Superior

It’s not just animals that early humans – our ancestors – slaughtered, making many of them extinct. They killed rival human species too. There is a point of view that several weaker human species perished in the hands of more robust superior humans, becoming totally extinct. Some, of course, fled to distant regions, living isolated lives, limiting or slowing down their evolutionary growth.

The victors evolved progressively, moving from living in natural sites such as rock shelters and caves for temporary refuge to forests where they learnt to build primitive huts from branches of trees and settle down in tribes/communities. Animals found in the forests in their wild state provided basic food – both milk and meat. Some species of birds provided eggs and meat as well. Those living near rivers or the sea learnt to catch and eat fish and turtles. Most food was eaten raw, but, with the discovery of fire some 20,000 years ago (I’m not sure about this date), roasting of meat became common practice.

Social and economic management came into practice as well, with division of labour and barter systems enabling smooth functioning of the overall tribe/community. Different people were allotted and participated in different tasks, ensuring that the entire tribe/community benefited from their collective effort. For instance, while the men hunted animals for food, the women gathered fruits and grains near their settlements. At this time, an important economic discovery was made: early man learnt to store goods for future use, thereby creating the concept and the value of ‘surplus’.

Technology, apart from fire, was still limited to stone tools and the improvement of this technology – the creation and use of better and better stone tools – is really what defined human evolution. The stone tool was no longer just a weapon for protection and hunting, but began to be used for cutting, chopping, axing, cleaving, carving, boring, drilling, pounding, grinding… the applications were numerous. Many more tasks could be performed with these new stone tools, and along with tools made from animal/human bones, our ancestors were not only superior, but virtually unconquerable.

Lord of the beasts

[No, it’s not the lion.]

Although we like to fantasise about dinosaurs and humans in a fight to death, dinosaurs were extinct long before humans were found on Earth. According to the established and accepted systems of dating the Earth – in Geological Ages – dinosaurs lived in the Mesozoic Era, somewhere between 248 million years and 65 million years ago (give or take 5 million years). The first humans were found only 2 million years ago or thereabouts.

It is acceptable today to describe or define the first humans as those who, having emerged from the ape species (the hominids), could naturally walk erect on its two legs (a biped). Evidence from fossils, dating between 2.6 million and 1.7 million years ago, points to Africa – particularly East and South Africa – as the earliest source of human life form, called the homo habilis.

The homo habilis – and a younger contemporary, the homo erectus – were really something to talk about. They had a much larger brain than other hominids of the time, and expectedly, greater intelligence. Evidence suggests that they may have lived collectively in groups, uttered gargling sounds which could be believed to be the first ‘words’, and could make stone tools by striking one stone against another, breaking away flakes to get a cutting edge.

This cutting-edge technology allowed the early humans to make weapons, which were used for protection and to kill other animals. Kill they did in such large numbers that many animals became extinct or reduced drastically in numbers. Lions, tigers, leopards… fell in this category. Some fled and survived in the wild as humans began to form colonies and settle down in specific locations.

As lord of the beasts, man promoted only those animals – such as horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, poultry, dogs, cats, and even elephants – which he could domesticate or bring within his control by other means. Others had to take their own chances. In a fight to death, early man ruled over all animals… and lived to tell the tale.

An organised life

In a settlement, many of the surprises common to a nomadic life of a hunter-gatherer – such as travelling to unknown destinations, discovering new terrains, foraging for food, protecting oneself and the tribe from predators and other adversities – were replaced by routine activities in an all-too-familiar territory. Uncertainties were rooted out and life was organised.

Of course, a settled life didn’t mean peace and harmony. New problems surfaced: how to manage resources on a sustainable basis; how to till the land so as to get more yield year after year; how to store food and other commodities without spoiling them; how to harness the power of the seasons; how to deal with conflict arising from people living in close proximity.

Slowly a sense of self emerged in the early human settler; along with it, a consciousness of differential access to resources, skills and knowledge. And thus, to social status. Personal possessions became important. People used differences in their material possessions, as well as their knowledge and skills, to express their economic and social differences from others in the settlement.

Tensions grew, posing problems to the organised life that had been created.

A lazy man's approach

In the halls of history, anthropology and archaeology, there’s a debate raging over similarities between recent societies and past civilisations, taking discussions all the way back to the evolution of human beings. Who are we? Where do we come from? Are there links between colonies of cavemen and present societies?

It seems, finding answers to questions on whether we, today, bear any resemblance to our ancestors living thousands of years ago is turning out to be more difficult than expected. Especially from an archaeological point of view, since archaeology has to provide hard evidence to justify every theory.

Much to the disappointment of archaeologists, many colonies belonging to our Stone Age (or even earlier) ancestors may have developed into metropolitan cities of today, thereby denying them opportunities for archaeological digs and discoveries. And so, thanks to progress and development, a great deal of valuable evidence of our past may be lost forever.

There are theories on how colonies were formed, growing from a simple gathering of nomadic hunter-gatherers to groups of human dwellings to full settlements, which bear resemblance to immigrant movements and lifestyles of today. In one theory, based on analysis of bone chemistry of skeletons excavated from archaeological sites, archaeologists have found that many of our ancestors may have been lazy – practising a sedentary lifestyle.

