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Can Political Brands be successfully extended The case of the Congress party in India Srinivasan Subramani, Manager Marketing, Idea Cellular, Mumbai, India Ajit Parulekar, Associate Professor, Goa Institute of Management, Ribandar, Goa, India Abstract Purpose: Objective of this paper is to examine the applicability of the concept of brand extensions to political parties. The case used is of Indian National Congress (INC) and other parties containing the word congress as part of their names. Methodology: Qualitative research (Focus groups and depth interviews) and review of literature resulted in a questionnaire containing 11 items. Respondents rated 8 political parties on each dimension. Correlation was run to between INC and other parties. Findings: Positive correlations on all party image dimensions and low correlation on candidate image dimensions thereby confirming the existence of a brand extension type of phenomena. Implications: National political parties across the world are witnessing a drop in party membership. As a result there is a mushrooming of regional/ niche parties. This study indicates that national parties can compete in local markets by extending their brand and customising their image to the local electorate. Keywords: Brands and Branding, Political Marketing, Brand Equity, Brand Extension

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Can Political Brands be successfully extended The case of the Congress party in India Introduction The application of mainstream marketing principles to political parties, candidates and elections has been practiced for close to a century (Wring 1997) and the first mentions of political marketing in academic literature dates back to the 1960s and 1970s (Kotler and Levy 1969, McGinness 1969, Nimmo 1973, Shama 1973). The 1990s saw a flurry of research articles on many facets of political marketing, starting with research drawing parallels between mainstream marketing (of soaps, services and not for profit marketing) and political marketing (Kotler and Levy 1969, Marland 2003), studying the application of disciplines within marketing such as advertising and marketing research (Niffenegger 1989), direct marketing, segmentation (Smith and Hirst 2001), relationship marketing, marketing orientation (OCass 2001), positioning (Harrop 1990, Schoenwald 1987) and public relations to politics. Research in the area of the application of branding to politics (candidates and parties) has been relatively scant with a few notable exceptions (Reeves et al 2006, Needham 2006, White and de Chernatony 2002) though the importance of branding in politics has been been recognized for a long time now. Brand & image building have been recognized as fundamental tasks in the management of political parties (Kavanagh 1995, Egan 1999) and politicians understand that image (a.k.a brand) is a better predictor of voting behavior than facts like candidate or party ideology or policy (McGinness 1969). In fact, party image and the message perceived by the consumer compete with information on policy and image is found to be more relevant than policy (Beresford 1998). Egan (1999) asserts that What appears to win elections and maintain party popularity is the careful management of image over time. Hence the stimulus (imagery) value of political party communication is more important than the information value like is the case with conventional product brands (Reid 1988). Brand image is composed of the network of associations that the brand has in the mind of the consumer (Keller 1993). Brand image along with brand awareness make up the basis of customer-based brand equity (Aaker 1991, Keller 2003). Strong brands leverage their brand equity by extending the brand name to other products like extending the Nike brand from sneakers to tee shirts, sports equipment, timewear and eyewear. Not only does the new product benefit from the awareness the brand enjoys, it also gains from the transfer of the set of associations of the parent brand (Quelch and Kenny 1994). Moreover the extension can help the brand to cater to newer segments that are difficult to attract with the parent brand. Also, the equity of the parent brand may increases with the success of the extension (Aaker 1997). Brand extensions as a strategy has never been adopted in political marketing but we believe that some breakaway factions of national political parties in India have used brand naming strategies (copy cat branding) similar to sub-brands and this may function like a brand extension of the political party. In this paper we consider the application of the concept of extension of brands to political party brands, taking the Indian National Congress Party as a case for this purpose. This is an area where no previous work has been done. Lock and Harris (1996) have suggested that whilst a possibility exists of influencing the direction of a political party like the case of

