Adman and IIT alumnus MG Parameswaran aka ‘Ambi’, Executive Director and CEO of Draftfcb-Ulka Advertising, Mumbai, has just authored his seventh book on brands and advertising, titled ‘For God’s Sake – An Adman on the Business of Religion’. He talks to Srabana Lahiri about linking religiosity of the changing Indian consumer to consumption trends and marketing opportunity, and how five years of research for his doctoral thesis became the basis for the book
Q] Connecting religion to consumption and marketing – how did the idea for the book occur to you?
The idea of studying religion and consumer behaviour came when I was exploring a topic for my doctoral studies at Mumbai University. I originally wanted to take up ‘caste’ and ‘consumption’. But my PhD guide, Prof R K Srivastava, advised me not to take up such a niche topic, on which there was probably nothing published globally. So my search started afresh and I discovered that religion and consumer behaviour is an area that has been researched globally to some extent, but was relatively new ground in India. This led to my PhD, on ‘Religiosity and Consumer Behaviour with respect to Consumer Durables’. While working on the thesis, you get to read a lot of literature; I must have read more than 50 books and may be 400 articles. The idea of converting the thesis into a book came to me when I was writing my thesis report.
Q] From Halal cosmetics to Vastu Shastra discussed in ‘For God’s Sake...’- tell us about the remendous research that has gone into the writing of the book.
The thesis work took me five years, and this book got written in about six months. I think I could write the book in six months simply because over the five years, I had docked away a lot of interesting information which I pulled out. The challenge was to structure the book in a way so that it is enjoyable to a lay reader. Anish Chandy of Penguin played a vital role in structuring the book into chapters, with a clear start, a middle and an end summary. He had cautioned me not to go beyond 10 chapters, but ended up with 20+. I had left it to Anish to knock some chapters out, but he decided to keep them all. In a way, the book has a wide canvas from music to Vaastu to status of women to Muslim consumers to MBA education. The scope is vast simply because religion touches us in so many different ways. It is a fascinating voyage of discovery.
Q] How can the ad-media-marketing world help a country prone to religious fanaticism?
Advertising cannot change social mores, but can at best not aggravate them. To this extent, Indian advertising has played a meaningful role in helping women redefine their role in homes. Where we have used religion at the heart of an advertisement, we have ensured it is used in an inclusive manner and not as a divisive power. But that said, the job of advertising is at best to reflect popular culture and not change it.
Q] Any anecdote that you can recount in the course of writing the book?
My editor and I had been deep in debate on a catchy name for the book for over two months. I happened to share my wish for a new name for the religion/consumer book with my wife Nithya and son Aditya, as we were walking down the Mission District in San Francisco. It was Nithya who suggested the name ‘For God’s Sake’. In fact, the Mission District got its name from the Mission San Francisco de Asis, founded by Spanish priest Father Francisco Palou in 1776.
Q] What is the next book you want to write?
The topic of religion and consumer can yield some more books. There are also other ideas for books, but it will depend on what response this book gets from readers and critics. So I do hope, For God’s Sake, the book finds ready acceptance.
EXCERPT
The Mystery of the Missing Bindi
It was September 1994. Our agency DraftFCB Ulka (then Ulka Advertising) had just completed a new advertising film for the soap brand Santoor. The new creative was set in an aerobics studio and featured the Santoor woman exercising to some lively music. The ad, which was being shot by the veteran ad film director Prahlad Kakkar, was going to be a breakthrough. All of us in the agency believed that it would work in the marketplace to resurrect the brand that had hit a plateau after seeing great growth for a few years. We had in fact bet the agency’s reputation on this ad with our long-term client Wipro. But I was very worried.
I suddenly remembered that right through the film the Santoor woman was not shown sporting a bindi. In the story, she was a mother and her kid enters the scene with a loud ‘mummy’ squeal much to the surprise of onlookers. How could we have missed out on the bindi, I wondered.
