Can a tea brand wake people up to their electoral responsibilities? Can a detergent turn into a crusader for water conservation?
A striking trend in India has been the emergence of the large canvas brand — one which hinges its communication entirely on a social platform. Brands supporting social causes is not new but what we are seeing is a phenomenon where that effort is at the heart of all communication emitted by the brand. The social canvas becomes a means of amplifying the largeness of the brand’s message.
A striking trend in India has been the emergence of the large canvas brand — one which hinges its communication entirely on a social platform. Brands supporting social causes is not new but what we are seeing is a phenomenon where that effort is at the heart of all communication emitted by the brand. The social canvas becomes a means of amplifying the largeness of the brand’s message.
This raises interesting questions. At one level, it recognises that brands are cultural and social artefacts that play a role in our lives well beyond what marketing imagines. The usual marketing vocabulary is limited, being stuck in the rational/emotional kind of dualistic frame. Here, we see brands embracing the larger meaning that they deliver to the world and do so to their advantage. On the other hand, it also raises questions about whether these brands are exploiting larger, more sensitive issues.
A closer look at some leading examples will help put the issue in clearer perspective. Idea is a telecom services provider, which historically lagged the market leaders in terms of performance. With its new campaign, which sets the tag line ‘What an idea’ in the landscape of rural India, it has managed to become a stronger and more credible player. The advertising focuses on stories that demonstrate how the mobile phone helps bring education and democracy to rural India, not to mention solving the caste problem.
In one ad, a missionary school principal links up schools without teachers through the mobile phone. In another, a village headman solves a caste feud by decreeing that people would henceforth be known only by their numbers and not names (which are based on caste). The brand does little on the ground to support this communication. So, really, what the brand is doing is to use rural problems to show off its brand promise rather than solve them.
Another instance is that of a leading tea brand from India’s most respected business house, Tatas. Tata Tea uses the tag line ‘Jaago re’ (wake up) and its advertising shows its protagonists handing out cups of tea to young people in college insisting that they are asleep and need to ‘wake up’. The waking up in question involves their going out and voting. In this case, the advertising leads us to a website which actually allows people to register on-line as voters. In India, where finding one’s name in the electoral rolls is a messy affair, this is a real service. The campaign is run in partnership with an NGO, which makes the back-end a very real one.
There have been a host of brands that try to play the role of cheerleaders for India. One of these ads shows an animated representation of an Indian ‘conquering’ one country after another as a global leader These representations, though popular, operate at at a superficial level.
It becomes interesting when brands begin to engage in questions of a more real and pressing kind. Can a brand use poverty as a scenic backdrop without doing anything about it? One dimension of the debate around the film Slumdog Millionaire is precisely whether the pornography of poverty is a legitimate source of profit for the world of cinema, particularly Hollywood. In a country like India, there seems to a great opportunity for brands to find larger canvases for their brands while helping solve some intractable problems. Perhaps more brands need to wake up to that.
Santosh Desai, CEO Future Brands
santosh.desai@futurebrands.co.in
