POLITICAL MARKETING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract

Politics and marketing have always played a very important role in each other’s lives; we might like to call it “The politics of marketing” or “The marketing of politics”, either way it is easily understandable and visible to even the most nonobservant of eyes that without marketing politics cannot survive and vice versa as the case may be. Throughout history we can find immaculate examples of politicians using their inner marketer to come up with ingenious ways of making sure that not only their voice is heard but it ends up being the stimulus for decision making, the decision of power, control, countries, states and millions of lives. Whether it is the reverend Pd. Jawaharlal Nehru or the outspoken Indra Gandhi or the veteran of words Atal Bihari Vajpayee right down to the free spirited Barack Obama all have been able to somehow transform themselves into figurative organizations riding on the back of their niche marketing strategies, running their oppositions to the ground trampled underfoot. But with the advent and emergence of Internet everything kind of changed forever, the 2012 US presidential elections are a perfect example of that, Barack Obama used the power of the internet and Social media in order to establish a massive communication campaign in order to reach out to his voters and it worked for him splendidly as he was reelected as the president of the USA. Taking cue from this, Indian political parties have now started to focus on getting a first mover advantage on the internet realm as more than 50% of Indian population is under the age of 25 and is increasingly falling in line for the technological revolution, conquering the online marketing space kind of makes sense! The purpose of this study is to find out the effectiveness of political marketing campaigns with a special focus on the internet and new age media campaigns used by various political parties in India.