New Delhi, Sep 17 From a humble beginning in Gujarat’s Vadnagar to a ‘brand’ -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s evolution as a leader has been discussed and analysed on various platforms.
Today, ‘Brand Modi’ has achieved a near-mythical stature since the Bharatiya Janata Party achieved a monumental feat in 2014, thanks to the ‘Modi-wave’.
In his case, “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind”, as was earlier stated by the celebrated brand designer, Walter Landor.
Here, the product was made through clever election campaigning, political advertising, and unique and innovative use of social media, among others.
In 2018, in a paper at the Ahmedabad-based business school MICA, a scholar wrote ‘An Exploration Of The Development Of A Political Brand Image For A Political Party And Leader: A case of the BJP And Narendra Modi’.
The thesis was undertaken through systematic research -- mapping BJP’s digital and offline marketing tactics, social media objectives, segmentation strategies, and campaign case-studies.
It concluded that Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s case shows how disciplined narrative design, symbolic repetition, and professionalized marketing practices can construct a resilient political brand that shapes voter perception, institutional practice, and international image.
The brand was created more through people connect, emotive renditions, and leading by example.
Some initiatives and programmes like “Main Bhi Chowkidar”, “Mann Ki Baat”, together with regular public and media appearances, among others, connected him with millions of Indians, which eventually helped build the brand.
It all combined to influence the ideas of the people.
And that led to what the American entrepreneur Scott Cook had described in a different context, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is -- it is what consumers tell each other it is.”
According to a paper from a research scholar of the Delhi School of Management, Delhi Technological University, “Modi’s campaign is overseen more effectively than other contenders to design, impart, and make the development.”
Another study from Gujarat’s MICA on ‘Brand Modi: How India Clicked an Icon’ argued the brand’s resilience derived from embedding leader symbols into state activity and institutional rituals, turning governance acts into branding moments.
Official programmes, high-visibility inaugurations and international diplomacy doubled as reputational assets, reinforcing the leader's brand beyond campaigning seasons, it added.
But this success is scripted more by always evolving, always adjusting, taking each issue as it were, not carrying the past to the present, or beyond. As the marketing guru, Rishad Tobaccowala, once famously said, “The future will not fit the containers of the past.”
He wrote in his widely-followed blog in 2021, “From organisational structure to how markets are organised, the existing ways of doing business have been optimised on what has come before. The challenge for most of us is to realize that the future refuses to be contained in the containers of the past, whether it be media, money, markets, or mindsets.”
Seen through Tobaccowala’s lens, Modi is both a re-maker and a test case.
He builds new containers to house emergent political, technological, and diplomatic futures, demonstrating the payoff of visionary packaging. He also shows the hazards when speed and personalization try to substitute for systemic capacity and plural institutional redesign.
The maxim’s core prescription -- design containers that actually fit the future rather than forcing the future into familiar moulds -- resonates strongly with both the successes and the limits of the Modi era.
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