The Economic Times – Brand Equity

It is over. The results are known. A democratic exercise, unparalleled in human experience, has concluded. What has emerged is the key to the flood gates of power. A government has been elected with an unambiguous verdict. It will be responsible for the most populous and youngest human population on the planet. It will be endowed with awesome force and majestic powers. Its sweep will be deep and wide. Marketers please take note of everything that happened. What is true of the emerging Indian political system is true of India itself. The noise, the human crush, the blare, bands and screaming seen alongside the pageantry and the oratory of this unprecedentedly, long campaign hides the structural underpinnings of success. Planning was done, money spent, reputations minted or destroyed. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] There is a way to power in India, not as clear and flamboyant as in America, not as naked in its grasping as a tyrant’s strike for power in despotisms. Over the past 67 years, since the first general elections in 1952, our national life has evolved. Technology has made a grand entry, learning and Literacy have spread, cultural patterns have been reshaped. Politics has changed from a pivot to the Congress to one that has become totally centred on the BJP. Yet, like before, power flows from free choice exercised by participating citizens – active and responsible participation. It is a process where the elements are beyond rational analysis and control. Events, blunders, decisions, deals and treachery all play their part. The masterful exponents understand the mechanisms of nation-wide communications, alliances of political oligarchies, dynasties and the experienced cynicism of the struggling masses. The combatants have money, media machinery, platform and positions. They possess a fund of wisdom, earthy experience, and contacts. Their memories and narratives running back several decades. They have, more crucially, the jugular instinct to read the pulse and beat of power. They know – that in politics – your strategy is never based on choice, it is forced upon you! Here resources trump rivalries. Most party bosses and dynasts have emerged into the fray from jousting preliminaries where victory guarantees nothing but defeat often kills. This election saw, yet again, a naive but touching debate on ability alone securing clout for a political aspirant. Perish the thought. As many dynasts have been floored as elevated. There was a dampening of intraparty warfare that is usually only to be expected. Yet, the grubby, rooted politics of deals and chicaneries was in full splendour. It is an manifest truth in politics that candidacy for any office is the coming together of not one but many men’s ambitions. 2019 was positioned as a contest over a system of values. A struggle between good and evil. Some claimed it was a culminating contest for tolerance vs. intolerance. It was hyped so much, as if the very nature of man was being voted on. We must conclude from the results. First and foremost, this re-election and mandate has confirmed the numero uno status of Narendra Modi. The BJP’s campaign and its entire architecture were built around him and the results prove that he delivered spectacularly. The party’s organizational machinery, delivery of critical benefits programs at the grassroots level, palpable concerns about national security – all of these – contributed to the appeal. But, above all the clarion call of “every vote you cast comes to Modi” did the magic. Like never before, Narendra Modi managed to turn a parliamentary election into a Presidential vote. One may even think of it as a referendum. It takes a lot of political capital and brand goodwill to get people to parade behind you. Pitted against a fragmented opposition frayed over its leadership brand Modi was recognized to be firm, steady and in control of affairs. Modi is arguably the biggest super- brand and political phenomenon India has seen since the independence movement. I say this because 2019 signalled a decisive shift of mind set, boundary constraints. Political axioms and certainties were shattered. In his electoral triumph, Modi has bridged divides of caste –high and low, Urban and Rural abode, Rich and Poor by income and even Bharat and India by mindset. This is truly unparalleled ! There are flavours of anti-elitism, muscular nationalism and majoritarianism in this winning recipe, unpalatable to a western educated intelligentsia. That said, for the vast majority of the voters, it is about opportunity. Voters rewarded empowerment, roads, electrification, housing, health care, toilets, cooking gas and so on. Of course there has been cosmetic concealment of warts and wrinkles by the marketing machine behind this juggernaut. But it was done with such expert emotional distraction that,in the due course, plurality became an antonym of nationalism. In the overall analysis, Modi is seen as hard-working, committed and focused whereas the opposition were seen as feudal, privileged, corrupt and office seeking. They were seen to be banking on vested interests and parochial vote banks. Besides the force of brand Modi, what are some of the salient points for marketers to note from 2019? Strategic calculation: advertising without strategy’s is art, futile art. The mix: messaging above scandals, mistakes, backroom