Marketing Lessons from BJP

If you were asked to guess which industry spends the most on marketing, what would your answer be? FMCG? Pharma? Education?

Well, if you guessed anything other than politics, and more specifically, election campaigns, then you're probably wrong.

Therefore, right now, there's no better marketing case study than the Indian elections and the marketing campaigns surrounding them.

But to pick the best campaign, we need to go back a decade to the 2014 Indian elections and talk about advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather and media buying agency Madison World, the media team that helped Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win a landslide victory.

The creative mind behind the party's campaign was Piyush Pandey, Executive Chairman and Creative Director for South Asia at Ogilvy & Mather, also known for his iconic Fevicol, Vodafone and Cadbury ad campaigns.

It was Piyush who coined the famous slogan "Ab ki baar Modi Sarkar" (This time, a Modi government). Piyush Pandey even goes as far as saying that Modi is the best product he has ever marketed.

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Now, without further ado, let's dive into what we, as marketers, can learn from Piyush and the BJP's campaign.

Key Learnings:

1. Choose the right product and features: Building a campaign around a prime ministerial candidate wasn't as obvious as it seems. Ogilvy and his team conducted in-depth surveys to understand what resonated most with the audience, and the answer was Narendra Modi. Remember, no amount of marketing can sell a bad product.

2. Keep it simple and humorous: You need to consider when and where your ads will run across platforms and what your audience's mood will be. Since many ads would run alongside the Cricket World Cup, Ogilvy decided to keep the tone simple and humorous. Pandey emphasizes that emotion sells best in marketing, and the safest emotion to use is humor.

3. Universal Answer Strategy: This strategy involves making your brand slogan the answer to any and every question. Something like this: "Bahut hua brashtachar, ab ki baar, Modi sarkar" or "Bahut hui mahengayi ki maar, ab ki baar, Modi sarkar". If done well, your audience might even start promoting your message for you.

4. Overspending is better than underspending: Ogilvy acknowledges learning this from the BJP campaign. It's crucial to estimate and spend your marketing budget adequately and not shy away from overspending. Undespending could lead to losing your entire campaign and budget, while overspending only means losing the additional amount.

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I'd love to write an article solely on Piyush Pandey, the "King of Indian Advertising," compiling all his learnings from the thousands of campaigns he has run. If you're interested, reply to this email with "Piyush Pandey." If we get enough responses, that will be the topic of my next article!