Case Study: AAPs success as a

Challenger Brand par excellence

AAM AADMI Partys Success Story

Brand
Identity
& Symbolism
Disruptive

Nature of
Success & its
Future

Innovations
for Impact
Party-Brand
Vision
Mission
Values
Differentiators

Opening up
Mind Space

Campaign
Management
low budget,
high impact

Challenger
Thinking
Conversion
Strategy
Audiences &
Messages

Brand Identity
The Name: Arrogates the common man of India to the party
Acronym AAP is a mark of respect to the common man
Takes the space away from the Congress who have so
far presumed to speak for the masses of India

The Symbol: Broom connotes cleaning up

- is also a simple, frugal and practical tool
fit for the purpose

The Cap:

The Gandhi cap representing the honesty,

integrity and spirit of serving the nation that the
Independence Era political leaders had

Brand Colors: Colors of the national flag connoting

patriotism

BRAND DEFINITION
Vision: A corruption free India

Mission: A political party of principles wanting to really help/serve the people of India. Offer the people of India an alternative politics, a different
experience of participative democracy and clean governance
Values: Integrity, transparency, commitment to the greater good-whats good for the people, performance vs. power orientation doing good work
and getting results that benefit the people
Brand Essence: Clean & Transparent Governance

Target Audience: Politically involved and concerned citizens of India who are searching for an
alternative to the traditional political parties w.r.t corruption, delivery of services to citizens
and good governance
Competitive Frame of Reference: Traditional parties like Congress, BJP & others who are
corrupt, sans values & principles and whose leaders are focused on amassing power, pelf and
wealth for themselves to the detriment of the people of India

Differentiator Contesting Elections with

integrity

Differentiator: Accessibility & Grass-roots

people connection

Transparency & clean politics (anticorruption)

- Large volunteer force, not just party

members

- Campaign & party finances are properly

declared and accounted for

- Mohalla level meetings to identify the

problems and grievances of the people

- Set a cap on campaign spending, within the

limits prescribed by the Election Commission

- Mass mobilization through people to

people campaigning/w-o-m

- Field only trustworthy candidates drawn

from the people, people with a real
commitment to serve their constituency

- Leaders who interact directly and closely

with the public and citizenry

Brand Personality/Archetype
Crusader for good
Challenger / disruptor of status quo
Courage of conviction willing to fight hard
and long for principles
Sincere, principled

Differentiators: Constructive Opposition /

Effective Governance

???? TBD

Disruptive Innovations challenging & disproving the

established order & norms
Election Campaigning:
Candidate selection political novices with a keen desire to serve the people of
their constituency, selected on merit with no considerations of
class/caste/religion/genderdisproving received wisdom that vote catchers,
even if they have criminal records are a necessary evil
Setting a cap to the campaign budget and staying within the samedisproving
the received wisdom that it is money power and voter bribing with goodies that
wins elections
Public donations accounted for donor provided with receipts and data
recorded on the website, transparent and available to be seen by alldisproving
the raison detre of established best practice - using unaccounted and
undeclared cash for election funding

Opening up public mind space towards AAP as a

serious contender: Bold moves of Challenger thinking
Arvind Kejriwal decides to contest against Sheila Dixit in her New Delhi
constituency
A symbolic throwing down of the gauntlet
Demonstrates courage and risk taking
A victory for AK and AAP signals the end of politics as usual and presents AAP
as the force to reckon with

Conversion Strategy: Tailored messaging to audiences

Listening to the people & understanding their needs
Door-to-door interviews with people in all 70 constituencies in Delhi, across the spectrum
to understand and list their problems & grievances
Mohalla meetings in all constituencies

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/aap-goes-doortodoor-for-71
unique-manifestos/article5256570.ece

Tailored messaging Specific Manifestos for each of the 70 constituencies based on mohalla / council meetings held there to identify peoples needs
and problems at the ground level

Campaign Communication Mix: Surprisingly cost-effective options and

ongoing orchestration: Low Budget/High Impact
AAP said they would cap their campaign budget at Rs.20 CR and eventually spent Rs. 18.5 CR
By all estimates, their budget was a fifth or sixth of that of the BJP or Congress. It was within the Election
Commissions prescribed limits.
They used a huge mix of elements very well the core of the campaigning strength came from the volunteers
and smart use of technology and the digital medium.
Media Coverage / PR:

