Has the Indian Customer Evolved??

Some fifty years ago, David Ogilvy said: “The consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife”. I believe that this was true about the Indian consumer then and is as true about her today. Nothing has really changed. So, is the question in the headline redundant?

It would not be wrong or boastful to say that the average Indian advertising today is perhaps superior to that of any other country in the world. This is not just a nationalist point of view; when many of us in the business share Indian work with the outside world, it is received with much appreciation.

This was not the case decades ago. At that time, lots of advertising was basic, relying on the brand name repetition six or seven times in thirty seconds. This was done in the belief that this was the only way in which the ‘unevolved’ Indian consumer could connect with and remember the advertising. Just imagine the plight of the consumer!

This was an advertiser and advertising view of the consumer, not the truth about the Indian consumer. It has taken fifty years for the Indian advertiser to evolve, realise the truth that the Indian consumer is not backward. So the more relevant question should be ‘Has Indian advertising evolved?’ And the answer is a loud ‘Yes’.

In the early days, advertising ignored the fact that the Indian consumer has been, for centuries, brought up on understanding messages metaphorically. The Dohas (couplets) and Chaupais that our parents recited without consuming “memory plus” tablets are a simple example of the fact that the Indian consumer not only remembered these messages but also enjoyed them.

However, the advertiser after his MBA, and his agency, after reading a lot of western books on advertising, used selective memory to only focus on “We sell or else”. And thus created a lot of advertising that was rational, ‘A for apple’ and hence boring. They conveniently forgot that the same David Ogilvy also wrote: “You can’t bore people into buying your product”. Engagement and entertainment were given up for making product-oriented sales messages. And yes, there were enough brothers in research who validated that this was the way to do it.

Much can be taken out from the roadside seller’s selling techniques. Remember the long chain of Bhel puri sellers on Marine Drive or Chandni Chowk or the Agarbatti sellers in trains and buses. How well they packaged their sales messages in interesting copy and story telling. These people lived the lives of “We sell or else” in reality. If the salesman didn’t sell by the evening, he and his family had to go to bed without dinner or had to have kilos of bhel puri for it.

So he sold his wares persuasively, entertainingly without talking about the ingredients with which or the process in which the product was made! If he did, he did it interestingly and not like a science class.

Unfortunately, the modern marketer or his agency partners did not have the fears of going hungry. So they decided that they were ‘clever’, consumers were ‘morons’ and hence had to be spoon-fed messages to be persuaded to buy their products. This is a result of people taking themselves too seriously. When a normal, gentle, good-humoured father till breakfast at home, becomes Mr Manager or Einstein’s gift to mankind in office, the result is people who forget they are consumers and human beings and believe they are brain surgeons. And the result: clinical operations and not heart-warming stories.

I distinctly remember a discussion with a brand manager many years ago. It was for a brand of headache pills. I presented a humourous script. The brand manager got quite upset and said: “People don’t have a sense of humour when they have a headache”. I argued that “people don’t watch TV when they have a headache. The task of advertising is to make them remember us when they are not watching TV and do have a headache”. He just didn’t relent and I lost the battle and had to create a ‘boring’ script. It took me many years to realise the reason why he did not want humourous advertising. He wanted a very boring and irritating ad, so that people would get a headache and then he could sell his pill!

It is only when we get consumed by our product that we forget the consumer and treat her like an idiot who has to be fed with features that are more important to us than to her. Look at the charm of Daag acche hain. I think my middle-class family in Jaipur would have understood and loved it in the ’70s as much as the middle class consumer connects with it today.

Unfortunately, thanks to the ‘misplaced perception’ of the advertiser and advertising community of those times, my poor mother had to suffer some magnified, microscopic view of some lab test where some black particles were released from something that looked like a close-up of the weave of a charpai. Pepsi’s ‘ Nothing official about it’ and Asian Paints ‘Celebrate’ campaigns are landmarks that remind us that our consumer has always been evolved and likes to participate or be engaged with our advertising. Cadbury’s and Hamara Bajaj did not have to sell features in the early nineties. They did not have to spell out their messages. They treated the consumer as intelligent beings who liked to fill in the blanks and enjoy their intelligence to be recognised.

Everyone loved Fevicol in the ’80s; everyone still loves it in 2008. And mind you, these people did not have to go and do an “advertising appreciation course” in the interim to enjoy these campaigns Back in 2004, I was waiting for my car outside Rambagh Palace Hotel in Jaipur when the watchman — a handsome looking 70-year-old man with an eight-inch Rajasthani moustache — walked up to me. He probably had not studied beyond class four or five. He said: “Sir, you have left Jaipur for good?” I replied in the negative and told him it is my hometown, that my mother lives here. I come here very often. He laughed and I could see a twinkle in his eye as he said: “So you are stuck to Jaipur as if with Fevicol”. QED. The ultimate reflection of the intelligent consumer! W

ith a ten-fold increase in media exposure, the pressure is now more on us — advertiser and advertising agencies. Consumers have grown smarter and are able to make bigger connections — fill paragraphs, not just blanks. If we don’t treat them with the respect they deserve, they will oust us from their lives and we will be left writing only intelligent articles on “Has the Indian consumer evolved?”

(The author is executive chairman and national creative director, Ogilvy & Mather India)