A book I’m reading, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, a compilation of mindful writing by Michael Bierut, has an essay in it entitled “India Switches Brands.”
It’s about how the 2004 elections in India featured a ‘360 media campaign’ by the dominant and favored-to-hold-power Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against a much simpler and less expensive grass roots campaign by the underdog Congress Party.
The name of the BJP campaign ( in his essay Bierut calls it the ‘brand’) was India Shining. Produced by Grey Advertising’s Indian division at a total cost of $100 million , it was designed to subtly credit BJP for India’s surging economy and its new hifalutin status in the Networked World. It had all the anytime-anyplace-any-platform bells and whistles, from TV spots to SMSpam, the same kind of blitz Hollywood launches four weeks before a Spielberg film.
It didn’t work.
Bierut, a world-class designer and teacher, makes some great points about how BJP’s India Shining campaign mis-judged the market. In a country of 1 billion people, he writes, only 90 million were wired at the time. India, you see, is a rich country inhabited by poor people. In Bihar, no one gets your email blasts. Bierut describes how a voting trend in India that the wealthier you are, the less likely you are to vote — the reverse of the trend in the U. S. — further stymied the BJP strategy.
Needless to say the Indian Shining brand was poorly received by the voters. It New Coked. It PeaPodded. The Sonia Ghandi-led Congress Party, with a campaign hacked by Leo Burnett’s Indian division, a campaign full of gritty images and purposefully grainy film, swept into office.
Anybody who has been in involved in branding for any length of time has encountered the India Shining scenario on some level. Somehow $100 million has a way of making all the other numbers work out. And in the end, your audience gives you a thumbs down, after which many other fingers get pointed and flipped in the search for the guilty and the punishment of the innocent.
My book GameChangers presents myriad ways of analyzing business performance, including that of a brand’s performance in the marketplace. And nothing is more instructive than figuring out why something didn’t work. Bierut begins the dialogue brilliantly. Here’s a GameChangers addition:
In the improvisational business model, there are two audiences to consider: External and Internal. Customers are the primary external audience, but there are also outside stockholders, competitors, the government and the media to consider. Anyone not in your organization or on your team who is potentially affected by, or can affect, your brand, comprise its external audience.
The internal audience consists of anyone whose approval or participation is needed to get the brand to market and support it once it’s there
Players in an improvisational organization honor suggestions from their internal audience. But when all is said and done, how the external audience, especially customers, respond to your performance matters most. You can have all the buy-in, respect and support in the world from your internal audience, but if you don’t please the external audience, you’re cooked. And a new game, the Blame Game, begins.
Giving priority to your external audience allows for improved critical thinking, more objectivity in the process and better focus by the players in the scene.
The second observation about India Shining is that it was a metaphor without emotional resonance for most of the voters. In fact, it was so hollow that in a very short window leading up to the 2004 elections, it became the butt of jokes in India’s media.
When it comes to keeping the audience connected to your brand, and bringing emotional resonance to its metaphors, I often tell my clients about Maya Lin, the student sculptor who won a competition and created the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D. C. Lin’s design for the memorial came from a vision she had, of a Vietnam Vet touching the sculpted name of a fallen comrade. It was a vision that was not only visual but emotional, too, a vision of memory and touch evoking honest, heartfelt emotion. All through the tremendous rigamarole — the politics, the red tape, the controversy and protest over her design — she clung to her simple, profound initiation of the scene. The emotion carried the scene. Still does. Over and over and over again, through a billion fingers touching names of 58, 196, fallen loved ones, Maya Lin honors the audience.
A GameChanger understands that however they get communicated, however we choose to dress them up and send them out into the world, honest emotions are the medium of the people.
Tags: 360 Campaign, BJP, Congress Party, Grey Advertising, India, India Shining, Johnny Cochran, Michael Bierut, New Coke, PeaPod, Seventy-nine Short Essays About Design, Sonia Ghandi