The battle is over. This is the best time to look back, analyse and learn from hindsight. All analyses of Election 2006 will have a political focus. There obviously can be other points of view from which this election and its results can be examined. Many for example believe that electioneering is no different from marketing of other consumer products. Both attempt to engineer perceptions to evoke a specific behaviour. More importantly, both have brands, their positioning and promises.

As we discussed a few weeks back in Ad Lib, the Left Front has created a brand variant. The main brand continued to focus on the rural electorate. For you and me, the new Brand Buddha was created. It is adorned by flyovers and shopping malls, Sector V and multiplexes. The brand proposition at one level was the same. They were both selling hope. What was intelligently tweaked was the differential translation of hope for the two constituencies.

Targeting the extremes of a market with the same brand name is not very common even in the world of soaps and shampoos. Given the dissimilarity of targets in such situations the manifestations of the brand need to be very different. That entails a risk. Contamination could tax the consumer trust on the brand. If that affects the mother brand then all hell could break loose.

That is what makes the similarity with Lifebuoy interesting. Remember the original Lifebuoy ? a hexagonal cake of maroon red colour with a very plebeian appearance. It is one of the largest selling soaps in the country. The consumer base is very male, very downmarket and traditional. Its core promise is health. As its jingle says: health is wherever Lifebuoy is.

A few years back Hindustan Lever, much like the Left Front in Bengal, decided to exploit this huge property of Lifebuoy in an urban upmarket environment. Lifebuoy Plus was launched. The target group was the early teen, female and contemporary. It had the original health platform as the core value. For the new target health was given an anti-pimple incarnation.

The similarity of the Lifebuoy strategy with the recent game plan of the Left Front is striking. The health platform is replaced by the hope platform. Everything else is virtually the same. Left Front?s Lifebuoy Plus is Brand Buddha. What has been the end result? The original Lifebuoy, like the previous six times, has won handsomely. Most have attributed the success of Lifebuoy to Lifebuoy Plus, or in other words the resounding victory of the Left Front to Brand Buddha. That conclusion, however popular, begs a review. The promise of Brand Buddha was industrial resurgence, growth of high- tech sectors, elevating Calcutta to the pedestal of Shanghai etc etc. Very urban, very metropolitan brand promises. The target was clearly in focus.

Now witness the results. Alipore and Chowringhee, arguably two of the richest constituencies of the state, did not elect a Buddha protege. Ballygunge and Rashbehari, where many of the elite Calcuttans live, have still not been won over. Saying that these have always been Opposition strongholds is restating the point. The anti-pimple soap was created specifically to break the metropolitan strongholds of the Opposition. That has not happened yet.

Maybe that is because too little time has been given to Brand Buddha. Or maybe the symbols of hope that brand Buddha have constructed looked too remote from the bottom of the pyramid of metropolitan voters. Maybe in that segment, the contradiction between the fancy anti-pimple platform and the basic health soap is straining credibility. These are still enigmas. What is not is that this marketing game is yet to be won. Or lost.