Emotional Benefits and Mighty Hearts

There is this article in today’s Mint that talks about brands owning emotions because functional differentiators don’t exist anymore. Also supposedly, consumers feel before they think. Examples in the article include Benetton, Nike, Disney etc.

But owning emotions is not a simple academic exercise as it is often made out to be. It is not about tagging an emotional payoff to a rational benefit. The classic, this brand will make your child healthier and hence will he will be more confident is old tripe.

I think it’s more important to define a brand as a personality that evokes real emotions and then bring that personality alive. To truly resonate with people, this personality needs to be real, warts and all. In our frequent attempts to treat our brand as a holy grail we often deify the brand to an extent where it becomes an insipid caricature, shorn of all truth. And such smarmy personalities rarely connect – whether they are brands or living people.

Amongst many other things, connection calls for empathy and transparency. Almost all brands that achieve iconic status have a deep understanding of their customers and deliver on their promise. Many of them often reflect the personal passion of the brand’s owner – whether a professional or an entrepreneur. Many of them don’t even advertise in the conventional sense of the term. Iconic brands often show off their idiosyncrasies – and that actually makes them human and we love them all the more for it.

I reckon, owning an emotional benefit is more about courage. Courage to let your brand be human and to let people engage with your brand on their terms. To that extent, it’s not about the size of your budget or even the size of your intellect; it’s about the size of your heart.

What’s your Avatar?

First one that is. In all the brouhaha about virtual second lives, I came across this simple site with its tongue firmly in cheek.

Cricket in Any Language . . .

Watching the first India-England One Day match on the new Star Cricket channel with Hindi commentary was an interesting experience. I had always assumed that the Hindi commentary one used to hear years ago on radio and early DD and which nowadays gets mocked in television commercials was history. But I realized otherwise. The commentary that I heard Tuesday was a throwback to those days. But going beyond language, I also feel the Hindi and English commentaries are one more reflection of the vastly different sensibilities of different sections of Indians.
1. The Hindi commentary was high on statistics and facts (two slips, a leg gully, a sweeper and a long on - a nod to the old “aakhon dekha haal”) whereas English commentaries were more casual and seemed more interested in communicating the feel of the game – there was a discussion on the Barmy Army being made to pay more for a trip to Australia to watch the last Ashes.
2. The Hindi commentary seemed like a series of breathless exclamations; the English one was much more sober and considered.
3. The Hindi commentators seemed to carry on monologues for entire overs; they almost seemed to be afraid of silences (btw, have you noticed how audiences in a Hindi cinema hall start twittering and shifting uncomfortably when there is a silent pause in an emotionally laden scene). The English commentary was more of a dialogue with long pauses, which also gave the viewer time to ponder and form a point of view on the happenings.
4. The Hindi commentary seemed to be high on repetition, saying the same thing again and again (this also reminded me of the way Hindi News Channels play the same news footage looped over and over). On the other hand, the English commentators seemed to be better at building up a story and forming hypotheses.
I think these differences reflect a different idiom of not just speaking, but also feeling – for the game as much as anything else of consequence. That also explains the different type of news coverage in English and Hindi News Channels. That’s also probably why Chak De does well in the metros while Partner is the biggest hit of the year in the rest of the country.

From Sea Shell to New York City

I saw this billboard at Thane, on the extremely hazardous and pothole-ridden road that passes off for the Mumbai-Nashik Eastern Express Highway. Sandwiched between aggressive paan-spewing Indica cab drivers and 14-wheeled monstrosities that precariously straddle giant potholes, the promise of New York City seemed a bit surreal and truly poignant.

It also reminded me that what we choose to call our houses reflect our changing aspirations. The house I grew up in didn’t have a name at all, just a number. Those were quieter, humbler and dare I say more innocent times. In the city where I grew up, either the houses were named after people who owned them (after all there were no apartments), or they had names like Aashirwaad, Tulsi, Sneh Sadan etc. – with all the inventiveness of a Balaji serial. The house that had the first television in the locality where I was growing up was Shalmali. The most exotic one for us used to be quite a fancy looking house named Sea Shell - the owner used to work in merchant navy.

The 90’s were truly depressing times; Disasters like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Khuda Gawah happened, Sooraj Barjatiyya made super-duper hits and Govinda sang Sarkhailyo Khatiya. I remember buildings with names like Highway Darshan (I am not joking) and Lake View which used to overlook a mosquito infested swampland.

Now, as the front-pages of newspapers never tire of reminding us, we are living the India story. The world is ours and the names of our abodes should obviously reflect that. So we have buildings named Phoenix, Dreamz, Englewood and Wellington and roads named Central Avenue and Forest Avenue which cut through 14-storied buildings. Seen in that light New York City (which I learn is a housing complex coming up at Kasarvadavli in Thane) is one more leap of imagination, hope and stubborn optimism – the potholes be damned.

Song of the Open Road

The debate on making parts of Mumbai hoardings-free, though contentious reminded me of this Ogden Nash poem:
I think I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.

That was in the nineteen thirties.

Gorby's New Bags

Mikhail Gorbhachev is one the latest faces of Louis Vuitton luggage. He is supposed to have agreed reluctantly in return for a donation the brand made to Green Cross International, his environmental charity.

I found the use of Gorbachev very interesting because firstly it’s refreshing to see a face that is not associated with sports or movies. Secondly by using him, the brand is also making a statement about fashion by moving away from flash and glitz. In a way, it is showcasing its credentials on other dimensions of fashion – wealth, understated class, exotic travel etc.

Thinking aloud – who could be an equivalent for Louis Vuitton in India. Any retired politicians?

What is the meaning of Jugaad - Part 2

This story on IBN about “Jugaar” – rural India’s new hot wheels, makes for interesting reading.

“Jugaar” is a cross-over vehicle made with Kirloskar irrigation pump, Mahindra Jeep tyres, and a steering wheel and moving at a constant speed of 30 km/h. It’s also another example of the common Indian’s vibrant mix of entrepreneurial instinct and make-shift engineering which meets a real consumer need and makes a decent profit for the owner.
Not that this is new. I believe that two of the most fundamental changes in India over the last fifteen years – the cable TV revolution and the ubiquitous PCO - have been driven by thousands of small entrepreneurs scattered across the country.

There is a huge potential for bigger, more organised companies to tap into this. But it calls for a new business model and a lot of patience and energy to manage the vast multitude of people and partnerships. One company that is doing an admirable job of attempting this, I think is Tata Motors. Though Mr. Ratan Tata now feels that they haven’t done enough to reinvent the business processes, they are making brave attempts with their sub-One Lakh Rupee car. Wonder how long it will be before more organizations start to look at this as viable opportunity.