From dietary patterns, research has found that early humans had given up their foraging lifestyle, trekking across vast landscapes as hunter-gatherers, to settle down to a quieter life in areas which were rich in resources. After all, the trek and the hunt were in search of ‘resources’, fairly similar to immigrant populations of today in search of 'resources' leading to a better life.

With these early humans, soon settlement patterns became fixed; specialisations over local resources developed into common tasks and professions; daily routine became lifestyle. As long as the settlement did not run out of resources, there was no need to move. Over thousands of years, settlements such as these slowly developed into cities.

It’s interesting to note how a lazy man’s approach to life may have actually created great civilisations of today.

Creatures of the past

[No, this is not about pre-historic animals.]

In every community there exist connections between people. Between one individual and another; between groups of individuals; and between one individual and the community as a whole. These connections constitute a community’s social capital. This social capital, like its culture and identity, is something people simply have. It’s a leftover from their long dwelling together as a group… a sort of continuity with their past.

The nature of some of these connections gets modified over the years; but, all in all, they remain, collectively as social capital, an important component of the community and its prosperity. In fact, the potential for this social capital actually spreads beyond the community – i.e. the immediate group of people who constitute the community – and influences others outside it. Depending on their social capital, some communities welcome others, embracing new cultures and new thinking. Some exude negative vibes and actually repel outsiders.

Racism, genocide, caste-based behaviour and communal feelings are examples of such negative social capital. Or, correctly, negative externalisation of such social capital. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate one from the other. Internally, the social capital of a community can act as a cohesive or binding force, enhancing the functioning of the community; but externally, it can treat people with suspicion, hostility and hatred… excluding others as outsiders. Some of these negative feelings have a history behind them, embedded as they have been in the minds of people for generations, and are difficult to change or erase.

Hopefully, with globalisation, the social capital of communities and countries will improve, creating a better place to live for all of us. But, then again, who knows? We are, after all, creatures of the past.

Elementary societies

Social capital in the form of cooperation and trust is an integral part of all societies and economies. Some of them may even thrive on the notion that cooperation and trust are its basic foundation. This notion is typical of small communities like tribes and villages rather than modern metropolitan cities; and, I guess, is more a characteristic of the underdeveloped or developing economies than the prosperous ones.

This phenomenon can be seen today in the adivasis (ancient tribes of India) who still live by themselves in self-sustaining self-reliant communities, governed by the policies of their own tribe/community. Everyone knows everyone else in the tribe/community, and everything is done to contribute to the general well-being of the tribe/community. Within the adivasis, the notion of selfishness is almost non-existent.

It’s an elementary form of society/economy, carried forward from pre-historic times when there were no formal policies or laws or institutions guiding tribes or people. Cooperation and trust were the only means of survival and prosperity for these tribes/communities.

Although informal in nature, the norms of social interaction, joint effort and governance adopted by these tribes/communities were quite effective, and governed these tribes/communities efficiently. The tribes/communities prospered to become great civilisations and, today, form the societies and economies of which we are a part.

However, over hundreds of thousands of years, societies/economies have become more complex. Goods which were once freely available have become scarce, and competition has become a driving force behind economies and human behaviour. Nations have been formed, politically demarcating geographies, human populations, cultures and ideologies. Laws and institutions have been established for governance; while religion and systems of family/community education have assumed the role of instilling moral order.

Social capital and the moral order

Where does moral order come from? Do we really have, as Marc Hauser proposes, an automatic ability to distinguish right from wrong? Is our moral order really a function of our biological evolution? What are the implications of a breakdown in the moral order in a society?

Some seven years earlier, in his book, ‘The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order’, Johns Hopkins professor Francis Fukuyama had suggested something similar: that human beings were biologically driven to establish moral values. That these values evolved from the ground up, rather than being imposed by government or organised religion.

If this theory is true, does it mean that the growing corruption that worries Indian youths today (see my previous post) is really a reflection of themselves?

Professor Fukuyama’s book did not mention India. It occupied itself with the United States and Western society, specifically with their development in the past 50 years. However, professor Fukuyama did talk about social capital as a key building block of modern society, something that permitted cooperation and trust within its members. He suggested that as social capital depleted in a society, so did cooperation and trust within its members. This, in turn, resulted in an increase in family break-ups, drug use, crime, and other anti-social behaviour.

Could this theory be true? If social pathology was an indicator – a measure, perhaps – of overall social trust, what meaning did it have for the level of corruption in India today?

[Professor Fukuyama defined social capital as “a set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permits cooperation among them. If members of the group come to expect that others will behave reliably and honestly, they will come to trust one another.”]

Apathy

Sometime ago, as I stepped out of a retail store in Mumbai, I was confronted by a group of college students who wanted to interview me on the growing corruption in our country.

I’m afraid I gave them all the wrong answers: that corruption is a fact of life; that it’s everywhere, and not confined only to India; that money corrupts, power corrupts, sex corrupts, materialism corrupts, our greed corrupts; that the situation is likely to remain so despite our efforts to reduce it; that I had no idea how corruption could be managed apart from public awareness and action.

