Marketing During Political Times

Politics and Marketing make a heady mix and the recent primaries in the US have taken political marketing to a whole new level

We in India are well aware of the political debacle that was the India shinning campaign, but what no one noticed was the succcess of the congress party campaign - congress ka saath, aam aadmi ka saath (Loosely translated: Congress Party's Hand is holding that of the common man) It was successful in striking a chord with the people on issues like riots, price rise etc. Indian Politics is ofcourse still taking baby steps towards being marketing savvy. Leaving print or TV ads, our parties haven't embraced the net like their countreparts in the US. Ofcourse this strategy does make sense when you consider that the bulk of the population lives in rural areas and hardly has access to electricity let alone the internet, but...but... a sizeable urban population has access to the net and they get their information at their finger tips. I feel it makes tonnes of sense in investing in online marketing campaigns for our parties too.

The Obama campaign in particular has re-defined campaign funding and marketing in the US. This Washington Post Article explores the obama online campaign and the findings are mind boggling. Obama through internet ads has succeeded in building a network of $1 million donors!! this in stark contrast to the traditional route of having a small but wealthy pocket of donors. Obama through such tactics managed to raise $91 million in just 2 months thanks largely to this humongous group of small donors. Obama camapign also spent their money wisely - they out spent the clinton campaign by ten times on their online marketing budget.

The online campaign is also interesting in itself, according to the article. The Obama ads didn't take one directly to the donate page but focused on building an online relationship instead. People who signed up with their email Ids first got a welcome message, information about policies, information on the various ways one could volunteer and after building a rapport, only then was one asked to donate. I find this extremely fascinating. This is new age marketing. We'd call this lead nurturing only this is being applied to a political campaign

There have been other instances of the obama campaign being net savvy. A social networking group called ObamaCycle started by an enthisiastic obama supporter, actually ensured that Obama Campaign supplies were reused not wasted. This supplemented a situation where people who ran short of campaign supplies in states which were going to vote in the primaries could communicate whith people in states that had already voted and hence could re-use their campaign supplies!!

The obama campaign has been Web2.0 savvy with widgets and buttons on facebook and myspace etc.

I guess this tactic fits the american mileu but I strongly feel that our parties could easily take a leaf from obama's campaign book and make our political system more interactive, more participatory and more fun