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conventional brand extensions, the possibility of introducing a new party is relatively remote. Whilst this may be true in the case of UK and USA, India has witnessed the launch of more than three hundred political parties in the last ten years including a large number of breakaway factions from established parties like the Indian National Congress and the Communist Party of India. In the next two sections we discuss the importance of branding and the applicability of brand extensions to political parties. Brands in Politics Political parties get launched as a result of social and political developments, when certain sections of society feel that they have to approach certain social and political questions around which they gather support or they seek to defend in the face of opposition. Thus, political parties have histories, traditions and philosophies, which when combined with party names and symbols, create and strengthen their position and image in their voter audiences (White and de Chernatony 2002). Similarly in India the congress party associates (and so do their supporters) itself with leading India to its independence from the British. Also, in recent times new parties have emerged in India either as a result of social developments (like the Shiv Sena party emerged in Maharashtra to protect the interests of native Maharashtrians in Bombay) or as a result of political developments (like the Nationalist Congress Party was formed as a breakaway faction of the Indian National Congress in protest of the party leadership being taken over by a person of foreign origin, Mrs Sonia Gandhi). Similarly a lot of breakaway factions were formed from the Indian National Congress over a variety of political developments and some new (i.e not breakaway factions) congress parties were also formed as a result of social developments. The Case for Political Brand Extensions National political parties (i.e political parties that are mass parties) are facing a crisis all across the world and are witnessing a drop in party membership. Bogdanor (2006) compares the drop in party membership of mass parties like the Conservative party (UK) from 2.8 million members in the 1950s to 1.5 million by 1975 and then even lower to 250,000 in 2006. The same is the story with the Labour party (UK) where membership dropped from a million in the 1950s to 400,000 in 1996 and 200,000 in 2006. Moreover voters are becoming less attached to their parties. Political parties have now become amongst the least trusted social institutions. Webb 2006 states that mass parties were the result of the collectivist age and hence it is only natural that the demise of collectivism should see the end of mass parties. This has resulted in the formation of a lot of smaller parties that have a more select appeal. For example: the Green party wooing environmentally conscious voters, the Libertarian party, and many more such parties. India has also witnessed the launch of more than four hundred new parties that are posing a challenge to the national parties like the Congress party and Bharatiya Janata Party. Even wikipedia lists more than 500 political parties in India. These parties position themselves to attract either a regional segment (like the Telugu Desam Party positioning itself as the party that will look after the interests of the people of the state of Andhra Pradesh), a particular caste (like the Bahujan Samaj Party attracting voters from the Bahujan Samaj castes), religion-based (Akali Dal wooing Sikh voters), occupation based (Bhartiya Kisan Mazdoor Party), issue based (Save Goa Front to protect the state of Goa from vested corrupt interests), and many other such niche/ segment parties. These parties have been outperforming national parties in their respective small segments and thereby all regional parties put together manage to win a large number of seats in the parliament. Ever since 1997, these regional parties have played a decisive role in the formation of the government at the

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centre by way of partnering with one another and with a national party to form a coalition government after establishing a majority in the 543 seat Indian parliament (the Lok Sabha). The objective of this study The objective of this study is to examine the extent to which parties containing the congress name (like Nationalist Trinamool Congress, Kerala Congress, Tamil Maanila Congress, Himachal Vikas Congress, and Nationalist Congress Party) share the brand image (set of associations) of the INC party in the mind of the voter/ consumer by virtue of the common congress name and thereby function like extensions of the congress party. Methodology The methodology adopted consisted of 2 stages: Stage 1 involved qualitative research and stage 2 was quantitative. In Stage 1 we first conducted 12 unstructured depth interviews spread across different parts of the country in 2004. These interviews were not recorded but provided insights on how to proceed further. In 2006, we conducted 2 separate focus groups of 6 respondents each. These respondents were carefully chosen voters who represented diverse demographic backgrounds. The proceedings of the focus groups were recorded and then content analysed to elicit different themes. The objective of the focus group discussion was to explore the image that voters perceived of the Congress party and other national and regional parties. This stage was followed by in depth non structured interviews of 6 respondents till we believed theoretical saturation was reached. Stage 1 resulted in identifying the various image dimensions that consumers held of Congress Party and the other national parties (i.e BJP, NCP, the ruling coalition UPA, and CPI). A total of 41 associations were identified. Some of these were bipolar (like Capitalistic outlook and socialistic outlook, communal versus secular) and hence we considered any one of the two bipolar dimensions. These were then reduced by eliminating dimensions that were either individual political party leader specific like L.K Advani, Sonia Gandhi, Indira Gandhi or Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This resulted in identifying 9 dimensions: secularism, socialist, leadership, growth, honest, involvement with Indias freedom struggle, educated leadership, progressive economic policy, and corruption. We also included two other dimensions (has the party been stable at the centre when in government; and whether it is a regional party) as a manipulation check measure. We anticipated that regional parties will be scored differently (will get a low score on both these dimensions) from national parties on these dimensions and hence share a low correlation with national parties. These 11 associations were of four types: 1) associations related to party ideology, 2) associations related to candidates and leaders of the party, and 3) associations related to the history of the party, and 4) the two associations included as a control to ascertain validity of data. Stage 2 consisted of developing and administering the questionnaire. We selected a total of 8 political parties - 5 national parties (Indian National Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, United Progressive Alliance, Nationalist Congress Party and Communist Party of India) and 3 regional parties that contained the word congress in their names (Arunachal Congress, Tamil Maanila Congress, and Congress of People). Respondents were asked to rate each of these 8 political parties on the 11 dimensions in the questionnaire on a Likert type scale of 5 from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The questionnaire was pilot tested, finalized and then administered to respondents all over the country.

