A Disturbing Trend
The dramatic debacle at the World Cup has revealed to me a rather disturbing
trend. I am not sure if this is accurate, and would like to be challenged, but it
seems to me that India is running out of role models. Most of the people we look
up to have been around for at least 7 odd years, if not more.

Starting with cricket, the great tragedy has not been the fact that we have lost.
The great tragedy is that we actually found ourselves in a position where we had
to turn back to yesterday's superheroes. A lot of us feel depressed at the sight
of a helpless Sachin for we have effectively grown up with him, having seen him
battle through his first two one day innings scoring a duck each and so on (won't it be an
outrage if the SriLanka innings ends up being his last, in which
case he will have a duck in his first and last innings), all this while
treating him like a man from Krypton, feeling a sense of awe at his ability to do
unimaginable things. It appears to be a highly tragic end to this amazing fairytale and I would like to remember him for the awesome 15 years through which he amazed us
and nothing else. Yet, I hate to say this, but this emotion is not good for
India. What India needs is someone who can upstage this remarkable man the way he
himself upstaged Kapil Dev who was then going through a similar phase. We have
had (apparently) false starts, like Dhoni and Sehwag and Pathan, but we just
haven't found someone who can make us forget Sachin. Yes, Ganguly, Dravid and Kumble have
had their moments, Yuvraj may be the future but they are not quite Sachin, Kapil or Gavaskar, and besides, have been around for rather long as well.

Moving on to movies, the trend becomes even more evident. All our heroes are in
their 30s, 40s and 60s. You may argue for Hrithik, but then, he's been around for
8 odd years, and well, hasn't proven himself to be an Amitabh or a Shahrukh. Not
yet, at least.

What about music? We have not found someone who can make us forget Rehman.
Shankar Ehsaan and Loy have been a good distraction, but they have not made
people cry with their genius, have they? Wonder if this is the fallout of the
Indian Idol approach, but we just don't seem to be finding artists who bring
something dramatically fresh and new.

Moving to business, where we do have reason to feel euphoric, we encounter the
same trend - we have not found a Narayanamurthy, Azim Premji or even Sabeer Bhatia in
the last 10 years.

In politics, we saw a glimmer of hope with a lot of younger, good looking, well
behaved politicians appearing around the last election. But again, no one has
really stormed in capturing everyone's imagination. Buddhadev B did seem to be
filling the gap created by the absence of Chandrababu Naidu (whether good or bad)
but he seems to have been upstaged by the overgrown complainer Mamatadi. We do
not even have an Atal Behari or a Manmohan Singh to look up to anymore. Abdul
Kalam is around, but with his tenure ending, who knows what the political scene
will look like (peering very superficially of course).

Looking into other sports and walks of life, the trend continues. We are still
following Vishwanathan Anand, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi. Sania Mirza is
one exception, and am I thankful for that. We had our hopes in Karthikeyan and
the shooters and so on, but clearly there is scope for a lot more visibility for
these guys. For gods sake, even our commentary teams have not changed - we
launched a vigorous campaign for "Harsha ki Khoj" a couple of years back, but no
one really seems to have taken his place.

Or at least so it seems to me.

I am not trying to undermine the leaps and bounds in the Indian economy, the
Indian psyche and general standard of living (subject to the urban-rural
argument), and this is not an outburst following a general negative sentiment as
a result of the cricket. In fact I believe the overall depression is a lot
overdone since it would have been exactly the opposite had we managed to win the
game against Sri Lanka. We would have all been worshiping our cricketers for
"getting out of jail".

This is just an observation that I have made, and if it is
true, and if indeed we are entering a decisive decade, I believe we are in the
desperate need of a few superstars in the next 2-3 years, without whom our
national shoulders will droop and we will begin to lose all of this relatively
new confidence built painstakingly over the last 10 odd years. And if we have indeed been part of a revolution over this period, there should be hundreds of them lurking somewhere just waiting to emerge in the open. Or am I dreaming?
- posted by Rallix @ 7:08 AM 2 comments

 
Market re-search
It was a freezing morning today with sleet and snow flurries forecast for bulk of the day, accompanied with bonechilling gusty northerly winds straight from the Arctic ocean. Under these circumstances, as I stepped out of a fairly warm train into a wall of cold air threatening to shove me right back into the train not unlike the multitudes at Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, I noticed from the corner of my eye through a veil of wind-induced tears, a poster inviting me to visit India because India has snowclad mountains.

