Associations

One normally thinks that the answers that we are looking for are locked inside our consumers. However, our consumers are themselves locked into a wider cultural context. This context is different for each category in each country.

I have often observed that our preferences in music are be driven strongly by associations. For e.g. if some one has grown up listening to Hindustani classical music at a home where classical music was appreciated by the, say, father, say when the father was in a good mood mostly on holiday’s. Typically, the mood at home was very relaxed on such days. Every time this music was played, this setting repeated itself. This child is likely to grow up liking Hindustani classical music, you would agree. There is a good chance that his father was a normal adult father, with varying moods including anger, irritation, disappointment and given to stress on some days. There’s a good chance that in these not so good moods and occasions, the father did not listen to Hindustani classical music. Over a period of years, the association of classical music with “something good, something serene, something warm and secure and happy” got built for this child. Many years later when this child grows up, it can be argued that listening to classical music evokes the same feeling that it did like when he was a child – “good, serene, warm, secure & happy”. A child from another country with a similar father but listening to Mozart is likely to have similar types of associations when ever he listens to Mozart, but its unlikely that Bheemsen Joshi (or another well known Hindustani Classical Artist) will work for him in the same manner.

This means that we like a particular type of music because of the association we have with it – finally appreciation of music is an acquired taste, and that taste is acquired due to associations with very fundamental human emotions.

The same argument can be made for food. While in music this case can be argued very easily, in case of food, also I believe that this association theory is extremely strong. Why is every mother’s cooking the best in the world? Its definitely not because every mother uses the same recipes or the same quality of ingredients, but more because most mothers while feeding their children are at their loving best. For the child the whole experience is enhanced in the company of her mother. Watching her make the roti’s puff up magically, adding that pinch of salt in her characteristic style, wiping her sweat from her brow, tucking her pallu into the folds of her sari – all these things are amazing for the child to watch. More than the food the mother makes, it is these memories, symbols and the love and care for which the grown up child yearns for the most.

What is the implication of this for our brands? We spend a lot of time, understanding reactions of consumers to stimulus that we throw at them. Also we focus a lot on drivers of category choice and brand choice. However, if we can truly understand what the compelling set of associations and symbols and cultural codes for our categories are, immense opportunities can be unlocked. How we can leverage this understanding is another question altogether.

Domino's Pasta Launched !

The Domino's Pizza brand in India has grown into a network of more than 270 stores by August 2009 with a fairly large base of loyal consumers. Our reserach with consumers suggests that they would love it if we add something more to our product range other than Pizzas and the sides that we currently sell. Pasta was the obvious choice and we had been working on a pasta launch for the last 6 months. Well, we finally launched pasta. Its a hit. Literally flying off the ovens as we like to say:-)

The ad went on air last weekend and in case u missed it or if u do not live in India or do not watch TV - here is the link to it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lzzKetiDqI

You can find out more about our product and pricing here http://www.dominos.co.in/

Do let me know what u think. And yes, if u want to order dominos pasta and get happiness home delivered, just call 4444 8888. Enjoy !

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

I am a fan of Indian writing in English and have read most of the commercially successful work publsihed in the last ten/fifteen years. There are some very good writers in this trade namely Rushdie, Vikram Seth, etc. but in my view Amitav Ghosh is the master of this fast growing community. Those who have meandered with him on the Irawaddy in the Hungry Tide or traveled from the forests of Burma to the western ghats of India in the Glass Palace will often share the view that his writings have a certain unputdownable quality in them. But the manner in which a he has told the story in his latest historical and literary fictional work the “Sea of Poppies” has taken his craft to a new level altogether. Very rarely does it happen to me that I do not want a novel to end due to the void that finishing it will cause. All through the reading I was mildly concerned that once I finish the book I will miss the characters and the story. That was the extent to which the writing made me engage with the story, the characters and the settings. Almost as if it was part of me. The statement “Getting lost in the story” characterized what I went through, I think.
However, Sea of Poppies is not just about the story, the age in which the book has been set and the granularity with which the historical aspects of that time have been crafted have an equal if not greater role in making it a compelling read.