First thing next morning I called our film manager Monia Pinto and asked her if we could ‘rotoscope’ a bindi on the model Priya Kakkar’s forehead (rotoscopy is a technique whereby you insert a digital image into a real-life moving picture; it was relatively new and very expensive in the mid 1990s; the Hollywood film Who Framed Roger Rabbit had used this to great effect). Monia, the liberal that she is, pooh-poohed my worry. As did many of my other colleagues. The film was presented to the client, aired on television and became a landmark film in the history of brand Santoor. The Santoor woman, sans bindi, went on to play cricket, teach hula hoop to her kid and even made film stars dance to her tune over the next decade, helping make Santoor the third largest soap brand in the country.
But the bindi thought stayed with me. The bindi is a part of Hindu culture and even has a strong tantric underpinning. Both men and women wear the bindi or bindu, which means drop or globule. It is supposed to be the sacred symbol of the universe, depicted as a dot or the zero. Applied between the eyebrows, it is purported to be the position of the sixth chakra, a place which is also the exit point of kundalini energy. Tantric literature abounds with explanations on the red bindu (symbolizing fire/blood) and white bindu (symbolizing semen). Married women also wear red vermilion or sindoor in the parting of their hair, which is first applied there by their husband on their wedding day, during the sindoordana ceremony. Only married women are allowed to wear the sindoor, according to Hindu custom. Interestingly, though Islam does not have a bindi or sindoor custom, most Muslim women in Bangladesh sport a bindi. Even in Pakistan, Muslim women at times wear designer bindis, quite ignoring the Hindu symbolism of the bindi.
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Not too many people know all this socio-cultural background to the humble bindi. And the Indian advertising industry is populated by young men and women from upper-middle-class families. Most of them are what are called EMTs (or English Medium Types). The scenario is changing rapidly now with an increasing number of HMTs (Hindi Medium Types) joining the tribe, but the EMT orientation remains.These EMTs were told, in the early days of their training, to ensure that advertising did not hurt anyone’s sentiment, least of all the Indian woman’s. So all ads that showed married women had to show them with a mangalsutra and a bindi! (Professor Julien Cayla of the University of New South Wales discovered that Indian Muslim women, whom she has studied extensively, were almost immune to this religious symbolism in most Indian television advertising.)
My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to see if Indian advertising had evolved from the ‘bindi–mangalsutra’ trap. Accessing advertising archive services, my colleagues and I managed to extract around a hundred television commercials for packaged consumer goods (soaps, toothpastes, shampoos, tea, etc.) from 1987, 1997 and 2007. We wanted to see whether the portrayal of Indian women had changed in the three decades under study.
Using content analysis techniques, we analysed the ads across several dimensions such as role portrayed by women (spouse, mother, working woman, celebrity) and occupation and setting (home, workplace, shopping, etc.). In addition to these specific well documented international metrics, we also added a few of our own Indian metrics. These were the dress worn by the woman (sari, other Indian apparel, western apparel) and the presence or absence of the bindi and other religious symbols (mangalsutra).
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From almost 75 per cent of women in ads in 1997 sporting a bindi, it was down to less than 30 per cent in 2007. (The next time you watch television, do check if you can spot an ad that shows a woman sporting a sari, a mangalsutra and a bindi. And reflect if these symbols trigger something in your mind. What do you think is the woman’s education level? What social class do you think she belongs to? What is her age? What would her outlook to innovative products and services be? What kind of mother would she be? As a wife, what would her big worries be?)
We then turned our gaze towards print advertising. When Femina celebrated its fiftieth birthday a few years ago, we took the opportunity to revisit our hypothesis of the missing bindi. Our researchers spent several days at the Femina archives pulling out ads that portrayed women. We pulled out ten ads per year in a random but systematic process and in the end got to look at almost 500 ads that featured a picture of a woman over the five-decade period. These 500 ads were subjected to the same analysis as the television ads. We found that as against 3 per cent of ads portraying working women in the 1960s, the number had increased to 16 per cent in the new millennium. Once again, the sari and bindi stood out in our analysis.
While 55 per cent of women shown in the ads from the 1960s were draped in a sari, the number was down to 9 per cent five decades later. What about the bindi? The dot had almost vanished—from 45 per cent to 5 per cent in the same period.
[Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from ‘For God’s Sake: An Adman On The Business Of Religion’ by Ambi Parameswaran, (Portfolio|Penguin); Price: Rs 499]
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