New Product Development Approach to Political Party Development in India: Study of Aam Aadmi Party

Abstract

In the backdrop of India’s rising prominence in BRICS, understanding of its political environment, electoral competition, constituent parties with their political ideologies contesting to form government, attracts immense interest from the researchers in political science, political marketing and public policy. While literatures in political marketing are more than two decades (Harrop 1990, Gronroos 1990, Henneberg 1998, Kotler 1999, O’Shaughnessy 2001, Marshment 2001) mostly carried out in developed democratic systems USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand, India as a post transition democracy Heller (2000) received relatively less attention. The article has been conceptualized in the context of 2014 Indian general elections Loksabha 2014 (LS2014) as an attempt to study application of political marketing principles in a cross cultural democracy. The authors have probed the emergence of new political party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) riding on the success of Janlokpal (civil society movement), the marketing approach used by AAP, essentially positioning and branding strategies, during the national elections and party institutionalization. Research strategy followed secondary research of published data (Yin 2009) for examining the new party creation from a marketing perspective.