Set in the early nineteenth century Bihar and Bengal, Ghosh brings alive the implications of the forced cultivation of Opium as a cash crop in the region and its implications on the lives of every one around it. The other important part of history that the book reflects on is the movement of Bihari indentured workers (girmitiyas) to work in British islands like Mauritius and the West Indies. The latter subject has been a great source of curiosity for me and names like Ramnares Sarwan, Chandrapaul and Ramagoolam have fed that curiosity over the years. The treatment of this era, the lingo that was used, the culture, the rites, rituals, fears, hopes, events and happenings have been expressed in a manner that you get the feeling that Ghosh has actually traveled in a time machine and been able to observe the people from a vantage position. This treatment of the time and age coupled with fascinating events that unfold create a truly magnificent read.

I am glad that this is the first of a triology and am very eagerly waiting for the next one to come out. Just to make sure that I do not feel the void for too long, I have immediately started reading one of Ghosh’s much earlier novels, “The Shadow Lines”. Reading this one is making it clear to me how much Amitav Ghosh has evolved as a writer in the last ten years or so. If I project the same slope of progress in the future and assume that the trend will continue for another ten, then there is a very good chance that we may look back at him as the best ever.

I am now very curious about the “White Tiger” by Arvind Adiga which won this years booker ahead of the “Sea of Poppies”, if that was seen as better, then it better be mind-blowing. I hope the expectation of greatness does not come in the way of judging a very good piece of work. More on that later.

Rub of the Green

The pleasure of getting to do something that you are really passionate about is absolutely uplifting. These days I am experiencing that pleasure.

About five months back, fate and my boss took me to the driving range of the Noida Golf Club for a lesson and introduction into golf. Well, I used to tell all the usual golf jokes and up until then regarded it like an old man’s game and something that people do so that they can be networked and make contacts etc, so I had to be cajoled and pushed a bit to go and try out the game. I did not know then, that this day would have such a massive impact on me.

All through my teenage years and early adult life, I was a sportsman. I used to play Badminton very well till a combination of injury; studies, commonsense and the need to become “something in life” took over completely. The results was that the last fifteen years or so were more or less devoted to work and family only, regrettably in that order. I realize only now that a huge hole existed in me for all these years because I was totally detached from sports. Because I have always strived very hard to improve and equip myself to do my work better and better and also found the journey challenging and enjoyable (I love my job you see), I could never understand or articulate this hole. I kept dismissing this as something “that must be happening to every one else” and kept pushing it away but it just kept getting bigger and bigger.

I now realize what that hole was, I am able to articulate it to myself and I am able to fill it…with Golf!

I am not a morning person and I find it very difficult to wake up early in the morning. Anything earlier than 7 am for me has been impossible. However, since starting golf I get up every day at 5 am and by 6 I am on the range or the course and action has already started. If I find myself alone and not engaged in work or fun, I quite often find myself visualizing my swing. The temptation is too strong sometimes to shadow practice the swing and I can be quite a sight in queue or while waiting for an elevator. I am trying very hard to improve my game and practicing by taking out time from sleep and a few other things to get better and better at the game.

I realize that I need to do this. I need to play a sport. I need to engage my mind and my body (the system) in and against an environment where I can plot play and win. I need the intoxication of victory and pain of defeat. I need that to keep myself going and I need that to fill my hole. Golf, helps firstly because you play the game more with yourself and the conditions more than anything else and secondly because it has a strange magnetism that is difficult to explain.

One of the things that I took time out from in order to play Golf is writing and the other is reading. This partially explains why I have not posted anything in a while. But I do not regret it at all, I know that something has to give way…after all it was the rub of the green that got me here, now I need to make every shot count.

Tiger Shine On !

Project Tiger, and all other efforts to save the tiger meant as much to me as saving any other endangered species. I have always treated this as something important that needed doing, but never really appreciated why saving the tiger was something special and almost fundamental to our survival. I have heard many naturalists say, “we have inherited the world from our parents AND have borrowed it from our children”. I can understand what is behind that sentiment, but I never really related saving the tiger with this statement in a straight correlation.

However, all that changed last weekend after my trip to Jim Corbett National Park. I had gone to the park along with my Marketing team which is a team of nine wonderful and crazy folks. We had been planning a getaway for quite some time to celebrate a a very tough and successful year gone by and also to enjoy in each others company outside of the office environment. As a leader of this team, the trip for me, was an opportunity to appreciate every one's effort and also to improve team bonding. To achieve these objectives, any "touristy"place outside Delhi would have sufficed. Thankfully, Corbett was chosen as the destination after some sort of a democratic process without too much thinking about the specificity of what Corbett offered.