Looking back, I feel ashamed.

How could I have been so insensitive to those students and their desire to bring about a better life for everyone? Isn’t corruption a social evil we could all do without? At least, those students were attempting to address the issue of corruption in India. With all my maturity and experience, I was doing absolutely nothing about it.

If those students could not rely on the support of elders like me, who could they turn to? What kind of social and moral order was I presenting to those students? Has corruption permeated to such levels of morality that people like me actually give our consent to corruption by not challenging it? Does that mean my moral values need re-evaluation as well?

I believe people, individually or in groups, create social and moral orders for themselves as a natural process. I believe they create these orders on common shared values that build societies and civilisations. I believe India is a prime example of this, and she has a 5,000-year-old heritage to prove it.

I believe, in recent years particularly, the media in India has helped broadcast these common shared values to millions of people across the country, accelerating India’s growth. I believe this has resulted in positive shifts in values within families, within communities, at work, and between partners.

Yet, I see a breakdown of the family structure that India was so proud of. I see a hedonistic individualism replacing common shared values. I see ‘personal gains’ as the driving force behind the new social and moral order. And, for the weak, I see apathy as its greatest corrupting influence.

Morality: a collective possession

According to recent theories, such as those proposed by Harvard professor Marc Hauser, the human capacity to make moral distinctions – right from wrong, good from evil – is programmed into the brain.

Across the globe, people follow the same basic rules of morality – a limited set of rules which professor Hauser calls ‘moral grammar’. However, professor Hauser cautions us, the actual moral choices of the individual person also depends on how the culture (in which the individual grows up in) uses this grammar, as well as on the emotions the person experiences when he sees others contradict what he has learnt to believe is good.

Could this mean morality is something we have as an existential possession? An inheritance from our forefathers that guides the way we live our lives today? Could morality, like language or ethnic identity, be a sort of collective possession of groups of people, binding them into socio-cultural orders?

If so, then morality may be a key factor in the construction and maintenance of these communities and individual cultures. That might explain why family values, the law, the education system, the interpretation and practice of religion, the media vary from one culture to another.

If we study films as representations of culture and morality, we find many differences between India and the rest of the world. Indian films do not explicitly show on-screen kissing or sex. Topics like homosexuality or incest are taboo. Even within India, at a regional level, there are clear differences. For instance, films from the state of Tamil Nadu in South India are permissive, showing a lot of skin on their female actors; while films from Kerala, a state next door, are more modest, preferring to stay away from any overt display of skin.

Why is this so? Perhaps, morality is as much a consequence of a community’s sense of self, cultural upbringing and existential well-being – a collective possession, so to speak – as it is a universal feature of programming in the human brain.

The fact of the matter

Is there such a thing as a moral fact?

There are facts that prove things to be true – at least as we know them now. For instance, all things fall due to gravity. The Earth is round and not flat as it was once thought to be. A liquid takes the shape of the container it is held in. There are 60 minutes to the hour. Sugar is sweet to taste. Men are different from women in their physical appearance.

Evidence can be provided as proof of such facts; and rational people accept such evidence, proof and facts in their daily lives. For, these facts guide our actions.

However, when it comes to morals, life becomes complicated. Facts are no longer facts – measurable quantities or proven axioms – but issues guided, or influenced, by our personal interest, our appetite for or aversion to risk, and strategic considerations with a view to a larger or long-term goal.

Therein lies the rub. For example, even if we know that causing intentional harm to others is morally wrong, we may still decide to act upon it.

Although a child knows he should not tell a lie, he may still do so to protect himself or a friend from punishment. Although an adult knows that he should not tell a lie, he may still do so in order to avoid hurting others, or to avoid creating an ugly scene at a specific moment, or to take advantage of a situation.

How does the child or the adult take such decisions – sometimes instantaneous, almost instinctive, decisions – on morality and stray away from, or even violate, social or parental teaching, knowing full well the facts of the matter?

Faced with a moral question, people, both young and old, apply their minds from the point of view of what they believe is the nature of the situation at hand – in other words, the facts of the matter – and make up their minds, sometimes instantly, to act in a specific manner.

The process of making up their minds – and, in turn, the moral outcome – is, of course, guided, or influenced, by their personal interest, their appetite for or aversion to risk, and strategic considerations with a view to a larger or long-term goal.

Then there’s the issue of human instinct, as well as the theory of moral grammar that Harvard professor Marc Hauser talks about.

The fact of the matter about what is right or wrong, about what morally ought or ought not to be done, or how people will act in a given situation, are not easy to determine, nor explain.


[Citation: ‘Moral Realism and Cross-Cultural Normative Diversity’ – a paper by Edouard Machery, Daniel Kelly, Stephen P. Stich]

Moral choices

Are there principles in life that teach us how to differentiate between good and evil? If there are such principles, are they evolutionary – genetically programmed in us – and remain common for all of us on this planet? Or, do they change from one culture to another?

