I recently came across news that the Congress party is considering a shift in its electoral strategy, moving towards creating seat-wise manifestos instead of a single, monolithic national document (Hindustan Times). The idea is to tailor promises and address issues that are hyper-local and specific to the concerns of each constituency. While this is being presented as a novel grassroots approach, I couldn't help but feel a profound sense of déjà vu.
This "new" strategy is, in essence, the very first principle of marketing: know your customer. It’s the art of market segmentation, a concept I was writing and thinking about decades ago. Back in 2004, I compiled extensive notes on marketing, emphasizing the need to move beyond generic messaging and create detailed profiles to understand specific needs (Marketing General). The goal was always to stop seeing the market as a uniform mass and instead view it as a collection of distinct groups, each with its own unique desires and pain points.
Seeing this principle now being adopted in the political arena is fascinating. It’s a validation of an idea I've long held: that effective communication, whether in business or governance, must be personal and specific. A farmer in rural Maharashtra faces a different set of challenges than a software engineer in Bengaluru or a fisherman in Kerala. A single, sweeping national manifesto, by its very nature, will always feel distant and irrelevant to many.
The core idea I want to convey is this — I had brought up this very thought on the topic years ago. In my notes on creating 'Graphical Profiles,' the objective was to visualize and understand different segments of a population. I had already predicted that a one-size-fits-all approach was becoming obsolete, and I had even proposed a more granular, data-driven solution at the time. Now, seeing how political strategy is evolving, it's striking how relevant that earlier insight still is. Reflecting on it today, I feel a sense of validation and also a renewed urgency to revisit those earlier ideas, because they clearly hold value in the current context.
Of course, technology is the great enabler here. What was once a theoretical marketing exercise can now be executed on a national scale through data mining and analytics. It reminds me of my correspondence with my associate Rohini about using data mining tools to analyze job markets. Political parties are now data companies, mining their constituencies for votes by identifying localized grievances and aspirations.
But this raises a critical question: Does this hyper-localization lead to more accountable governance, or does it simply perfect the art of political pandering? Will it empower local communities by giving them a direct voice, or will it fragment national discourse into a thousand self-interested pieces? The tool is powerful, but its impact depends entirely on the intent of the user.
Ultimately, this shift is inevitable. The age of mass communication is over. Whether for selling a product or winning an election, the future belongs to those who can speak to the individual. The challenge for our political class is to use this newfound precision not just to win power, but to genuinely understand and solve the real, diverse problems of the people they seek to represent.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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