Chennaiites love sporting BJP merchandise

Chennai: Political merchandise is the easiest way of canvassing for parties to popularize their logos and leaders during elections. Be it facemasks, T-shirts, caps, mugs or bags, these are generally the cheapest means to influence voters in a subtle manner.

This time adding to the list of products is iPhone skins. And interestingly, Chennai seems to picking up more BJP-inspired merchandise than the rest of the country! BJP-inspired merchandize was most popular with maximum takers in Chennai at 76 per cent of the total sales in the city, revealed the findings of an internal analysis conducted by Printvenue.com, a portal enabling personalized and customized printing solutions.

“While three-fourth of orders from the city were for BJP merchandise, about one-fourth was for Congress products,” said Mr Saurabh Kochhar, founder of Printvenue.com.

“Merchandises of Kerjiwal’s Aam Aadmi Party that ruled second across rest of the country found no takers in Chennai,” he added. “We did get a lot of T-shirts and caps printed with lotus logo and Modi images this time from Delhi,” confirmed Mr Venkatesh, a BJP party worker.

A further analysis of the sales patterns across top eight cities revealed that T-shirts were the most favored kind of merchandize across the top 5 cities with mugs and iPhone cases coming in at a close second. “Chennai opted for T-shirts more at 30% in the price range of '300-400,” Mr Kochhar said.

While Congress found its maximum fans in Pune with 42 per cent customers opting to buy merchandize printed with the party’s campaign slogans. AAP enjoyed maximum patronage in Bengaluru with 37 per cent of the sales being made for T-shirts and mugs showing Arvind Kejriwal as a superhuman defender of the citizens’ rights, the survey revealed.

In Kolkata, however, only 7 per cent of the total sales were for Congress-inspired products. Contrary to national sentiment, Hyderabad recorded the lowest percentage of sales for BJP goodies at 38 per cent.

In the period between January and March 2014, the website claimed to have sold over 8,000 mugs, iPhone covers and T-shirts printed with faces of top politicians as well as party symbols.