India’s oral culture & its relationship to brand building

Ever since globalization began, marketers have swung from one extreme to another while dealing with the localization vs globalization of marketing communication.

The answer is always the same: the more culturally relevant the marketing communication is, the more efficient it will be. That is in keeping with our own experience: I have heard of and seen most of the characters that feature in the new viral G for Gatorade that is being talked about in the US right now, but because I am an Indian those men and women (whether Serena Williams or Muhammad Ali) carry no emotional cache. There are no lump-in-the-throat moment, no giggles. Similarly, the advertising professional in the US may have heard of Amir Khan, but s/he is unlikely to grin from ear to ear as I did when I watched him as a safari-suit-clad ambassador in the Panch TVC for Coke. “Tumhaare baap kitne the?” Wow!

So the answer is always clear (“the more culturally relevant the marketing communication is, the more efficient it will be”), the question is never. “What is culture?”

One of the shortest, the most meaningful and my favourite answer was provided by Dr Sudhir Kakkar, a renowned Indian sociologist and psychoanalyst: “Culture is shared meaning.”

Since 1995, I have been making presentations to fellow Indians and marketers about India’s oral culture and how it affects everyday life, product development as well as marketing communications even today!
First, a quick note on India’s oral culture. For those who appeared fairly recently on earth, the Indian culture is meant to be at least 5000 years old. And the one noteworthy aspect of this culture is that most of its architecture, dance, music, mathematics, even medicine has been transmitted orally for several thousand years.

The Indian musicians perform without musical sheets: they have committed to memory the ascending and descending notes that define every structure called a raga. Indian maths rarely went wrong because it was transmitted in rhymed Sanskrit, a language whose meaning is independent of syntax!

Most of the truths of Ayurveda, the science of health, were also transmitted through rhymed sentences. My mother had been schooled only until Class 3 in a village, but she calculated things faster than I ever could but she had been made to memorise arithmetic tables of not just 2X2, but 1/4×1/4, 3/4×3/4!

So far so good! Does this culture express itself in today’s life, in the 21st century or is it just a fancy notion about a romanticized past?

Consider this: one of India’s most successful TV shows is actually a radio show. It is called Antakshari. It involves singing songs that match the last sound of the competitor’s song. “Now that’s a face for radio” was a phrase invented just for these participants (late night, allowing myself some nastiness;-)!)

Consider this: every single global brand of car marketed in India needed to have its horn re-calibrated. The louder the horn, the bigger the car!

Consider this: every single global television brand marketed in India needed to have its sound recalibrated. If the neighbour can’t hear my TV, why have one?

Consider this: On the Indian highway, unless the car in front of you hears you, it will dismiss your car’s image in its rearview mirror as an illusion. That is why, India has the largest collection of trucks that say “Horn OK Please” Well Ok, the OK used to be once upon a time a light that would blink at night to signal to the overtaker that the overtakee had allowed him to overtake on the dark highways of India. But the Horn was essential to certify that the overtaker was real;-)!

Consider this: Most Indians will send a mail or an SMS, and then call you to say they have done so!

Consider this: Every single marketing and advertising ‘slogan’ in India is rhymed. (Except those in English, of course.)

Consider this: All ad agencies in India have writers who write in English and writers who write in other Indian languages. As a Creative Director in advertising for 20 years, I have always had the English writer coming to me and handing over a sheet of paper saying, “KK, what do you think of this?”
I have always had the language writer coming and saying, “KK, listen to this.” Without exception!

Once, I asked my wife, who is a specialist on the INDog, the primitive dingo pariah dog-type, why our pet dogs do not react to the images of cats or birds or other dogs on TV, and she said, “Because they can’t smell them.” Their primary organ is the nose! They might hear them mewing and barking and chirping and get excited but if their noses don’t confirm the data, it is not useful data!

For us Indians, the ear is the primary organ, the eye is not. When Coke came to India first, they ran a TVC that celebrated the colour red. Whoa! The brand name was never uttered! The consumer did not know whether to ask for coke or coca or coca cola! Worse, 60% of the TV sets were B&W! Worse, Coke was distributed not through retail outlets where row upon row of merchandise was displayed but through mom-and-pop shops where you had to go and ask for it.

Lesson One: Therefore “Brand Recall” (ears, therefore how to say the brand name!) was more important than “Brand Recognition” (eyes, therefore how to spot the colour red as opposed to the Pepsi blue).

My most memorable anecdote about branding building and the oral culture in India (I have several, write to me if you need more!) was when I was doing marketing communication for a detergent soap (remember in India, powders, liquids and bars co-exist!) named, hold your collective breaths, 501!
The number 501.

So we decided that on the pack and in other visual media (outdoor, print) we would restrict branding to the English script (the brand name would be written as 501)…but what about media where sound played a part?
Radio and TV? (The internet was not even born before 1988!)
We had to, believe it or not, translate the brand name in the local language!

So on Marathi TV channels the brand name became, “Paach she ek”, In Tamil it became, “Aainati unna…” in Bengali it became, “Paanch sho ak…”

Heard of any other nation where the same brand name is pronounced in twelve different ways?
Naah…so stay tuned;-) for more interesting notes (from an old and ever-delighted observer) on brand building in India and elsewhere!