We started from Delhi, early Saturday morning and after an uneventful drive arrived at Corbett after about 6 hours . Our stay was arranged at at the wonderful and quaint Jim’s Jungle Retreat. The retreat is really close to the forest (on the east side) and it was really exciting to be so close – so much so that one could actually hear tiger calls from the cottages in the retreat. (these are panic calls made by animals when they make eye contact with the tiger) . The sense of the tiger being so close was exciting as well as scary at the same time. One expected the retreat to be typical with all the trappings that modern day resorts offer in India, nothing more, nothing less. But, we were completely taken aback by what we got. If there is something called Eco Tourism- then I believe that Jim’s is the gold standard for it.

As soon as we walked in we could see that the place was different. I have never seen so much greenery in a resort before. It was so densely green that we felt that we are in the Jungle itself. Over an area of 13 acres, they have only 12 cottages, almost an acre per cottage! Since all of us in the team are marketing folks we immediately started discussing that they could get in at least 50 cottages in the same space and how much higher ROI they would have and so on. The rooms were comfortable and the resort has all the creature comforts that one can need... swish rooms, AC, pool, massage, great food, sports and so on. However, what set this place apart for us was 3 special people that we met here. Jassi, Majid and Mr Imran Khan. You would expect the General Manager of a resort like this to have a degree in hospitality or experience mainly in the hospitality business – not here! Mr Imran Khan who runs the place is an ex Forest Services employee who has a PhD in tiger conservation and worked with Valmik Thapar on his research. WOW! Jassi and Majid, his second in commands, are MBA’s who have worked in regular jobs in places like Delhi, but have left the draw of the plush life because they “love the jungle”. A strange trio to be running a resort you would think at first, but read on to understand that 3-stage seduction process that we were all going to undergo.
Since there are only 12 cottages in the resort and we had 5 of them, we were able to get a lot of interaction time with the three. Majid, in an impromptu hour-long lecture on the evening of our arrival, explained minute details about the forest and what the rules governing the life in the fores are. We got a very good basic understanding of the forest, the tiger and various other interesting facts about Nature in general and Corbett in specific. His passion and love for what he does was infectious – we were bitten! Seduction Stage 1.

Early next morning, Jassi took us for a 2 hour nature walk deep into the forest and showed us several birds, various types of animals, made us hear bird sounds, sounds of different animals, mating calls, panic calls, and exposed us to forest in a manner that none of us had ever experienced. On foot, right next to the animals, without the safety of a cage or a vehicle. We also saw tiger marks at various places, bones of dead animals with Jassi hypothesising the cause of death and other such details. We came back flush with excitement of the nature walk feeling totally blessed. We could feel the intoxication! Seduction Stage 2

At break fast the same day, we had an hour-long discussion with Mr Imran Khan, which was one of the highlights of the trip. For the first time I truly understood the importance of project tiger and its implications. Mr Khan explained a simple equation to us. Tiger = Forest = Water = Life. Basically, Tiger = Life. According to him, if the wild tiger bcomes extinct, then life as we know it today will not exist. This seemed like a preposterous statement, but he looked serious enough so we listened. Carefully.

Mr Khan explained that not for nothing is the Tiger known as the King of the Jungle. He plays the main role in the preservation of the forest itself by maintaining the fine balance between all the elements that are needed for a forest to survive. If the tiger gets wiped out from a jungle, the jungle dies and takes away everything that it has to offer. Take the example of the Sariska Forest Reserve; since there are no tigers left there now, the forest has started to die. Animals on whom the Tiger would otherwise keep a check like Neel Gai and Deer and other herbivores have multiplied in such huge numbers that the balance of the forest is totally gone. The herbivores are eating the jungle away, and, the vegetation is not able to grow back that rapidly to feed all the hungry stomachs. Sadly, there is no Tiger there anymore to save his jungle, to bring back that balance in the circle of life. The Sariska Jungle is perilously close to destruction. Point made sir, Tiger = Forest!

