Fake It Till You Make It
As the digital world continues to expand, brands world-wide are left with one daunting task: to integrate digital and traditional medium with no compromise on the success of marketing.
This was more worrisome for marketers and advertisers in the Indian market considering various reasons such as internet penetration, digital education and awareness and digital as the first preference or choice of people to consume the content.
While firms, brands and agencies had a difficult time in figuring out and deriving the rightmix of media pie, it was the white khadi kurta-payjama clad clan that showed us the way.
Yes, I am indeed talking about our politicians.
Usually considered as laggards, political parties and politicians turned out to be the early adopters of this technology revolution. And this helped them solve two critical aspects of reaching out to their target audience – win their hearts and grab the votes too: How do I change public sentiment? How do I get people to think better about me?
The trick was simple! Replicate the traditional medium model onto the digital world, with the nitty-gritties of the medium taken care of. Remember how we always hear about these political rallies attended by a swarm of people? Depending on your source of news, these people are either paid to attend these rallies or are genuine volunteers who know and believe in the party ideology.
Their mantra is to be the talk of the town, be the trend and for this they have one uncomplicated rule: Fake it till you make it! It is okay for them to not fully understand the implications of the ideologies and philosophies but it is important for them to propagate it nonetheless.
Replicate this model in social media. Create an army of social media friendly (may be not savvy) people in your party and a means to alert them (via SMS, WhatsApp or Email) with what you want to trend. Voila! Your job is done. But how do these people get paid? Well, the modes are pretty much the same. Some get money; some get favour and the best ones get to go up the ranks faster in the party than anyone else.
The trend of course started with AAP and Modi, but seems to be prevalent across parties now. And with every state election, it is percolating further. Next up – Bihar!
Now that Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad have joined forces in the offline world, it would be interesting to see how this pairing affects the online world. Lalu’s rustic style or Nitish’s balanced approach – which of these do you think would take the social world by storm? Would ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ concept work in an election where chaos is the new order?
Do let me know your thoughts in the comment box below! 🙂
