We don’t normally touch politics in this series of Q&As, but yesterday’s developments in Mumbai were just too hot to not handle. Here’s Dr Bhaskar Das in the July 3 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on…
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Q. It may appear to be a stretch, but are there any branding and marketing lessons or takeaways from yesterday’s developments in Maharashtra politics?
A. There are a lot of lessons possible if one is open to learning from them. It is a global malaise that marketing is perceived to be relevant only for marketers or business people. Politics is not supposed to be a business or the last refuge of a…., as Samuel Johnson famously said.
See, politics – Maharashtra or for that matter anywhere – operates in a bi-direcectional manner. Sometimes politics gets influenced by the sentiment of voters sand sometime voters get influence by political sentiments.
In case of Maharashtra politics, it seems that opportunity is the dominant logic to ignite the passion for serving voters. Hence one cannot pass any value judgment in terms of political ethics, but come to think of it, marketing and branding are also about leveraging opportunities that suits a marketer. And there are episodes galore where such opportunities used. You may get a lot of examples from ASCI.