deals and reckless gambles. Keep on the message and be opportunistic to shape the message according to the emerging mix. The machinery: the sum total of your ability to influence the voting market matters more than just a message. Diffusion: Look beyond focal points because power acquisition today is way more diffused as a process than ever before. We should remember a hundred times, this was the first mobile-digital election in India. The power of mobile internet based dissemination is vastly underestimated. Charisma: hard to use, easier to lose. Those who marshal it, like Modi, are masters of communication itself. Centrifugal: Hacktivists, Troll armies, versioning media men. The politics of the centrifugal forces cannot be neglected but if you are banking on them to be elected , think again. Trust: the most precious elements of political branding, it needs evidence after one iteration. After the first, trust

Globally, the trillion dollar marketing, advertising, and branded content economy runs on things new, loud and ephemeral. But consumers, individually and collectively, are creatures of memory. This is a fundamental contradiction, and perhaps hypocrisy which is hardly discussed. Managers, creative partners, and disseminators get enormous energy, profit, and career growth from creating brand paraphernalia afresh but this may not necessarily be in the brand’s best interest. Memory is the world’s most precious business commodity. It crystallizes from amorphous associations. Our learning, response, cognition is all memory based. We are nothing but a thinking system actualized via memory. Our evolutionary encoding teaches us to navigate the future from a record – conscious and subconscious – of the past. It is memory that we, as individuals and as consumers, rely on to predict the possible future outcomes. Therefore memory is all about the future. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Today, a fundamental collapse of memory is a collateral damage of the movement toward democratization and mass culture on a global scale. Our unconscious, spontaneously actualizing memory has been put on an ever accelerating treadmill in modern times. Modern Indian society has a growing belief in a right, a capacity, and even an obligation to change. This acceleration has been increased to a paroxysmal limit. It wasn’t always so. India has more often depended on myth, lore, collective ritual and folk narratives rather than archived, memorialized history evidenced by source. Memory was nourished by our living society. Therefore, it was vulnerable to manipulation and seizure by the powerful. It was organically predisposed to being long inactive and only sporadically revived. But, good or bad, memory was and remains a bond tying us to the ceaseless present. As an emerging economic superpower, India needs a more positive, all encompassing, and elucidatory memory. This is even more relevant because we may risk abandoning our collective memory. It is the result of a billion people moving ahead and doing things for the first time. We are the planet’s youngest and largest population. 400 million Indians are less than 18 years of age. This is a society deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that innately values the new over the antique, the young over the old, and the future over the past. Galleries, archives, mausoleums, festivals, centenaries, monuments are not at the heart of our socio-cultural discourse. As a young, preoccupied country with an increasingly urban culture we now have poor spontaneous memory. Hence, our governments maintain memorial trusts, mandate anniversaries, organize celebrations, utter acclamations, and issue tribute stamps because such activities no longer occur naturally. Our hyperactive, commercially frenzied modern society, propelled by change, must strive to organize the past. Luckily, brands are a most essential part of our social, collective memory of at least the past 150 years. Brand culture and brand memory is flourishing and is invaluable. Why is this good for business? Because by better understanding how memory works, building strong, stable memory anchors and developing a communications system to reinforce rich, relevant memories that guide purchasing decisions, a brand’s business can boom. With the arrival of electronic means the manifestation of memory has been enormously expanded, swollen, dispersed and democratized. A critical priority in marketing and advertising ought to be creating and reinforcing positive brand memories, associations that lead more customers to buy more. Strong brand memory and positive product associations translate preference to sales. We must understand the workings of consumer memory. What makes a brand distinctive and memorable? Every brand manager must do stocktaking to know the elements and associations that are memorable and influence memory ranking. Many factors play a role in what we remember. Consumer decision making is irrational and non-deliberate. Communications and persuasive messages are read or heard and product performance is assessed objectively. That said, in the end, people decide intuitively where emotional memories – highly subjective and imperfect – play a clinching role. Ultimately, a brand that has deep, wide, comprehensible and emotionally positive ‘memory structures’ wins. When consumers remember old advertising, they are pointing to gold. A brand that keeps its memories alive never scripts its own obituary. https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/creating-brand-memories-for-future/68688800