Some sociologists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists – like Harvard professor Marc Hauser – believe there is a universal ‘moral grammar’ underlying all specific moral norms that different cultures embrace. For example, everywhere, people recognise universal values such as fairness, responsibility and gratitude – and oppose cruelty, unfairness and oppression. This ‘moral grammar’ is programmed into our brains as a part of our evolutionary process.

Moral choices depend on how each culture uses this basic ‘moral grammar’. If we reward those brains that mean well for our culture and us, we are likely to create civilisations which promise a bright and peaceful future.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time, when man had just evolved from apes to take on the human form, there was no concept of good or evil, right or wrong. The concept of moral or immoral behaviour did not exist in man’s consciousness at that time. Man acted on impulse, with no thought for the consequences of his actions… on others.

Gradually, man began to identify with himself; then with his family, his community, his tribe. His conscience was awakened. He became conscious of doing good, as different from doing harm, to others. He began to understand that some of his actions were right; some wrong. He began to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil.

And man understood that right or wrong, good or evil, moral or immoral behaviour are concepts… each depending on the other for its existence.

The important thing to do

It’s all right to let millions of people die from starvation, AIDS, pestilence and war – or a combination of these – while we enjoy an easy life, consuming more and more to satisfy our inner desires. After all, it’s not directly affecting us. Not at the moment. And, the way things are, it’s not likely to do so, soon. So, let’s carry on with our lives just the way we have been.

Or, maybe we should stop and listen to people like Bono (see my earlier post) and a thousand others who campaign against life’s inequalities – for others, not themselves. Maybe we, too, should have the courage and the motivation to step up to do something about what we feel is not right in this world. To think of others, and not just ourselves. Simply because, as human beings, it’s an important thing to do.

Philosophers, historians, social scientists and religions have debated over morals for centuries. And, we are still left with our own conscience. What may be unfair to us may not be so to others. Even the degree of unfairness in a specific situation – the gravity of it – may be debated. This measuring of a situation’s unfairness may divide us into those who act against unfairness and those who don’t. Or, into those who believe someone else should take action, but not us. Or, into those who intend to take action – but, perhaps, not right away.

Then again, what about our feelings? Our passions or our compassion towards another human being or another life? Or, this planet? What about our anger or our excitement at seeing something unfair or cruel happening right before our eyes? What of that? What do we do then?

What is right? What is wrong? How do we decide right from wrong? And, what do we do after that? These questions may dog our minds and take away our sleep at night, but they come later. Much later. What’s important is what we do before our powers of reasoning cloud our minds against unfairness or injustice or cruelty or suffering. Perhaps these should be motivation enough for us to take action.

When will Indian brands turn (RED)?

This is an excerpt from The (RED)™ Manifesto:

“All things being equal, they are not.

As first-world consumers we have tremendous power. What we collectively choose to buy, or not to buy, can change the course of life and history on this planet.

(RED) is that simple an idea. And that powerful. Now, you have a choice. There are (RED) credit cards, (RED) phones, (RED) shoes, (RED) fashion brands. And no, this does not mean they are all red in colour. Although some are.

If you buy a (RED) product or sign up for a (RED) service, at no cost to you, a (RED) company will give some of its profits to buy and distribute anti-retroviral medicine to our brothers and sisters dying of AIDS in Africa.

We believe that when consumers are offered this choice, and the products meet their needs, they will choose (RED). And when they choose (RED) over non-(RED), then more brands will choose to become (RED) because it will make good business sense to do so. And more lives will be saved.

(RED) is not a charity. It is simply a business model.”

Today AIDS is a preventable, treatable disease. Yet 5,500 people are dying from AIDS in Africa everyday. (RED) hopes to address this issue and save lives in Africa.

(RED) is an idea started by Bono (of Irish rock band U2) and Bobby Shriver, Chairman of DATA, earlier this year, to engage consumers and the corporate world with its marketing prowess and funds to fight AIDS. The campaign intends to raise awareness and money for The Global Fund by teaming up with the world’s most iconic brands to produce (PRODUCT)RED branded products. A percentage of each (PRODUCT)RED product sold is given to The Global Fund. The money will help women and children affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The parentheses, or brackets, are used to indicate ‘the embrace’. Each company that becomes (RED) places its logo in this embrace and is then elevated to the power of red. Thus, the name (PRODUCT)RED.

Yesterday, 13 October 2006, (RED) partners Gap, Converse, Motorola and Apple launched their (PRODUCT) RED™ products in stores in the United States and online. (RED) is supported by various celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Penelope Cruz, Don Cheadle, among others.

In India today, the story of HIV/AIDS is as serious, if not worse. The following report is from AVERT, an international AIDS charity working in India:

“India is one of the largest and most heavily populated countries in the world, with over one billion inhabitants. Of this number, at least five million are currently living with HIV. According to some estimates, India has a greater number of people living with HIV than any other nation in the world.

HIV emerged later in India than it did in many other countries, but this has not limited its impact. Infection rates soared throughout the 1990s, and have increased further in recent years. The crisis continues to deepen, as it becomes clearer that the epidemic is affecting all sectors of Indian society, not just the groups – such as sex workers and truck drivers – that it was originally associated with.

