When Anna Hazare settled down to fast at the Jantar Mantar back in April, he was still a man. A good man, even a great man to some, but a man nevertheless. He was the face of a movement that clearly had many leaders, who spoke passionately about corruption, each in his or her own voice. Most media pundits didn’t like him or his movement very much, but covered it because it was making news, and that’s their job. There was a media strategy, but of the rudimentary kind. The people streamed in, nevertheless, inspired less by Anna than the cause.
Cut to August, and it’s all Anna, all the time. The leadership of the movement is now dubbed “Team Anna” – and it is he who stands alone on the stage. The slogans themselves speak volumes – Anna is India; India is Anna – as do the headlines: Anna vs Govt. The entire anti-corruption cause reduced to a single four-letter word.
Over the course of 12 days, from the moment of his arrest to the first sip of coconut water, Anna the man became Anna the brand with a slogan – I am Anna – borrowed from an old Nike campaign (I am Tiger).
Some journalists tend to blame this sorry state of affairs on the movement itself. “Manufacturing a Mahatma” is the accusatory headline on the cover of Open Magazine’s latest issue. The article inside warns of “spin doctors” with a “carefully crafted plan,” of a movement whose image is being thought out, shaped, and projected by a battery of erstwhile media professionals.”Others slam the TV news channels and anchors posturing as unashamed boosters, and reducing the protests into a TRP-boosting Bollywood blockbuster with Anna playing the super-hero. All true, but the greater share of the blame belongs elsewhere. On a section of Hazare protesters who swelled the protest ranks in August and filled our television screens, eager to wave the flag and ham it up for the cameras.
“[A] rainbow coalition of supporters eats, drinks and makes protest before the camera,” is how Jay Mazoomdar described the scene at the maidan:
It’s carnivalesque, at first glance, with nearly everyone in sight clicking away—a few with DSLRs, many with point-and-shoot variants, the rest with mobile cams. The crowd is only occasionally in focus. Mostly it forms the backdrop as they shoot themselves, posing with the tricolour or with the more colourful characters around. Three boys and a girl from Sultanpur video-recorded themselves “being interviewed” by this lowly reporter. Being here, a part of this grand spectacle, is like being in the movies they’ve watched.
Mazoomdar’s description is, of course, skewed and self-selecting. But he rightly identifies a new type of protester. Less citizens than consumers, they were attracted not so much to the cause but its feel-good “experience.” A generation of Indians whose lives and minds have been shaped by 24X7 television and a market-driven pop culture. And they are the engine driving a new kind of telegenic politics that bodes ill for both the cause and for democracy.
The Age of the Brand
The modern-day brand was born when advertisers decided to no longer sell a product but evoke an emotion. Branding is the attempt to recreate that same relationship of trust, affection and commitment that people have with larger-than-life personalities, be it movie stars, athletes, or leaders – except with a company or a product.
Corporate success is marked by the ability to turn a trademark into a “lovemark,” as former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts likes to describe it, “You want lifetime customers, and you want them to have a love affair with you so that no matter what the competition do… they will stay with you and they will pay a premium.”
A supporter of veteran Indian social activist Anna Hazare holds a cap on which the words read "I am Anna". Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Sounds good, except the grand theories about neuro-marketing has never quite worked in practice, as columnist Bob Garfield points out: “Since time immemorial, advertising agencies have been trying to create emotional reactions to goods and services. But there is no magic string for the puppet; there is no Svengali spell; there’s no poison gas; there’s no magic wand…What they are doing mostly is failing again and again and again.”
Garfield’s reality check applies to the Anna critics as well. Like Roberts, they too assume that the protesters are dumb, passive consumers ready to spring into Pavlovian action when triggered by the right messaging. It’s a clumsy argument that misses a more complicated reality.
Marketing, however excellent, cannot and did not make us feel an emotional connection to Anna, but it did influence how a number of us acted it out. Hence, the desire to buy I am Anna t-shirts, umbrellas, and caps as though he were a movie star. The tendency to wave banners that read like advertising copy. The rush to offer up quotes to journalists that sound like filmi dialogue.