At a trillion dollar, Apple is a wow that truly defies valuation. Yet the stock market is not sanguine about its prospects. Apple has its success and its failings to pin on one flagship product, the iPhone. The iPhone holds significant market shares in only three countries: the United States, the U.K. and Japan. Even there, its share is less than 50%. In China, it has hit all the hurdles and yet continues in the race. In Bharat, it lags behind for now. Anywhere else, its share is between 10 % and 25%. Globally, the iPhone has less than 20% of the smartphone market. Yet it has a crushing share of the same profit pool. How is this volume to profit mismatch explained? When one buys an iPhone, one is buying esteem and self-image. The high arc of its halo rises way above its performance, which is about the same as its competitors. Hence the performance per dollar paid is poorly off. It gives a blinding glimpse of the obvious, namely that the pricing power and value resides in the Apple brand rather than the functionality of its products. Apple is the world’s most valuable brand. Forbes’ calculations put Apple on top with its brand worth $182.8 billion, up 8% from last year. Samsung sold more phones worldwide than Apple did in the fourth quarter of 2017, but 87% of industry profits ended up in Cupertino. But, as Apple’s relative brand premium declines, so does its pricing power. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] It first manifest itself in volume shipments. There were declines in projected unit sales 46.9 million iPhones in the Q4 of fiscal 2018, same as a year ago, disappointing analysts. But, the average sales price per iPhone user has seen a big jump. Then one sees it in price labels. Apple introduced new versions of its MacBook Air, Mac mini and iPad Pro products. These were sequentially at much higher prices than their respective predecessors but they don’t do much more than the older versions. The inference is direct. Apple’s volume sale is stalling, and its profits increasingly reliant upon users who are willing to pay more. The root of this phenomenon is of acute interest to me as a marketer. When wealth and value creation rests on pricing power, like Apple’s, it means the value-pivot shifted from brand pull to extraction. Stock valuations rooted in extractive brand values fall. Consumer dissonance begins to act as gravity. But, the Apple story has some complex and unique enablers to its brand aura. First of all, the iEcosystem. Apple was always about the hardware, the insular software and the integrative services. Think iTunes or Apple Music, the App Store, iCloud and Apple Pay. These are just some of the things that make Apple’s services business its most important and fastest-growing drivers of revenue. Second, aesthetics and design. Apple had a string of hit products topping charts on design and user experience. Apple devices were perceived as being better in quality – and certainly in design – than competing products. Steve Jobs was relentless on winning via design and ease of use. When he died in 2011 of pancreatic cancer, that singular obsession ceased. Ever since, Apple has continued to be the dominant tech company in both market share and stock price however, Apple has become iterative rather than disruptive. The iProblem Apple is heavily reliant on the iPhone to power its financial success. The Apple that created value was a brand humanising technology. It got to a trillion dollars because there were built-in barriers for customers to move elsewhere and a sense of intense community love. When the revolution happened, new iPhones came with updates that could fairly be called disruptive and life-changing. The arrival of GPS, the development of app stores, streaming video – these changed the way we live our lives. Whilst advancements continue, the frequency of big life-changing features has slowed. Similarly, the continual need for extra processing power now follows the ‘Law of marginal futility’. With iPhone’s innovation funnel petering out, the other smartphone brands have got an opportunity to catch up to the baseline. Where are the bad phones? The trillion dollar value question for Apple is what are you really paying for when you upgrade? Apple had positioned itself as something “different”. Can that halo always rise over and above the technical specs? Apple has not been feeding its brand with singular, evocative, game changing ideas. It has done some work in showcasing customer experience into branding such as the ‘Shot on iPhone’ campaign but it was not a new pillar in building emotional connection. No matter how entertaining or creative your brand campaigns are, if there’s no emotional connection with your audience, your marketing strategy is likely to miss its mark. It is that emotional connection which has cultivated such brand loyalty among Apple fans, and enabled the company to get away with pricing their products so much higher than competitors. Apple needs to do what it once did well. It needs the same recipe where a Cesar Chavez, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama persuaded people that a Macintosh made them to “Think Different.” https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/business-of-brands/apple-and-its-diminishing-bite/68171576