Or at least that is the message that I got. The poster had a large caption proclaiming "Incredible India!" and an even larger white mountain as its dominant image. If you paid closer attention to the poster you may spot a serene lake and a boat by the white mountain, but under the circumstances I kind of missed that bit.

So let me get this straight - after living through cold dark months (ok it wasn't as cold this year as it could have been but it was dark nevertheless), the Indian tourism department is inviting the general British public to vist India to see some snow? Imagine this - a Mr Jennings steps onto a wet platform with an umbrella that barely succeeds to stay open without turning inside out, sees this picture while his coat flaps violently around his legs and thinks to himself "Aha India! This is where I want to go ... to see some snow! Must propose this back home, it'll make me popular with the wife and kids!"

Well here's the catch - while the poster sent a shiver down my spine with the inopportune image, I realised in due course, as my brain thawed slowly following internal neural activity triggered by extreme confusion, that the actual message that the ad agency was trying to pass on to Mr. Jennings was that he should visit India this summer. At least there was a small caption that said so.

In other words, the ad agency is inviting Mr Jennings all the way to India this summer to actually catch some cold weather and relive his fondest frostfilled memories. Or maybe it isn't - in which case the invitation is actually to ignore the image and come over for a lovely 40 degrees in the shade holiday in India the way summer is really meant to be. In either case, I doubt Mr Jennings is likely to be particularly excited.

Clearly the department of Incredible India needs to ask its market research agency for a refund. If anything, better hotels, roads, booking facilities and security measures might excite more visitors to what is actually an incredible holiday destination. But that doesn't seem to have crept up in the market research.

But I really have to insist this failure to understand its market cannot be attributed to the fact that this is a government agency building a marketing campaign - in fact when it comes to government agencies, this is a spectacular piece of advertising - there are some mindbogglingly ridiculous ad campaigns government agencies launch here - for instance the income tax ad for "time is running out" with a man walking inside a sand clock and sand slowly slipping under his feet which might actually have been a good clear message had the execution not been so bad- or the local tube ad claiming that "one of the many improvements in your DLR - a new uniform for the staff!" which clearly isn't a good clear message (though is very well executed with the image of two giant railway staff nattily dressed in lovely green uniforms overlooking a bright red Dockland Light Rail enter a station) especially when severe delays are occuring on your way to work right across the line due to a signal failure at Gallions Reach?

It isn't only government agencies that are clueless about the market - most corporates are ultra-mega clueless too.

Most car ads fall into this category - I have observed car ads at close quarters in India, the UK and the US and they all astound me with the mind-numbness of it all. There is this ad in which a car turns into a giant robo and starts roller skating through streets before converting back into a car ... and then there are countless ones in which a car undertakes the bumpiest ride imaginable outside of Bangalore for instance through a mountain stream or an arctic landscape or whatever.

A lot of bank/insurance ads fall in this category as well - either they try to impress you with something that leaves you completely confused (e.g. what does the HSBC clone ad have to do with my savings account?!) or they try to entice you with spectacular deals (e.g. move your credit card balance at no cost to our credit card so that you can then move the balance from our credit card to another credit card and so on till everyone is confused about your actual liabilities).

You may argue that this is because of the nature of the product - which I find very hard to buy. Even within these products some ads can be more specific than others - e.g. the 2599/pachis ninetynine campaign of Maruti vs the Josh machine...

The bottomline is that I feel very angry with anyone who makes a bad ad, which seems to be the order of the day mostly. Hence I suggest market researchers try re-search. It might just help.
- posted by Rallix @ 12:45 PM 1 comments