Heed those jingles

Yelling with gusto used to be the best way to advertise your wares. There was plenty of media and if you had plenty of money, you were set. Today, of course, yelling doesn’t work so well” Seth Godin, best selling author of Permission Marketing
Marketing as a function has run through the gamut of communication options that have been available through the ages—from yelling, advertising on walls, print, radio, television, direct selling, Internet… and then coming back a full circle to sell the old wine in a new bottle. That is why, looking back from time to time is a good way of moving forward. And recounting the marketing story through ads and the four Ps of marketing (product, price, promotion and placement) is a good check, especially at times such as these when a global slowdown is slamming the brakes on India’s growth story.Of course, different people have different memories of what worked, and what did not. Straight up, the fundamental difference over the years, according to Anand Halve, Co-founder, Chlorophyll, a brand and marketing consultancy firm, is that while FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) was the most visibly marketed categories from the 1960s to the 1980s, the years since then have seen durables, services, hospitality, entertainment, retail, and technology as the most aggressively marketed segments. “In durables and in services-led categories, ‘brand behaviour’ and ‘actual performance’ are far more important than in FMCG. As a result, the role of mass media has weakened, and the role of customer recommendation, or, word-of-mouth and customer service have become far more critical,” he says.Story of brandsThere are many ways of telling a story and it serves to check them out in time slabs and in terms of the influences (largely moving from print to television that has grabbed popular imagination). The economic and social realities of an era tend to play upon what we as consumers desire and seek. In retrospect, periodic themes also become apparent. In the immediate post-Independence era, the dominant images were those of the jawan (soldier) and kisan (farmer). Everyone else was in between these two heroic personas. The soldier protected the nation from external enemies and the farmer fed a hungry nation not yet self-sufficient in food. “Advertising then spoke of saving, hard work and frugal consumption. Products were very long lasting, functionally strong and even cosmetically hardlooking. The landmark ad from that era was the one depicting Lifebuoy,” says marketing expert Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults.This picture of a sweaty, hardworking man bathing with a hard, red carbolic soap, on the tandorosti (health) platform somehow stood the test of time and continued till well into the 1990s. Hindustan Unilever (HUL), which owns the Lifebuoy brand, changed the product as well as its imagery only in the early 2000s. Interestingly, certain themes have endured—like Lux, with its plank of “Cinestar’s Beauty Secret” but the same story is now more consumer-centric: “While Lux has always stood for being a filmstar’s soap (it was prestigious then for actresses to be asked to endorse Lux as it afforded them greater visibility), now, its plank has shifted to ‘Discover the Filmstar in You’. There’s a huge difference,” points out Santosh Desai, Managing Director & CEO, Future Brands.The 1980s, and the advent of colour television sets in India brought about a seismic change in the Indian advertising scenario. Consumers were exposed to more complex shades of influences. At one level, there was the bikini-clad Karen Lunel under a waterfall, the poster girl for Liril soap, who successfully pushed the sales of the soap up (the ad made its debut in late 1970s but it was a watershed moment that ushered in the radical and more complex influences of the next decade). In fact, this is when motorbikes, too, make an entry in a big way. “These were (comparatively) more ostentatious machines than those available at that time; and Hero Honda turned us into a biking nation,” says Shripad Nadkarni Director, MarketGate Consulting.In many ways, this was the era when the Indian middle class had its first real brush with the outside world. Pranab Mukherjee, as Finance Minister in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet, cut tax rates and allowed NRIs to invest in the stock markets; Swraj Paul launched hostile corporate raids against Escorts and the Shriram Group; and a clutch of upcoming business tycoons, led by Dhirubhai Ambani, Raunaq Singh, Vittal Mallya and others, challenged the hegemony of the incumbent corporate leaders. The old order was changing; Indians were beginning to lose their innocence; and the ads captured the spirit of the times.The 1980s was also the time when Bajaj Auto launched its Hamara Bajaj ad line (it kept changing its imagery but retained the line till recently), close on the heels of the government’s Mera Bharat Mahaan and Miley Sur Mera Tumhara campaigns that both helped drive and rode a still incipient pride in all things Indian. During this decade, Karsanbhai Patel and his Nirma brand of detergent stormed the market with a catchy Washing Powder Nirma jingle and its affordability plank, and HUL (then Hindustan Lever) fought back with the “Lalitaji” campaign for Surf and initiated the Wheel detergent into the market. But the decisive moment was the launch of Maruti 800, which, in many ways, allowed the middle class to visualise an escape from socialist drudgery.These were, in fact, just a trailer to the decade that followed—when Indians gave free rein to their aspirations. “When I joined advertising in the mid-’80s, shampoos were still an exotic category. Hair oils ruled and it was the image of thick hair, groomed neatly in place. Shampoo advertising sent out the image of a liberated woman, outdoors, with unbound hair,” says Desai. It was a powerful subliminal sub-text in the transformation of a society where the product (that had existed long before) finally clicked along with its message. As the 1980s were drawing to a close, it also saw the cricket field being used in a big way for the first time by advertisers in the Reliance World Cup in 1987.The 1990s saw the bottle "open up" as Pepsi suggested that people could have frivolous fun. This decade also unleashed another beast in the form of the mass media. At another end, Kamasutra condoms established the legitimacy of pleasure. And there was also the instance of communications experts creating the Fevicol brand out of an industrial adhesive.The current decade has seen the true arrival of a personal media in the form of the mobile phone and the Internet. It has also been marked by a dizzying rise of celebrities in advertising as brand endorsers and the fullfledged emergence of cricket as the new playing field.