Political Marketing in India
By Prof. Gurinder Singh Ahluwalia
GJIMT, Mohali.
Abstract
Political Marketing has already become a subject of serious study and research in the US and the West but not quite so in India in particular. Political parties prefer to rely on the experts from within the party to design its campaign strategy though advertising is outsourced to the professional advertisers. India’s oldest political party Indian National Congress used the services of commercial advertising agency way back in 1989 and since then most parties have been using marketing tools and concepts for achieving success in the elections. This paper is a desk research to understand the concept of Political Marketing from an Indian perspective and an effort to stimulate research in India in this field.
Introduction
Political marketing as a subject of research & study has been receiving considerable attention in the US, Europe New Zealand and Australia. There has been few research papers on this new discipline based on the study of South East Asian democracies also. But it has not yet caught the attention of scholars from India, a country that prides itself being the largest democracy on the globe.
Although Political parties and candidates in India have long been using concepts and tools of commercial marketing to win over the confidence and approval of Indian electorate but no structured study has come out on how the political marketing has thus far been evolved here. This paper is an attempt to explain the position of this new field of study as a separate subject and stimulate its appreciation from the perspective of India.
Politics is normall ...