Advertising guru & theatre personality
It will seem like heresy if I say that Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest marketing guru who ever lived, but it’s true. It is from Gandhiji that I learned that if the media is not on your side, you can use word of mouth to swing public opinion in your favour. In his day, the British controlled all newspapers, radios and newsreels. There was no television, and certainly no internet. And they wouldn’t publish anything about Gandhi unless it was negative.
So he had to rely on staging events. Maybe he did it subconsciously. But as far as I am concerned, he was one of the greatest Event Marketing people the world has ever seen. I think even Martin Luther King Junior learned a lot from him and his Million Man March on Washington, to bring the spotlight on denial of civil rights to the Negros in America, owes a lot to Gandhiji’s Dandi salt march. L. K. Advani, I am sure, was inspired by this event to stage his Rath Yatra. It was this event (Dandi March), which really galvanised India into realising that the British were cruel taskmasters for imposing the draconian salt tax.
Gandhiji decided to defy it, but he did not do it instantly. He let it all build up, and in that, he was the master of Hitchcockian suspense. He sent out word that on a certain day, he would be picking up a handful of salt on the deserted beach at Dandi. And he let this message percolate.
His second brilliant innovation was interactivity. He could easily have taken a train to Dandi, walked a few furlongs and got to the beach. Instead, he announced that he would start from Sabarmati Ashram and walk his way through. This meant that it would take him several days to reach Dandi. This astute strategy was designed to spread word of mouth to all the surrounding villages as he walked through them. And as he walked from village to village, word spread that Gandhiji was approaching, “Mahatma aa rahe hain. Mahatma aa rahe hain.” And as Gandhiji walked through each village, most of the villagers would join in the march. This ultimately transformed an act of defiance by an individual into a people’s participatory movement.
Then the press got wind of it, and reporters and photographers came from all over India and abroad to see who this frail man was, ready to defy the might of the British Empire. Pretty soon, the entire country was talking about Gandhiji and his padayatra. The suspense was building up. Would he reach Dandi? Or would the British prevent him from getting to the beach. When he picked up a fistful of salt from the beach at the seaside town of Dandi, foreign media who had come to hear of his march were there to photograph and transmit to the world outside India. This was probably the first time that an event was successfully used in India.
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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2011.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
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