Political reputation is a mystery. The reasons for it to wax and wane are seemingly arbitrary and yet we care intensely about our collective opinion. Good reputation, judged amass, percolates down to the deepest roots of our social existence. Fame or popularity is not alogical basis for action. Still, we act as per group judgement. It is a compelling evolutionary heuristic. As a marketer, when I analyze political brands in terms of perception, charisma, trust, I do so in a relativist sense. The reputation of a political brand gets created, stabilized and grown via a narrative that includes fact, gossip and anecdote.Mass perception is intuitive, extemporaneous and feeds on sheer optimism. Our sense of trust can precede a cold calculation of risks and consequences. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Whenever a politician faces reversals attributed to a bad reputation, it implies an erosion an of social capital, loss of network traction and a failure in mastering the hierarchy of influencers who mint, evaluate, grade and circulate such reputations. The pathway of elevation to power is helical. One gains reputation, then esteem, becomes honourable, gets chosen, wins elections and become empowered. These are precarious times and to strengthen our society and democracy, we need to think deeply about the formation and enshrinement of our collective opinion. Voters think they are vigilant, strategic and rational but act in credulous and irrational ways. The high ideal is to be inspired by emotion but validate with reason. Power and Validity are synonymous. The Latin root validus means strong, powerful and potent. Our complex world demands an evaluation of the basis of trust. Apply the rules of thinking to the rules for judging. We should be able to filter biases, distortions and manage the inundation we are subjected to. When thousands of people hear a speech at a rally, what transpires? Apart from the fluency, content and robustness what more are they gauging? Individually, our young voters don’t show deference to authority so constitutive of Indian-ness. As a mass, why are they mute spectators? Obviously, collectivism is at work in intentionality and intuition. Is this judgement of the collective, better? If I wanted to maximize my wealth, I ought to ask the best wealth advisor I may get access to. Instead, the opinion of a few friends may weigh more heavily. So, there is a pragmatic assessment, a moral assessment and an independently verified ‘truth based’ assessment that gets factored into crowd wisdom before they pronounce reputational judgements. Democracy pre-supposes that, given appropriate aggregation, choices and decisions are best made collectively and get better as more people weigh in. Aggregation is powerful. TripAdvisor or Google Translate or the stock market or the popularity meter of celebrities is based on exactly the same group vote. AI is sophisticated aggregation overlaid with statistical decision making. Group think on political brand(s) operates under two constraints namely the logical constraints of the mind and the social constraint on transmission of information.Now, both are being radically transformed by the info-dense access to the web. This access is unprecedented. Collectivism operates at a scale previously unimaginable. But a surfeit of information is paralyzing. Vigilant filtering seems waning rather than improving. Abundance is jamming our info processing and crumpling our meta memory. Indian culture innately accepts and respects authority. They are not subjected, first-hand, to a rational interrogation. Let us consider say, ‘ease of doing business’. A global ratings agency or body awards a score for India. Good or bad, it gets played out in media via newspapers, TV, e-journals, magazines etc. Each endorses or damns it based on, for the most part, their political leanings. Experts are summoned to opine on experts. In consuming this, we are far removed from the presumably rational first source.We get no down time to decipher motivated spin, factual inaccuracies or selective disclosures. This build up is breathless and enervating. We see reputation built or demolished via selective or fake news and outright pamphleteering. Propaganda is a double whammy. It allows persona construction and authority building while clogging channels of rational information sharing. It undermines democracy. There is hope. As a marketer of the digital era, beyond this degree of caution, I reject alarmist, paranoid theories of mind control. The dynamic world is much larger than the largest apparatus set to shape and control it. I am more concerned about cognitive intrusion than about cognitive load. A responsible, thinking individual needs to develop a competence in assessing the canalization of information. Forget veracity. Focus on the pathway. Evaluate the motivations and deduce the agenda of those who strive to make others credible. The future of our democracy, economy and civilization rests on our ability to collectively and critically assess the reputation of those who promise us what we do not possess. Let us not fail! https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/be-blogs/reputation-and-its-pathways/3401