In a country where poverty, illiteracy and poor health are rife, the spread of HIV presents a daunting challenge.

There is disagreement over how many people are currently living with HIV in India. UNAIDS (the United Nations agency that co-ordinates global efforts to fight HIV) estimates that there were 5.7 million people in India living with HIV by the end of 2005, suggesting that India has a higher number of people living with HIV than any other country in the world.”

What India needs today is a project similar to (RED). Indian brands and consumers need to come together to address the issue of HIV/AIDS and help rid – or, at least, reduce – the threat of this disease that is spreading across our country.

Will they? If not now, when?

India’s quiet revolution

It’s a shame that many in India think advertising is a bad thing. That it’s distasteful. That, being at the cutting edge of capitalism, advertising is tool to make people buy what they don’t need. That India, struggling with her poverty and her low per capita income, can do without it. This belief, a fallout from our pre-Independence days when Indians had a negative disposition towards anything British, is partly responsible for the poor growth of regional-language newspapers in India. Advertisements in newspapers were considered such a British capitalist thing… to be discarded and trodden upon.

And so, for a long time in India, English newspapers walked away with all the advertising money, leaving regional-language newspapers to flounder like fish out of water. Printing machinery supporting Indian language scripts were difficult to find. Cost of newsprint was high (Indian-language newspapers consumed more newsprint as the scripts took up more space for the same amount of copy). And the distribution channel – the newspaper hawkers – took away a fair share of the income. Income from circulation was too little to sustain a regional-language newspaper on its own.

The central and state governments stepped in to rescue the situation and, despite criticism against them, became large advertisers for India’s regional-language newspapers. Leading the show was central government’s Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP), which still contributes a substantial amount to regional-language advertising, with individual state governments joining in in support of their own vernacular newspapers. Even then, it wasn’t much. Post-Independence, the bulk of advertising spend came from commercial advertisers; and they believed that people with purchasing power could only be reached through English newspapers and magazines. This belief ruled advertising spends in India until recently.

In the eighties, with offset printing technology supporting their enterprise, regional-language newspapers and magazines finally saw a turn in the tide. They could print more, faster and cheaper than ever before; and distribute their publications in the rural markets of India where English newspapers had no presence. With over 70% of India’s population living in rural India, advertisers saw this as an opportunity, re-designing and re-packaging their existing products, or creating new ones, to address the needs of the rural markets… spending good money on advertising in vernacular publications. Circulation figures for regional-language newspapers soared and, with it, advertising revenues.

The Indian-language newspapers gained prominence, fulfilling a dual role. They covered local news, incorporating the culture of the region and connecting with their readers. At the same time, they brought national (and international) news and information about products and services into the household of the rural Indian. Both regional/local as well as national advertisers woke up to this fact and increased their advertising spends in vernacular newspapers. According to Aroon Purie of India Today, in the Frames 2006 conference organised by FICCI in March this year, there is a heavy growth in vernacular publications, with Hindi publications growing at 68% and Telegu publications growing at 63%.

However, all was not hunky-dory for the vernacular publications. At the same conference, Jacob Matthew of Malayala Manorama stated that, during 2002-04, although advertising contributed 60% of revenues, most vernacular newspapers dependent on revenues from circulation as well – some even for their survival. Apparently, of the total advertising pie of Rs.10,900 crores for print advertising in India (from a PWC-FICCI study which was launched in Frames 2006), English publications still cornered 50% of advertising revenues. Perhaps, we haven’t got over our English hangover yet.

Nevertheless, a 50% chunk of the print advertising revenue pie is a huge gain for regional-language newspapers. With growth pegged anywhere between 12-16%, it’s likely to overtake spends in English publications very soon. I’d say, this is nothing short of a revolution.

[Here’s more data from Frames 2006: S K Arora, Secretary of the Information & Broadcasting Ministry, commented that print readership in the urban sector was flattening out, but there were superb gains in the rural market. These gains were coming from approx. 47,000 Indian-language publications, of which 22,000 were in Hindi and the rest in 90 regional languages. (Apparently there are 9,000 English publications in India.)]

The story has just begun

Very few people can read in English in India. My guess is, of the literate population (people who can sign their names – approx. 2 out of 3 Indians), it’s 5%. That would mean around 40 million (give or take 5 million) people know English well enough to read English newspapers in India. Still, the English newspaper industry is flourishing, garnering a substantial part of the advertising revenues. That’s reason enough for several Western media companies to invest in India (see my previous post ‘India assures a future for print journalism in English’).

This bias towards English newspapers was, perhaps, expected. The issue is language: India uses 18 different languages in 10 different scripts, much of it distributed geographically. No single Indian language can reach out to all of India. Indian-language newspapers have always suffered from this. Moreover, printing technology had responded rather late to India’s need for available scripts. There was a lack of mechanical typesetting facility for composing in Indian languages. Yet again, the problem was expected.

