unit scanning the press, radio and the Internet.
"Political marketing is still in a nascent stage in India," says Rajiv Desai, Congress adviser and president of public relations agency IPAN. Agrees Pandit: "Indian agencies are just beginning to wet their feet and political parties are just waking up to its effectiveness."
[snip]
businessworldindia.com
"Indian agencies are just beginning to wet their feet and political parties are just waking up to its effectiveness." LOL... IPAN'd better beware that it doesn't drown in the Kashmir quagmire altogether! |