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Sampling The sampling process aimed to select an audience that would be representative of the Indian electorate and hence we required a pan India sample. Since the research was not funded we had to rely on using emails as the data collection method in most cases and were able to personally administer the questionnaire only in a few cases. Therefore, the sample chosen were urban, internet (email) connected, Indian voters (adult Indian citizens who had voted in at least one election in the last 5 years) from different parts of the country. We identified prospective sample respondents in stage 1 of the research process and decided on a sample size of 100 respondents. Considering the low success rates of mail surveys, we targeted 160 respondents. Out of the 160 respondents, 78 responses (47.5%) were received of which 18 questionnaires were either incomplete or were randomly filled and hence had to be rejected, leaving us with a total of 60 (37.5%) responses for analysis. Data was entered in SPSS and analyzed. Findings We ran a correlation between the responses for each of the other seven parties and the Indian National Congress. The results of the correlation are presented in table 1. Q1 INC BJP UPA CPI NCP* AC* 1.00 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 1.00 Q10 1.00 Q11 1.00 * Thes e parti es conta in the word con gress in their name .

1.00 1.00

1.00 1.00

1.00 1.00 1.00

-0.19 0.15 -0.05 0.01 -0.12 0.29 0.06 -0.19 0.22 0.26 0.12 0.52 0.67 0.20 0.66 0.21 0.34 0.60 0.47 0.57 0.31 0.56 0.44 0.68 0.42 0.46 0.49 0.39 0.15 0.25 0.59 0.54 0.59 0.56 0.50 0.59 0.47 0.24 0.48 0.18 0.25 0.22 0.12 0.07 0.21 0.07 0.54

-0.38 0.91 0.11 0.76

-0.06 -0.01 0.47 0.20 0.39 0.44 0.32 0.42 0.21 -0.53 -0.29 -0.51

0.07 0.30 -0.12 0.22 0.03 0.34 0.10 0.30

TMC* 0.69 CP* 0.76

0.15 0.32 -0.13 0.27

The correlations were high between the four congress parties (NCP, AC, TMC and CP) with INC on 4 dimensions. On all these 4 dimensions the correlation between the INC and the other 3 parties (BJP, UPA and CPI) were much lower. These dimensions were how secular they are perceived to be (NCP 0.52, AC 0.67, TMC 0.69 and CP 0.76), how socialist were they perceived (NCP 0.6, AC 0.57, TMC 0.56 and CP 0.68), that they stood for growth and prosperity (NCP 0.25, AC 0.54, TMC 0.56 and CP 0.59), and how corrupt the party was perceived to be (NCP 0.59, AC 0.59, TMC 0.5 and CP 0.47). On the dimension of growth and prosperity NCP had a poor correlation with INC. Correlation on the able leadership dimension was moderate (from 0.31 to 0.47) amongst all parties and the INC with the exception of United Progressive coalition (0.66) and BJP (-0.05). The high correlation between UPA and INC is explained by the fact UPA is the ruling coalition of India in the current government and its party leadership position is occupied by leaders of the INC which is the largest partner in this coalition. Correlation was moderate

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between INC and other congress parties on their perception of the party being corrupt (NCP 0.39, AC 0.44, TMC 0.32 and CP 0.42). However these scores were much higher than the correlation scores between INC and the other parties (BJP -0.38, UPA 0.11, and CPI -0.01). On the lead Indias freedom struggle, contributes to economic reforms, and has educated leaders, the correlation was low amongst the INC and other congress parties. On the has educated leaders dimension, the correlation between INC and UPA (which share the same leaders), the correlation was a high 0.54. As anticipated, we found a negative correlation between the 3 regional congress parties (AC 0.53, TMC -0.29 and CP -0.51) with Indian National Congress on the regional image dimension whilst the 4 national parties had a positive correlation with INC (BJP 0.91, UPA 0.76, CPI 0.47, and NCP 0.21). Also, on the stability at the center dimension, as expected there was hardly any correlation between INC and the 4 congress parties (NCP 0.20, AC 0.12, TMC 0.10 and CP -0.13). This increases the validity of the data. Discussion The results show that all the 4 extended congress parties have shown a high correlation on 4 of the image dimensions of the Indian National Congress party, moderate correlation on 2 other dimensions and low to no correlation on 3 other dimensions. An analysis of the type of associations reveals that correlations were found to be high between the congress extensions and INC on 4 out of the 5 party ideology associations and moderate in the case of the fifth association. The correlation was low in the case of both the party history associations and moderate to low in the case of the candidate/ party leader associations. Thus we find that party ideology associations get transferred from Indian National Congress (the parent party brand) to breakaway factions and new parties containing the congress name. This could be due to the congress name having a residual stimulus value with which the voter associates some attributes and values which the voter has for the parent party (Reid 1988).

Recommendations and Conclusions National political parties across the world are experiencing a drop in their membership. These parties have been created decades to a century back and hence find it difficult to remain relevant to a large electorate akin to the problem faced by mass marketed products. The findings of this study suggest an avenue for these political parties to be able to segment the electorate and target varied segments through extensions of the mother political party brand.

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