A strategist's journey from political pitch to Bollywood

When top political luminaries gave an overwhelming response to his novel idea of changing the way elections should be contested by mass engagement with potential voters, strategy entrepreneur Karan Singh, who has his offices in Gurgaon, thought of replicating it in the entertainment industry too.

Oxford University and London School of Economics alumnus planned to gather inputs from audiences about the genres of movies they would prefer to watch, in addition to multiple permutations and combinations of key variables around a film, to help a film maker zero in on a movie script. The “unconventional” idea was initially passed off as mere wishful thinking by his peers and co-workers, but as it evoked discerning nods from two well-known filmmakers in Bollywood (whose identities he refuses to divulge at this juncture), even his sceptics were awed.

Despite a wide range of business interests across segments like entertainment, analytics and innovation, he wants to be an active politician at the earliest. His real focus lies in Indian politics, which sustained his graduate-level research interest at the University of Oxford, where he focused on patterns of voter turnout in India.

Currently, he is working for a host of MLAs and MPs from the Congress and Trinamool Congress to study electoral pattern in a bid to increase their winning quotient in the forthcoming general election and the Haryana state elections the same year.

“While crunching numbers in 2006 on general election in 2004, I found it bizarre and futile to analyse data two years after the elections were over and the government was already in power. So, I thought the data must be collected much in advance so that political parties can plan their communication strategies and spread their message loud and clear,” explains Singh.

One may confront him by saying that there are dime-a-dozen trade analysts in Bollywood ready to give him a tough run for his money, but he dismisses the argument by saying that they base their decisions on a limited secondary data, whereas he scientifically analyses vast amounts of real-time primary data coupled with secondary trends to come up with logical solutions.

“We can carry out innumerable analyses of innumerable variables across millions of data points in a time span of a just a fraction of second through our in-house innovation model, which we have named as Intelligence Driven Strategy and Communication (IDSC). After the results are out, one can take informed decisions and minimise the risk — be it in politics or entertainment,” says the 35-year-old entrepreneur.

Unlike several professionals who sit in air-conditioned cubicles to crunch already-available data, Singh sends his tablet PC-equipped staff to the field to gather data to be sent to his data bank.