In today’s world privacy dilution often camouflages as a convenience even as it manipulates. With the ‘Jio revolution’ India has surged to the top ranking in growth, per capita usage, sheer cost and availability of data. There is no parallel in history for this. Yet, as the world sees the power and depth of data, we -as Indians – are mute about its social and political significance. The world is run on mobile devices. Artificial intelligence and adaptive machine learning will make the arrival of the data economy almost an evolutionary epoch. Everything in our human civilization is on a data map. From social sciences to physical sciences data is supreme. Commerce is directly read as data flow. Every time you swipe a card, make an online transaction, vote, give birth, pass an exam or die, you are a data point. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Our entire administrative, economic, social and behavioural ecosystem is data dependent and hence data mapped. Given universal access and unique identification data privacy and security is a matter of national importance. Privacy guardrails need definition in moral, social and legal terms. Sigma Privacy for the sum of all data points. Unfortunately, in India, the latent value of data isn’t recognized. Data is seen as record. It is perceived as messy, of shallow value, in terms of direct count and as a lag indicator. Data is not a bankable asset. It is not on corporate balance sheets. Consequently, those who hoard data escape scrutiny. Every set of data points has actual, combinatorial and deductive value. The irony is that data is scarce. Tools and ideas are available. Data is not. Data is proprietary. Yet, Indians give it away for free. Even to those who get it, data protection and privacy is about contractual sanctity, obligations, rights and remedies. Men have not considered dealing with algorithms. If you sign off your personal data, it is an individual and societal liability for which there is little redress possible. Even sovereign nation states and governments are helpless. Where does privacy rank in the spectrum of fundamental rights? Is it at the base of it all or is it, in essence, the fruit of it all? Individual assertion conflicts with affiliation. In the case of disease prevention, discovery, battling terror, fighting crime or detecting fraud answers emerge when aggregated from individual data. Where does privacy begin and end? If my actions are always measured, tracked, stored, analysed which is the permission gate? Should I permit measurement and tracking but not analysis or disclosure? Shall I permit current usage but not future possibilities? Just as the data talks to you about your optimal choices likewise, it talks about you to others. It reflects you as a type, a family, a community, a race, an income group and so on. You are data on the move and are being analysed as such. Privacy has poor recognition also because of its recent emergence as a concern and cause. All through 5000 years of Indian civilization, the right to ask questions and the prerogative to record responses was a sovereign right. The dangers of ‘data surrender’ is not as much in its primary intended purpose as in its secondary, mutating potential uses. Any two repeating data points tell you something about me. Each additional data point adds to my profile. Access to all my data is Me. The ‘notify and seek permission’ mode is the most legally kosher means to access and analyse personal data. But, how can you permit something if you can’t fathom what will be done with it? Marketers do not have individual liability for unintended breach and exposure of customer data. Next there is ‘anonymization’. But a name, by itself, is a shallow marker of identity. Your data stacks are more relevant. And now, combine that with the entire world of social connections. It’s a spider’s web of linkages. Data managers know personal information concerning all aspects of your life. It can be pieced together as a real time mosaic. It is acted upon for profit without any foreknowledge on your part. Marketing used to be about individual motivations. No longer so. After all, you are predictably the continuum and sum of your data. Indians get cost and value. They must remember that nothing is free. We may not be paying in currency but we are forever paying with data. Privacy dilution often camouflages as a convenience even as it manipulates. It can bore into the way we think. Try typing a google search and getting prompted. It’s reading you by reading many like you. There are two parties – the state and the corporation. A legally enforced definition of the right to individual data privacy needs both to act in concert. Corporations claim that they have private contracts where data and privacy policies are transparently exposed and willful compacts drawn up. But a right is a right only if it works for all. It cannot be surrendered. The state has to ensure that private force will not subvert that right. A digital future concerns us all. It’s like climate change. Everyone is a party here. Private accumulation of data is a sovereign risk. In the 19th century a private company of London merchants assumed similar sovereign status in India. Its name was the East India Company. https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/be-blogs/the-data-dilemma/3376