Indian languages are complex, with many more letters to their alphabet (a dozen or so more) compared to English or the Roman script. Then, the shapes of the letters created a dilemma, sometimes with two or more letters combining to create another letter-form. If this isn’t enough, Indian language scripts use space both above and below the line, taking up more vertical space (on an average, Indian scripts take up 15% more space than Roman scripts while setting a block of text – i.e. slightly fewer words into a given space Roman scripts). Although hot-metal casting of type in the Roman alphabet was in regular use by the 1880s, it took another 50 years to perfect a similar technology for Indian languages.

In spite of these drawbacks, India did have its language newspapers as early as 1821 when Raja Rammohan Roy in Calcutta published the first-known Indian newspaper in Bengali called Sangbad Kaumudi. This newspaper, unfortunately, is long forgotten. In 1822, Fardoonjee Marzban in Bombay published Mumbai Samachar in Gujarati, which is published even today, making it the earliest Indian newspaper on record today. The first English newspaper in Bombay was printed much earlier in 1777 by Rustomji Keshaspathi (I’m not sure what it was called).

Offset printing technology and photocomposition of type came to India in the late 1960s, once again, with a bias towards the Roman script. It took another 20 years to become popular with Indian-language newspapers as the computers and software necessary to use offset printing technology was not readily available in the Indian languages. With offset presses in place, the late eighties saw the beginning of a printing revolution in Indian-language newspapers, the benefits of which are visible today – not only in news and editorial, but also in advertising. For the Indian-language newspaper, the story has just begun.

Yet another dilemma

“You were who you were because of the language and dialect you spoke, the location of the village of your male ancestors, the family and religion you were born into. I was a Bengali and proud of it, which meant that I claimed as heritage a culture distinct from that of a Bihari or a Punjabi or a Gujarati or a Tamil. That’s the way we were brought up in Calcutta in the Fifties. We were encouraged to set ourselves apart from people of other Indian states.”
(from ‘An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee’ by Tina Chen and S X Goudie, University of California, Berkeley, 1997)

I wonder if things have changed much in India since the Fifties as far as this observation goes in defining our identity. In India today, we still identify ourselves with our father’s name and his cultural/ethnic background. Mind you, this is not an extraordinary notion contained within India. All over the world, after defining their nationality, people do make a reference to their roots/origins – indicating a consciousness that people carry about their social identities.

The significance of this social identity increases with migration – of the kind India is experiencing today as millions of people from the rural setting are moving into the cities (see my previous post). Migration leads to fusion of cultures, interracial marriages and, perhaps, more confusion over identities. Governing all of this is a history of a nation of poor people. For marketers trying to champion their cause in such a marketplace this is a real challenge.

How do marketers win the hearts and minds of consumers who are so diverse that reaching out to them means communicating in 18 different languages? How do marketers identify and use the myriad images, colours, symbols and nuances that are the building-blocks of a hundred different cultures? How do marketers create demand in millions of consumers who have been used to using wood and coal and kerosene as their source of energy?

Despite the much-flaunted modern India of mobilephones, fast cars and Western fashion, India has retained many of its former characteristics. A sense of self-identity as defined by our place of birth and our male ancestors, which Bharati Mukherjee spoke of, is one such critical characteristic that defines our buying habits and consumption patterns. For marketers, the challenge is to understand this and find innovative ways of blending India’s past with the future through sustainable marketing and advertising campaigns.

It’s yet another dilemma for the marketers. Though one thing is for sure, India’s regional/local language media is likely to benefit from this the most.

[Bharati Mukherjee is the author of four novels, two short-story collections, and two works of non-fiction (co-authored with her husband Clark Blaise), and a well-known creator of immigrant literary theory “that embodies her sense of what it means to be a woman writer of Bengali-Indian origin who has lived in, and been indelibly marked by, both Canada and the United States.”]

India’s cities: a life source for millions

As India’s urban affluent head out on the highways for a joy ride in their fast cars (see my previous post), millions from India’s over 600,000 impoverished villages move into the cities for a daily living. Travelling in trucks and buses, on trains and even on foot, they migrate not only to the nearest town but also to distant cities (people move from Orissa to Delhi, Bihar to Surat, Kerala to Mumbai), offering themselves as cheap labour to their new city employers.

Working for 50 rupees a day (just over US$1), they take their chances with the new economy that has permeated everything they see, leaving behind their fields and their farming forever. Typically, they look for factory jobs or jobs at construction sites, in groups, sharing meals, spending nights in most squalid conditions. Supply outstripping demand, many are found begging on the streets or turning to crime. If they get lucky, they become street vendors, owing their allegiance to a local ‘boss’.

Of course, not all migration is of this type. There are others: smarter people, with some education, coming to the city with a friend’s contact, staying eight to a room. They take up jobs in shops or offices (recent attractions have been India’s retail and service sectors); become drivers for cars, auto-rickshaws or tempos (India’s version of utility vehicles); perhaps join the police force; or, in a place like Surat, become a well-paid diamond polisher. They get absorbed by the city, straining its resources, and, in turn, over the years, changing the city’s demography and culture.

There’s a churn in the villages too. With people moving out of villages, the village landlord’s power base is slowly withering. Moreover, when these city migrants return home for a visit, they not only bring with them money for the family, but also a new outlook to life and self-governance. They share their stories and experiences of their struggle, of sustenance, of self-reliance, of consumerism, of indulgence, of aspirations… giving hope to millions who, in turn, look to India’s cities as a life source.