The second and third part of the equation, i.e. forest = water and water = life is easily understood and it did not require much explaining. The individual parts of the equation are easy to understand but putting them together made the big picture Tiger = Life crystal clear to all of us and we suddenly understood that saving the tiger is far more important than just saving the tiger. It is actually a measure of the impact of all our conservation efforts. The Tiger count in our forests is like a Ecology Sensex of sorts. At the turn of the century India had approx 40,000/- tigers, around independence we had approx 5,000 and today we have about 1,500 tigers in the wild. Arguably this could also be a numeric indicator of the deterioration of our environment itself- a measure that can quantify the extent to which we have raped nature. Tiger conservation has a significance much larger than anything else that I have heard in a long long time. It is possible that all this was common knowledge and you may feel, “what’s the big deal, I already knew this”, but all of us who spent that morning with Mr Khan came out of the conversation feeling like tourists transformed to naturalists.
This was the final stage of seduction; we were filled with the magic and completely inebriated. Over and out. Mission Completed. Stage 3.

Now, I do not know if these 3 amazing gentlemen had planned these 3 stages of our seduction with nature or it happened naturally (Pardon the pun). Whatever the case, we could not care less. The intoxication was heady and we loved it.

Yes, we did an Elephant Safari deep into the forest that evening and after a 2 hour search we saw not one but 2 tigers from as close as twenty feet and had our chills and thrills. But, when the tiger sighting happened, for us it was much more than a badge of having seen the tiger. It was much more than a box that we as tourists needed to tick. It was much more than having seen the mandatory “lovers point” or “monkey point”. For us sighting the Tiger was the culmination of a 2-day seduction journey that ended in a orgasm of sorts symbolised by seeing the tiger in wild .

What about the team bonding objective ? The objective was more than achieved, not just because we were all together having fun for 3 days, but also, because we had been through this journey feeling similar emotions and similar realisations at the same time. A shared emotional roller coaster is sometimes a great glue to bond the human soul. This is what happened to us and we all came back saying in unison, “Tiger Shine on” !

Extremes

Enough is enough! I am going to write! Caution: If you find this post crappy, please forgive – this is my attempt to get over my block and I am determined to write something…even if it is crappy!

Last week I found myself in Bombay with a free evening with nothing to do. Tuhin, a friend who works for my ad agency was traveling with me suggested we go and see a play in the Prithvi theatre, which was quite close to the Hotel where we were staying. I have not seen a play in a theatre for many years now and jumped at the opportunity immediately. Anyways, we reached Prithvi and luckily got tickets for the night show for a Hindi play called “Bali aur Shambhu”.

Before, coming to the play we had spent the day in a studio supervising the post-production work that was happening on the latest TV commercial that we were working on for my company.

During the day, we were playing with frames, sound light etc. We were changing things at whim- even expressions can be changed by slowing them or speeding them. And in the evening we were in this completely different environment – the live theatre. Where we could reach out and touch the actors if we wanted, here I could almost feel the vibrations from the actors booming voice touch my skin. There was no scope to fix an expression; also there was no possibility to see the mistake again. The vector was however the same – that of telling a story by enacting it. The day was quite a yoyo for me in a sense, swinging between two extreme ends of the communication spectrum/vector.

What I realized is this, when you get exposed to the two extremes on the same vector of expression, you get a great understanding of the vector itself and also of the two extremes. If you want to play in the center (Like most of us do in our own vectors), I guess it would help us to visit the extremes ones in a while. If not anything else, it will at least help us define our centers a bit better.

Writers Block !

Am just not able to write off late. To make things worse, I have been terribly busy over the last month. Had a very hectic two-week travel to the US. Came back and got very very busy with moving to our new house. This is the first time that we have moved to a house, which we own and the process of moving in was very different from all our previous moves into rented places. The kind of involvement that goes into the planning of every fixture and every little piece of new furniture, furnishings etc was quite taxing but very enjoyable. Aditi's school admission was the other task that had to be accomplished. The workload also picked up at the same time and so did travel. Net Net, all this fed my writers block also and the outcome was a totally unproductive month...writing wise. Abhi sms'd, and said, "its scary when a regular blog goes suddenly silent"...the voice in my head said, "write bugger, write". But for some reason I am unable to see the purpose of this.
Its not as if I do not have subjects to write about. There are quite a few 1. The process of home building 2. Brand Positioning and how much time it takes - a personal case study 3. The Marketing of India Incredible in USA- a travelers view point 4. Film review of Jodha Akbar etc. But I am jus not able to put fingers to the keyboard. Hopefully, this phase will not last.