The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan when asked what it was that he most feared, is supposed to have replied “Events, dear boys, Events!”. This oft-repeated quote was perhaps never uttered. But its place amongst the most frequently cited quotes on politics, makes its import levitate above its authenticity. Indeed, most politicians will attest that in any given lifecycle – a movement, a political project or tenure in power – events intercede with disruptive and decisive consequences. Like a meteoric shower in a winter sky, events come in blazing brightly, from all ends, often with long tails inevitably drawing public attention. The centrifugal forces they unleash are full of potential for disaster. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Unlike a product brand that may mitigate the impact of adverse events and consequential PR storms by being measured and reactive, for political brands a more reflexive, proactive and responsive extroversion is called for. To head to the bunkers is a definite admission of guilt. Any surefire predictive system that may forewarn remains a utopia. Scenario planning and developing action maps for myriad ‘What-If’ outcomes is essential. But our political brand management is not adept enough to handle outcomes imaginatively. Ad-hocism, in practice, is nakedly apparent. Brand consistency demands a plan that overlays at least twelve-month forward policy pronouncements with a focus on expected disastrous outcomes and attendant events. Political brands must be able to impose a pattern of positivity and coherence, such that all wet cement stages are shaped to a given plan before the positions harden irreversibly. No example of the past will serve as axiomatic because the past did not grapple with 24/7 breaking news, yelling debates, social frenzy, and fragmentation. Templated, formulaic, incendiary diatribe issues forth from every news studio with the anchors straining their tonsils from the pulpit. Let me point to three recent events that seem to have immediate political ramifications namely the Karti Chidambaram arrest, Nirav Modi – PNB bank LOU scam and the assault on the Chief Secretary in Delhi. I have zero interest in the political realism or Machiavellian maneuvers that may have a bearing on these events and their run of life. My focus is on how political responses get framed and solidified. Firstly, the motivations in politics are nothing but business and rarely embittered and personal. The proximate goal is to make something stick. Therefore, to respond and call something a vendetta is an example of being obtuse. Likewise, it is a juvenile response where one is obsessed with the provenance of a scam. When did it all start and who was originally responsible are meaningless when the stink bomb is under your seat, on your watch. Finally, whether the investigations proceeded with equal alacrity in the case of every slap landed as fitful violence on other individuals in Delhi in the next 24 hours is really making a passion of pedantics. The world we live in is one where there is no possibility of hiding from the long lenses and flashbulbs especially when public contact is your stock in trade. No sooner has someone tripped to another’s political advantage, lo and behold! Commentary from every possible stakeholder and squads of roving reporters is dished out with acerbic wit, fatigued clichés, and rhetorical flourish. Where necessary, CCTV footage makes a miraculous appearance. All media sieges come with an artillery train of disclosures. A bombardment by the half hour. This is where grit and tenacity needs to be shown right at the top of each formation. For the big leaders to be silent and the pea shooters to be in the choir is damaging. India has no cultural space for ‘Mea culpa’. Public opinion gets formed, at first, with assessment of responsiveness. Specific, calm, positive, confident messaging works. Personalizing attacks, sarcasm, attributing motive leads to dissipation. India is witnessing an accelerated and willful disintermediation of conventional media in the generation and dissemination of news by consumers themselves. So this learning about responsiveness and savvy management of consequences has to be developed and imbibed now. Political brand management needs to mind the engine whilst driving the car. Political events come with spectral effects where truth and falsehood is split to many constituent parts. Therefore, the story and brand impacting narrative needs to be attended to before headlines are fixed and universally put in a repeat loop. Handling consequences of emergent events needs to be a dialogue and not a submission to an inquisition that it often gets reduced to. Political brands need to be repeated on message and only then does the message cut through the clutter. Utterances from immature spokespersons, casual commentary and pre-baked responses reflective of biases and hardened ideological positions do little good. Events are oxidants of political life. They will cause damaging divisions to emerge. Even the most universally appealing leadership will lose support when difficult decisions and choices ricochet out of track. Eventually, the collective common sense of the voters at large will prevail. The complex and often contradictory trajectories along which Indian democracy has traveled has made people immune to a degree to media judgment but not to your absence from it. They galvanize and mobilize in favor, not because they see events being handled with authoritarian populism but because they sense the truth in the air. They know that when the general elections give them a chance to press a button in what is the largest exercise in universal franchise on this planet, that event is the one that will be the sum of all events. https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/be-blogs/why-political-brands-need-a-crisis-management-strategy/2932