And movies like Rang de Basanti and Lage Raho Munnabhai played an undeniable role in priming the middle class audience for an Anna-style protest. “[Lage Raho] worked because Gandhi and the Gandhian way was contemporized. And suddenly, here’s the play-out of a script that all of us wanted to see in real life. A modern-day Gandhi was waiting to happen,” says brand guru Pratap Suthan. The movies succeeded because they tapped into a popular yearning for change, but they also offered a ready-made script for Hazare supporters of the urban, middle class kind.We now live in a market-driven world where everyone is trying to can, reproduce evoke every possible human emotion to sell stuff, be it media channels, advertisers, or movie producers. Nothing is sacred, in a sense. Everything becomes either a commodity or a product attribute, blurring the line between what is real and what is commercial. It’s the reason why even genuine protest soon begins to look like a Bollywood melodrama. And an advertising jingle for Hero Honda works just as well as its anthem.
Much of this sounds harmless, but here’s the problem: the style soon starts to dominate the substance, leaching it of complexity and meaning. And it’s how Anna became a brand and the anti-corruption movement a brand experience – at least to the most vocal and visible middle class supporters who dominated the TV screen.
In less than ten days, we went from being a nation outraged at corruption (and our government) to a nation in search of a messiah. A number of us became addicted to the feel-good high offered by the Hazare show unfolding in the streets. We are the people, hear us roar. To these supporters, the protests became less about the cause or even the man than how it/he made them feel: powerful, righteous, and visible. As all good branding gurus know, it’s not about the product but how the brand makes you feel. Well, the protests made a lot of us feel pretty darn good.
The perils of brand-driven politics
A wildly successful brand may be great for a company but not so much for a political leader or democracy. And herein lies the rub in consumerist politics.
Take, for instance, Barack Obama who beat out Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers’ top annual award in 2008 as Marketer of the Year. He’d become a brand long before he entered the White House, a brand that evoked hope and optimism. Over the past three years, he’s stayed fairly close to his campaign platform, even delivering a number of victories (say, hunting down Osama). And yet none of it matters because he couldn’t sustain the brand experience promised by that dizzying slogan, ‘Yes We Can.’
When leaders become brands, it undermines their ability to lead or govern. They become instead one-concept wonders much like Nike (Freedom) or Airtel (Youth) who have to deliver on their brand promise. And it’s the reason why Anna will likely never be a second Mahatma.
Gandhi belonged to the Age of the Icon, part of a long lineage of saints, kings, and political leaders. An era when branding was something you inflicted on cattle. These were large-than-life figures who were distant yet admired, respected, even adored. Political success made Gandhi an Icon, it has turned Anna in 2011 into a Brand. They seem like the same thing, except not quite.
A worker stitches Gandhi caps with the words "I am Anna" at a factory in the old quarters of Delhi. Parivartan Sharma/Reuters
For starters, one is allowed to be human and the other is not. Gandhi could be difficult, eccentric, even take unpopular positions, and still be loved. In other words, he could still remain a leader in every sense of the word. Hazare, on the other hand, runs the danger of being derailed by any act that contradicts the Brand Anna image. His brand loyalists have little patience for human contradiction or weakness.
Both inspire absolute trust, commitment and loyalty, but Gandhi could demand sacrifice. Most Indians may not have even met the Mahatma but they were willing to march on the streets, burn British-made clothes, and even court arrest for him – even if they didn’t entirely understand the nuances of British law. Anna, on the other hand, didn’t even ask his supporters to fast. It’s easy enough to protest corruption with a sandwich in one hand and the flag in the other. To be a true leader in the future, Anna will have to demand that people do more than just show up.
There are many lessons to be learnt from the Hazare protests. But at least one of them ought to warn of the perils of this new consumerist version of politics. The protests were far more significant that the media-manufactured spectacle offered up on television – but that spectacle also contains the seeds of its possible demise. Beware our middle class fantasies for they may kill the cause. Change is not a four-letter word that spells Anna.
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