The road to glory

There was a time when, to an Indian, owning a car was an achievement. Those who owned one were rich; those who owned more than one were filthy rich. There were two types of cars to choose from: Fiats and Ambassadors. Their shapes, their engineering, even the colours they were available in, didn’t change much over the years. Whoever owned a car owned one of these models, moving around town with an air of superciliousness. The rest of India either admired them or hated them.

In the 1980s, things changed with the entry of Maruti Suzuki. They introduced a small car and a small van – Sanjay Gandhi’s dream, although no-one gives him any credit for it – in bright colours, with low noise, faster pick-up and better fuel efficiency than the Fiat or the Ambassador prevalent on the roads at that time. Marutis became extremely popular, overshadowing attempts by the Contessa and the Standard 2000 to create a luxury segment in the Indian auto industry. Millions of Indians began to see new possibilities. For the middle-class, owning a car in the future was going to be a reality.

After a 15-year journey, that future is here. Indians are buying cars left right and centre, with a million new cars coming on the roads every year in various models, sizes and colours. Not just Indian brands, but foreign car companies are now in India with their manufacturing and marketing facilities, introducing new models every three years. India has now become one of the fastest-growing car markets in the world. Cars have become the new symbol of recognition in society – a metaphor for status and privilege, and the new consumerism that has flooded the country.

With better engineering, the new cars also represent speed. To accommodate this, India is now gearing up to revamp her roads and highways. Cities are expanding their roads, building flyovers, and installing better traffic-control systems. Still, progress is slow and congestions on city roads are worrisome, sometimes frustrating, particularly during rush hours.

The situation in Bangalore, for instance, is so bad that, on several occasions, travelling to and from the airport – a distance of 10 kms – has taken me more than an hour. People in Bangalore are infuriated with the traffic. Media reports have voiced that well-known business houses in Bangalore are planning to curb further investments in the city and move elsewhere, in an effort to highlight the government’s lack of concern in addressing the traffic-congestion issue.

However, some Indians are unfazed. They are taking to the highways with their fast cars. Going out on a 200-km road trip over the weekend, driving between cities or between a city and a holiday resort, instead of the usual train, is becoming common these days. Even when the highways weren’t so good, in 2001, I had done the 1100-km journey between Mumbai and Bangalore (and back again) in less than 18 hours. Although slow by Western standards, believe me, it was a pleasure!

Now the Indian government has stepped in, upgrading the national highways into 4 or 6-lane traffic. A major project is building the Golden Quadrilateral, a superhighway that connects Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Some portions are already over, welcoming fast cars and motorbikes with open stretches never experienced before. For Indians with fast cars, looks like the glory days are here.

So many mouths to feed, but who’s complaining!

“India represents an economic opportunity on a massive scale, both as a global base and as a domestic market… Recent times have seen an awakening of interest in what India has to offer to global businesses.”
(A September 2005 KPMG report, ‘Consumer Markets in India – the next big thing?’)

With over a billion people, you can imagine how much food is consumed in India everyday. One estimate says that, every year, India produces one ton of food for every single inhabitant. Got that! In spite of many people living below the poverty line, some starving to death, India is a huge consumer base for the world’s food and drinks market. Since this market is unorganised, with millions of small self- or family-owned shops, it’s difficult to estimate its size. A 2004 estimate by FICCI pegs it at US$70 billion for food alone. Beverages are likely to account for another US$80 billion at the least, not including alcohol.

The interesting thing is, most food consumed in India is domestically produced. India is the world’s biggest producer of livestock, the biggest producer of milk, and the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables. With a strong vegetarian population, India consumes very little meat or fish (much of India’s marine production is exported) compared to Western or other emerging nations. However, poultry is popular among non-vegetarians. Consumer spend on food varies, but an average Indian family spends half its income on food. This figure, of course, reduces with higher incomes.

Traditionally, Indians are used to consuming fresh food, shopping for fresh produce daily. So far, there’s been little fascination for processed or packaged food (around 2% of India’s agricultural output is processed). But, with globalisation and larger disposable incomes, lifestyles and consuming habits of Indians are changing. Now you can find anything from branded atta to bottled water, coffee to confectionery as packaged food on the shelves at retail stores across the country. The trend is apparent – more and more Indians are choosing to take home processed or packaged food everyday, along with their fresh groceries.

Since 80% of consumer spends in India are estimated to be on FMCG (household and personal-care products, confectionery and tobacco), even a quarter of that spend on processed or packaged food could open up a market of unbelievable proportions. Both Indian and global brands see this as a huge business opportunity, even in the face of government restrictions on direct entry of global brands in the retail sector. Homegrown Indian, as well as MNC, brands are ruling the roost at the moment, but soon most global packaged food brands are expected to be here.

Marketing has already begun in the urban centres and other towns, addressing a population of approx. 250 million. The rural markets are next, hopefully, adding another 250 million to the consumer base in the next 10 years. Opening up to the world a market of 500 million consumers! With so many mouths to feed, nobody’s complaining!