It was obviously not something that looked like it would be as popular as it has become. As a game it didn’t have glamour: it was familiar but not particularly desirable,” says Santosh Desai, MD and CEO, Future Brands, one of the leading chroniclers of Indian consumer culture. He freely admits he didn’t see the popularity of kabaddi coming. Neither did many others when Star Sports launched the Professional Kabaddi League in 2014. We recall a fair degree of derision and comments in the vein of “What next? The Chor-Police Championships? Extreme kho-kho?” around the time it debuted. And yet when Star Sports was looking to bolster its offering after its demerger with ESPN, it zeroed in on kabaddi. Says Anupam Goswami, league commissioner – Pro Kabbadi League “Given our cultural diversity and sensibility, there was clearly room for an indigenous sport. We wanted to grow one and make it not just comparable to others, but to turn it into a world class model sport.” [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] And kabaddi appears en route to meeting that goal. From a smattering of a few brands taking a calculated risk in the first few seasons, season 5 boasts of Vivo as a title sponsor with Gillette, AMFI (Association of Mutual Funds of India), Bajaj Electricals, Indo Nissin and USL among others. The opening day of the current season began with 60 million impressions with a cumulative reach of over 50 million registering a jump of over 59% over Day One of Season 4, according to Star. A lot of PKL’s success stems from very effective positioning at the time of launch. Shubhranshu Singh, head – marketing, Star Sports, recalls, at the time, the question was “Who are we speaking to? The urban affluent or traditional followers of the sport in rural or semi urban?” The team finally decided to pitch it to the former, betting on the trend percolating across the country. “We figured those with a real relationship with the sport would anyway convert” says Singh. Also important was the tenor of communication. There was a conscious decision to not be frivolous or apologetic about the sport and instead confidently highlight its best aspects: signature moves and its inherently fierce and combative nature. The actual game was tweaked to make it more TV friendly, and enough work done to familiarise both viewers and sports writers about its nuances. There was of course the surround of celebrities and glamour with Abhishek Bachchan being a team owner. Other celebrities who’ve come on board as regional brand ambassadors are Rana Daggubati for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Yash for Karnataka, and Ankush Chaudhari for Maharashtra. But as other leagues have proven, while viewers might tune in for a famous face, they need a lot more to stay invested. Each year, campaigns for PKL have pushed the ‘desi cool’ vibe of the sport, with one commercial even taking shots at other popular forms of TV. In its fifth season, kabaddi players are starting to see the celebrity — and money — that being part of a profitable sporting tourney brings with it. While top players are a few lakh shy of the `1 crore mark, according to Goswami, “We introduced a category called New Young Players between 18 and 22. The minimum salary for a season is `5 lakh. If you look at the entry level salaries across most careers, whether in engineering, software or medicine, `5 lakhs would compare very well.” Star is betting on a big push in the hinterlands this year with the launch of Star Sports First a free to air channel and SS1 Tamil, a dedicated regional sports offering. The one mystery the team is yet to crack entirely is the appeal the sport has for women and children. Cumulative viewership of women (15+) and children (4 to 14) was 54% for the last season of the PKL and for the Kabaddi World Cup. Goswami admits, “We need to get a better understanding of what draws them to sport. One reason could be though it’s a contact sport, it very rarely gets brawly the way other sports do.” Desai believes the appeal to this demographic could be because: “When you start with a clean slate, you consume what’s on screen rather than anything else. There are no pesky details and history or backstory that you are importing into viewership. If you are talking about soccer, there’s just too much to be known and there’s an asymmetry in knowledge, which I imagine, could be off-putting. Here, everyone is equally clueless.” Between geographic spread and more young people being incentivised to up their game, kabaddi looks to be in a comfortable position — which is more than what can be said for its players, frequently seen trying to get back to their side, with multiple members of the rival team holding them back. Desai considers it “A huge act of creation: not a linear step from seeing an opportunity and converting it, but more about imagining an opportunity.” https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/media/how-kabaddi-got-a-grip-on-india/60183917