If you look at it in a cold-blooded clinical manner, all the debate over the waxing or the waning of Brand Modi is often akin to childish gossip.
The fact is, no brand, no matter how powerful or successful, is infallible. Besides, there will always be occasions when other competing brands appear more attractive for a variety of reasons.
If you are in the world of corporate gladiators, the metric to measure the long-term power and success of a brand is quite simple: has the market share of your brand improved over the years compared to that of your rivals?
If market share, despite occasional drops, has been consistently improving over the years, the brand is powerful and successful. If market share declines over the years despite ashes of a rise, the brand is in trouble – and needs a makeover. The rules and metric are the same when you are a gladiator in the political arena. Just replace the term market share with vote share.
Looking at it that way, the resilience of Brand Modi is an astonishing phenomenon in modern politics.
Some Misses, Many Lessons
Let’s look at instances when Brand Modi has seemingly taken a hit in elections. The first dent was in 2015, when the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Janata Dal (United), Congress, and Left alliance swept the Bihar Assembly elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s vote share then was 24.4 percent. The JD(U) once again allied with the BJP during the 2020 state Assembly elections. The BJP contested on fewer seats but managed a vote share of nearly 20 percent.
In 2018 in Karnataka, Brand Modi was in trouble again as the BJP failed to secure a full majority in the Assembly elections. The BJP's vote share was about 36 percent. In 2023, the BJP lost badly, but its vote share was intact.
Brand Modi took another big hit in 2018 when the BJP lost Assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. The BJP vote share in these states was 38 percent, 41 percent, and 33 percent, respectively.
The resilience of a successful brand is its ability to bounce back and regain the market share (in this case, vote share).
In the 2023 Assembly elections, the BJP did precisely that in the three states. During this round, the BJP vote shares in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh were 42 percent, 49 percent, and 46 percent respectively.
Even in battles that a powerful and successful brand loses, the market share tends to go up. The BJP lost West Bengal quite badly to Mamata Banerjee, who led the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the 2021 Assembly elections. Yet, its vote share increased from 10 percent in 2016 to 38 percent in 2021.
Arvind Kejriwal dealt a second successive blow to Brand Modi by sweeping the Delhi Assembly elections yet again in 2020. The BJP won a mere eight seats in an Assembly of 70. But its vote share improved by about five percentage points to 38 percent. Come 2025 and the BJP vote share zoomed to 47 percent – and the party finally won Delhi. That is how long-distance thoroughbreds and powerful brands operate.
What Detergents Can Tell Us About Brand Modi, Kejriwal
Some more corporate parallels can be drawn from these numbers. Many decades ago, an upstart brand called Nirma scared the daylights out of market leader Surf in the detergents market, by offering value for money. It’s a cute and romantic story no doubt, and a tribute to the entrepreneurial skills of Karsanbhai Patel, the founder of the brand.
For some time, Nirma became a middle-class favorite. But in the long run, it is Surf that has endured.
One can compare Nirma and Surf with Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi, respectively. What worked for Surf is what works for Modi and the BJP: patience, long-term planning, organisational strength, the hard yards of slog and of course, financial resources.
In terms of understanding the market, Modi knows exactly what his voters are thinking, and exactly how they will react to a certain statement or incident. He remains the master communicator – be it inside the parliament or outside in a rally.
He knows what to say and when. It is not without reason that he still commands his audience better than everyone else. Making a powerful variation of product range within the same company is a proven strategy. People call him totalitarian, but the fact is that the next range of leadership groomed by the RSS has only helped to retain the charismatic effect of Brand Modi.
The fact is that the BJP won Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi (and Jammu, to be precise) by taking Brand Modi away from the campaign and shielding it from overexposure. The Opposition was unable to compete even with the secondary brands coming from the same factory.
Hero vs Bajaj, BJP vs Congress
If one sticks to corporate analogies, we can use yet another one to compare the BJP with the Congress. In 1984, when a Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress stormed into a landslide victory, Bajaj had a complete stranglehold over the two-wheeler market.
The BJP, like Hero MotoCorp, was a marginal player that was often treated disdainfully and derisively. But look where things are now: in 2024, Hero sold 6 million two wheelers while Bajaj sold 3 million. Similarly, in 2024, the vote share of BJP was nearly double than that of the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections.
Contrary to what some analysts said, Bajaj, like the Congress, has not drifted into the sunset of oblivion. It is very much around, and it will remain. But its glory days of dominant market/vote share are history, and it will remain a distant runner-up in the foreseeable future as things stand today.
The reason why that is predicted is because of the differences between Brand Modi and Brand Rahul (Gandhi). Nonstop hard work to improve the product is something which defines the character of Brand Modi. He is working even when he is not working.
Compare that to the NGO-style vacation-taking working philosophy of Brand Rahul and you will understand the difference. Modi has made his ancillary products also working in the same mode, ranging from Amit Shah to Yogi Adityanath to Shivraj Singh Chouhan to Himanta Biswa Sarma to Devendra Fadnavis, and everyone in between. Compare this column of the next-generation BJP leaders to the top 10 leaders of Congress. See the difference?
Last but not the least, Modi has the ability to go back to the drawing board and reset the machine the moment something goes wrong.
Remember JP Nadda saying, “We don’t need RSS anymore…” and the fallout that followed in a few states, in the 2024 Lok Sabha election?
It was akin to an FMCG product saying we don’t need the distribution agency; it simply backfired. Modi immediately understood the issue and went back to the basics of his product distribution agency: the organisational strength of RSS. The results are for everyone to see.
For the moment, it is the incredible resilience of Brand Modi that stands out.
(Yashwant Deshmukh and Sutanu Guru work with the CVoter Foundation. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the authors' own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)