Opinion polls were regularly conducted and their results publicized

Arvind Kejriwal held fasts in certain areas to draw attention to the high prices of electricity, difficulty of
obtaining drinking water etc
Digital and social media:
Email, Face book and Twitter were used extensively
Volunteer Strength (estimated at between 10-15,000) working on the ground in Delhi:

Human chains of volunteers wore printed t-shirts and placards and travelled through the Delhi Metro.
People also placed placards in their home windows, held banners up on bridges instead of paying for
hoarding space

Volunteers wore the AAP cap wherever they went, carrying the brand message

Volunteers walked through bastis and slum areas pitching slogans and distributing leaflets
Conventional Media:

Radio: Lesser cost medium for continuous and changing messages; in-house production for rapidly
adapting and changing messages at lesser cost of production

Auto-rickshaw backs: Low cost visibility that also reinforced subtly (medium as message) that AAP is for the
aam aadmi

Thousands of copies of constituency level manifestos were printed and distributed

Campaign Communication Mix: Surprisingly cost-effective

options and ongoing orchestration

Campaign Communication Mix: Surprisingly cost-effective

options and ongoing orchestration

Volunteer Organization Design

Prof. Phaneesh Puranam Prof. Strategy & Organization Design at INSEAD

As I researched the story behind their success, it became apparent that the AAP was using the same
sort of organizational techniques that have made Wikipedia and Linux successful; the creation of a
system that attracts valuable but voluntary (i.e. free to the organization) contributions from a large
number of people distributed in different locations, of the right kind and at the right time required. Such
systems do not emerge spontaneously, full formed, but have to be crafted.

The AAP, however, was borne out of a popular anti-corruption social movement in India, and many of
those involved in the movement became highly motivated AAP volunteers (estimates suggest between
ten to fifteen thousand of them were on the ground in Delhi). These volunteers included students,
software engineers, management consultants, bankers and media specialists. They were there because
they perceived the AAP to be actually living up to its ideals of a transparent and corruption free society,
through the way in which it raised funds and selected candidates. They contributed not only funds and
effort, but also specialist skills and a slew of clever but cheap campaigning ideas.

The critical point here is the variety of ways in which volunteers could choose to contribute,
irrespective of their financial strength, skills, free time and even location. What the AAP seems to have
clearly understood is that when people choose how to contribute voluntarily to an organisation, then
many of the traditional costs of organising -- selecting, monitoring, motivating, rewarding -- disappear.

A clearly stated inspiring idea, combined with a smartly designed structure that allows volunteers to
choose from a menu of ways in which to contribute, led to an extremely effective and cheap campaign.
You can think of this as a story about crowdsourcing, frugal innovation, social entrepreneurship,
or indeed all of the above. I like to think of it as leveraging the power of integrity through intelligent
(organisational) design.

The Future for AAP

AAPs Success Record

The AAP's electoral debut is stunning. Total vote tally:

AAP 28, BJP 31, Congress - 8
It won 30 per cent of Delhi's vote within a year of its birth.
It relegated the Congress to third place, eating away 15 per cent of its vote.
The AAP also chipped away roughly three per cent of the BJP's vote, and reduced
the BSP, which held great promise, with 14 per cent of Delhi's vote in 2008, to
insignificance.
With less money than the Congress or the BJP, and driven by volunteer energy, the
AAP has stolen the thunder from an otherwise quite impressive BJP performance.
It has rattled the Congress and planted doubts in the BJP's mind, making it unsure of
what lies ahead.

Growth & Expansion of its Footprint

and franchise across the country

Political pundits believe that the AAPs version of politics and its ideology is restricted to urban
centers or to urban/semi-urban areas around NCR
AAP will find it difficult to find support and voters in rural areas and in other regions where
the political formations are different (e.g. Tamil Nadu)
AAP will find it difficult to scale up its model of public participation, transparent funding etc
rapidly, in time for the 2014 elections
The AAP is confident however, that it will be successful outside NCR, at least in a few states
Haryana, UP and Maharashtra, to begin with
Prof. Ashutosh Varshney, however, makes an optimistic prognosis for AAP:
Moving forward, the AAP's quick spread to India's urban parliamentary constituencies (94
in all) and semi-urban constituencies (122) simply cannot be ruled out.
Penetrating rural constituencies (327) beyond those that exist in the larger
neighbourhood of Delhi, especially Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh by May 2014 will
be a tall order.
If the AAP gets 30-40 seats in 2014, mostly from urban India, it will be the third largest
party in Parliament.
If it gets 15-25 seats, it will still be a force like the BSP, SP, JDU, TMC, DMK, AIADMK or BJD
in Parliament.
This may or may not come true in May 2014, but it remains a remarkable prospect.

