The Un-boxing of India: Published articles/TOI 2

Article in the Times of India, Mar 7, 07

The Un-boxing of India

Branding, news and entertainment merge
as we open many Windows in our daily lives and live with multiple ids

There was a question in KBC the other day on the name of the cow that features in a Cadburys ad – and a majority of the audience got it right. As a man in a focus group said a few days later, “yeh kya hai, general knowledge hai ya Cadburys ke liye ad hai - sab jagah ghusa dethe hain”. A lively discussion followed on whether advertising and brand messages were becoming intrusive, or a more integral part of our lives and therefore unavoidable. While Amitabh Bachchan as a father releases an ad for Guru, an engagement is announced on the day of the premier… “personal life ko publicity bana dethe hain” they said, with all due respect to the great man.

A news channel went hoarse selling Parzania – was that a genuine interest in Gujarat, good advertising and a “media partner” deal for Parzania or the heroine’s PR consultant at work? One role, and she is recast as a reinvented activist. Did KANK really raise issues in public consciousness, or was it just “good PR”? As Shah Rukh Khan himself pointed out in a recent interview on television, the celebrities get the publicity, the TV channel gets its viewership, news and entertainment blend in and out, you don’t know when one ends and the other begins. Content becomes advertising, advertising becomes content.

Just look at a few more examples of all kinds of “un-boxing” all around us.

* Beyond celebrities, we’ve now seen media becomes judge and jury, citizens become media.

* Look at the world of products and services. Health is now not just health and hospitals, but health and spirituality, health and tourism, health and psychology, health and music, health and beauty, health and dance, health and sports. Health, fitness, spirituality and tourism get into each other’s boxes. Spiritual plus music is another box, music and mobiles is a whole new box. There’s tourism and adventure, tourism and HR (corporate outbound tours), tourism and spirituality, tourism and sports, besides plain good old tourism – holiday and sight seeing. Television and telecom create a new box together on the sms front, turning audience participation into nationwide news.

* Take brand benefits and Corporate Social Responsibility. ITC’s Sunfeast ad and the Ashirwad atta ad implies that a responsible company makes it, and you’ll be helping somebody if you bought the product, rather than urging you to buy the product because it is differentiated and delivers on a benefit. Different from the Surf Save Water and the Lifebuoy street cleaning ad which had strong Corporate Social Responsibility overtones, but were still rooted in a product attribute.

* Take the world of art and music. Artists combine painting with photography, cartoons, sculpture, industrial junk and kitsch. Art is corporatised, art is investment. Music, dance and drama merge to deliver new entertainment forms. Musicians are going beyond the concert platform into research, education, talent hunt, and even writing. A recent music book launch included a film on music, a reading of excerpts by theater professionals and auctioning of the first copy for a cause.


* Companies are now having to train employees not just in their area of operation, but language and culture - Wipro’s Shimpo programme teaches cultural codes, social conduct, business etiquette, and night life in Japan. HR, PR, and CSR are un-boxing themselves to build the corporate brand, as much as takeovers, CEO hobbies, Page 3 and the corporate wife.

All this is both cause and effect of many key aspects of brand building today –particularly segmentation, payoffs and media choice.

Take as just one example, the blurring of segments in cars. It is no more just hatches, sedans, SUVs and so on… but hatches, hot hatches, premium hatches, city SUVs, look-like SUVs and real SUVs.

With pricing, and value propositions going criss-cross across segments - and the consequent overlapping of payoffs – economy brands promising class, classy brands promising economy, who’ll-buy-what-when-and-why will soon be anybody’s guess.

Media plans therefore stretch from advertisements to placement of questions in quizzes, and everything in between.

Perhaps all this unboxing is nowhere more evident than in our personal lives - reflective of the multiple roles, and the increasing juggling that we are all trying to cope with - the many Windows of our individual lives as it were. Multiple ids are driving the personalities of both brands and people today.