Overcoming brand fatigue to settle scores is the new political strategy

In business and advertising parlance, there is something called ‘brand fatigue’. By definition, brand fatigue is caused by excessive repetition—and if your customer repeatedly sees the same messages in the same way, your brand can soon fade into the background. A school of thought names it as an effect of brand bombardment. A sign that brand fatigue has set in is when you start to notice your engagement rates slowly dropping the further into a campaign you get. One great way of preventing brand fatigue is to look into the past performance of your marketing channels and promotional tactics to identify where engagement rates for previous campaigns began to lag. It's when consumers become overexposed to a brand's messaging, leading to disinterest and a weakening of brand loyalty.

Today, consumers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of marketing messages they encounter daily, leading them to actively avoid brands due to fatigue. There are too many similar brands out there with hardly any distinction among them. The big brands have had similar messaging styles for a long time, making it repetitive. This is brand fatigue.Now put this entire thing in the political context. Lest one forgets, many prominent parties now adopt a somewhat corporate styleor follow some of the business principles.

Take for instance, the case of Trinamul Congress or its chief Mamata Banerjee, who remains a strong brand in Bengal and national politics, which is often associated with protests, agitations, streetfights,hullabaloo, political mudslinging and so on. The same message has been going to the electorate time and again, over the years. And this brand image has yielded dividends to her and her party, especially after 2011.In the recently concluded general election also, her party scored a resounding victory over the BJP, in terms of increasing its tally from 22 to 29. But hang on; the victory has not been without pain points and words of caution. Dips in support bases were noticed in several corporation, municipal areas and city suburbs, understandably causing some headaches.

With the Legislative Assembly elections due in less than two years (early 2026), the party’s political managers thought it wise to get rid of the ‘brand fatigue’ and go for a complete image makeover. The recently initiated hawker eviction drive from the footpaths, forming a taskforce to bring down and monitor surging prices across vegetable and meat markets, naming and shaming of a section of the party leadership publicly for lackadaisical attitude and wrong doings- are all cases in point. Many political observers say that Mamata happens to be a front bencher student of her political bête noire, the Communist Party, which, on its part, replaced Jyoti Basu with a new brand labelled ‘Brand Buddha’, as a measure of getting over brand fatigue. Mamata is possibly doing the same tricks, albeit in a new avatar. We will have to see whether her brand strategies have fetchedany political gains for her and the Trinamul Congress.