How should AAP as a party and as a Brand?

- retain its ideological appeal
- build greater credibility with the public
- transform itself into a democratically governed institution
As it grows and moves from being a challenger party or a
movement for change into a party in power?

Decoding AAPs DNA & Promise to Citizens

How can AAP be classified & categorized and its meaning understood?

Drawing from historic precedents, political pundits draw the following analogies:
Ashutosh Varshney writes in the Indian Express that there are only three comparable instances in postIndependence history of such a stunning debut for a new political party: Janata Party in 1977, TDP in Andhra
Pradesh and AGP in Assam in the 1980s. He is looking at AAP as an electoral insurgency.

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar in his Swaminomics column for the Times of India latches on to AAP as an
anti-corruption movement. So he compares the rise of AAP to Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s and V P
Singh in the 1980s. The first toppled Indira Gandhi. The second unseated her son.

S L Rao focuses on how AAP grew in strength its volunteer base, its use of social media, its strategy of
collecting small donations from the many. In his op-ed in The Telegraph he compares it to the first Obama
campaign.

The problem is AAP does not fit comfortably into any of its political forbears because as Rao writes unlike
most parties in India, it is not based on inherited power, wealth, community, caste or language, but on the
principle of integrity. Kejriwal has more of a mouse-that-roared persona instead of a celluloid God-on-earth
like N T Rama Rao. Varshney points out that unlike AGP, AAP was not born out of a student movement. It has
nothing to do with regional pride which has been the usual genesis of smaller parties in India from DMK to
Trinamool to the Samajwadi Party. Though the Lokpal movement triggered the formation of AAP, the political
party, it was nothing as cataclysmic as the imposition of Emergency.
Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/politics/problem-of-aap-why-kejriwal-is-more-of-a-mouse-thatroared-1302207.html?utm_source=ref_article

Decoding AAPs DNA & Promise to Citizens

How can AAP be classified & categorized and its meaning understood?

It is trying, writes Varshney, to practise what may be called the politics of citizenship. That
means democratic deepening, deliberative democracy, governance, accountability, citizen
politics versus clientelistic politics. Or on the flip side, its tapping into an anger and frustration
with the system. As Kejriwal puts it: Those whose salary comes from our money don't listen to
us. We cannot do anything against government doctors, teachers, fair-price shopkeepers, or
policemen.

As Varshney writes it is the promise of a citizen-friendly and corruption-free state, that has
begun to excite the imagination of urban India. The AAP threatens to undermine politics as it is
practised.
Writes Aiyar. Modi offers a vision of change, but within the existing political framework. The
AAP offers radical change outside the existing framework.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/politics/problem-of-aap-why-kejriwal-is-more-of-amouse-that-roared-1302207.html?utm_source=ref_article

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/politics-as-unusual/1210646/0
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/entry/aap-can-scale-up-like-jp-vp-singhmovements

AAPs has opened up a new ideological space in the culture of

Indias Democracy which it must expand and retain to build credibility as party
of clean governance that is anti-corruption
18

Qualifications

IDENTITY

POLITICS

Rule by members of ones own caste / religion

Party members who run for office must

MERITOCRATIC
ACHIEVEMENT

have the qualifications

for in-group gains

Transparent screening & selection

Caste/religious wars & riots

Must have a desire to serve the people

Clan loyalty is paramount

And be accountable for performance

THE CULTURE OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY

Authoritarian
Power/Clientelistic
& Patronage
Politics

Politician is a public servant,

Political families rise

who governs, not a Ruler who rules

Power is transferred within families

DYNASTIC
INHERITANCE

People Power /
Politics of
Citizenship

The common people must benefit, irrespective

of their caste, clan, religious affiliations SPIRIT OF PUBLIC
SERVICE FOR ALL

Inheritance over competence

Attitude

Space Doctors Ltd 2008

The AAP Brand must distribute its messages

and communication across performative & democratic elements
rather than just the leaders and promises

Results &
Performance

Local
Leaders

Ideology,
Vision &
Senior
Leadership
The Party
Members
&
Volunteers

Policies &
Manifesto
Democratic
Practices

Millward Browns Brand Growth Model

Although AAP is not a commercial, for-profit enterprise, some elements of this model
could serve as a good guidepost for AAP as it grows, expands and builds
itself as a political institution