During a panel discussion at this year’s ThinkFest in Lahore, I declared that these days people engage with politics the way they do with a cola brand. After the discussion, a handful of young folk approached me to ask exactly what I had meant by this. I was simply referencing a part of the book The Fragile Absolute by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

He uses the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi analogy to describe modern ideology. Žižek writes that the very idea of consumer choice is a farce because, even though Coke and Pepsi are chemically almost identical, people express identities through choosing one over the other. According to Žižek, our voting choices are made in a similar manner and are therefore superficial.

Choosing a political party or leader today is not so different from picking a bottle of cola off a supermarket shelf. Most people do not buy a soft drink based on a breakdown of its chemical ingredients, and the exact same logic applies to how we vote. Voters do not dive into a party’s manifesto. Instead, they buy into a brand identity. When you examine the mechanics of a modern election campaign, the parallel between a supermarket aisle and a ballot paper becomes clear.

The American marketing theorist David Aaker posits that product branding seeks to make emotional and psychological values transcend the physical asset itself. He uses the example of Nike trainers as a way to demonstrate that consumers do not buy them because they are fascinated by the specific rubber compound used in the sole. They buy them for the feeling of athletic aspiration encapsulated in Nike’s famous slogan: “Just Do It.”

In his book Marketing of a President, the American professor of marketing Bruce I. Newman writes that politicians are packaged in the same manner. Since public policy details are often far too complex for the average voter to consume, campaigns........

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