India assures a future for print journalism… in English

While the rest of the world is talking about the death of the printed newspaper (thanks to the Internet), India is on a new high. English-language newspapers in India are growing in circulation as well as in advertising revenues, and there’s talk of new publications coming up in the future. Already Mumbai has seen the launch of Hindustan Times, DNA and Mumbai Mirror, while Mumbai’s Mid-day has recently launched an edition in Bangalore.

But, there’s more. The International Herald Tribune started printing in India earlier this year. The Financial Times picked up a stake in Business Standard and plans to launch a South Asian edition next year. The Hindustan Times group, with branded content from the Wall Street Journal, is planning to launch a business title. Dainik Jagran (a Hindi newspaper group) is planning to print an international edition of the Independent (in English) sometime soon.

India’s regional language newspapers are growing too (even a 1% rise in India’s literacy level impacts newspaper readership), but it’s the English readership segment that the world is watching. What’s the reason for India’s success? The answer lies in India’s fast economic growth and the impact of globalisation – both contributing to a higher standard of living and a Westernised lifestyle. As an outcome, English language is used by more and more people these days, naturally increasing the demand for news in English.

Moreover, Indian newspapers are not threatened by online news and analysis as newspapers in the West are. With low penetration of the Internet – under 5% in India, compared to 69% in the US and 63% in the UK – Indian newspapers are enjoying a double benefit: Not only are they gathering new readers almost every day, they don’t have to compete with online advertising rivals as their Western counterparts do. On the contrary, for English-language newspapers, advertising revenues are soaring.

In the international market, this revenue looks small at the moment. But, with India’s huge population, it promises to grow to substantial levels… in a market which is rapidly shrinking internationally. In the world of print journalism, this looks like some sort of a magical turnaround. One hopes, India will keep her promise.


[Citation: The Guardian, 18 September 2006, ‘India is where the action is’ by Randeep Ramesh (requires user log in)]

A hot job market

India is the next destination for the world. And, it’s not just in tourism or business process outsourcing or in finding consumers for foreign brands, although India has plenty to offer in all these areas as well. The thing is, India is opening up as a huge job market for global talent. Gone are the days when Indians moved overseas for jobs as doctors, engineers, teachers and software professionals. Indian companies, particularly the technology firms, are now hiring foreign nationals at various levels in their organisations.

It started not too long ago, with the Indian IT sector opening up offices globally and hiring local talent to address local needs. It made perfect sense, but, for India, that meant foreign talent on foreign land. With phenomenal growths in software consulting and business process outsourcing in India, and consequent job losses in their own countries, many foreigners turned to India as prospective employees, along with many Indians returning home with a similar hope. After all, India was hiring in large numbers. It made sense to translocate to India, even if it was for a couple of years.

Today, the picture looks brighter. Opportunities have opened up not only in Indian companies, but also in foreign companies moving jobs to India. This includes jobs in the technology sector, financial services, management consulting, healthcare services and media. Apart from offering low-talent electronic back-office jobs in BPOs, India is looking for high-skilled high-profile talent from the world. The good news is that India promises to pay well (well, not exactly at par perhaps, but…) and, thanks to Indian companies becoming global, offer business and management environments comparable to the best in the world.

So what if the heat and hygiene are serious issues, and the food too spicy for the palate, if you have talent and can speak/write in English, you’re likely to find your next job in India.

How the West won

An executive plugs in his iPod on his way to work. A housewife takes her kids to McDonald’s for a birthday party. An auto-rickshaw driver stops to answer a call on his Nokia mobilephone. A teenager strolls into her college in her Nike and Levi’s. A schoolboy rushes home to play with his Microsoft Xbox 360. A family spends a day at the mall, loading their brand new Chevrolet with bagfuls of stuff before returning home to watch a DVD on their Sony system.

These scenes mark India’s changing urban lifestyle. India’s consumer culture is growing at a phenomenal pace, with its urban centres virtually exploding in a retail boom. Cities like Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai are leaping ahead of the rest, flooding the market with branded goods and services. The rest is not too far behind.

This growth is, of course, due to India’s acclaimed IT sector, servicing the world with software and IT-enabled services, creating tens of thousands of well-paying jobs every year. Not to be outdone, pharmaceuticals as well as financial and healthcare services are gearing up, with smaller industries like fashion, gold jewellery and diamonds emerging as highly-favoured players in the global market. The clientele for these industries is unquestionably overseas, and India’s earnings are in dollars and euros.

In exchange, India has opened up its market to the world, embracing a Westernised consumer culture that our forefathers had resisted for fifty years, thanks to our socialistic form of government and our first prime minister’s belief that advertisements made people buy things they did not want. But now, all that has changed. Globalised capitalism has entered our lives and transformed our country into a fast-growing economy, whose appetite for both foreign and local brands seems insatiable.

Marketers in the West have noticed this growing wealth and changing lifestyle of Indian consumers. Some may have even connived with their governments to enter the Indian market and induce this change. After all, apart from China (which is perceived as a contender for the same Indian consumer), where would they find such a huge population of consumers! So, they’ve stepped in with their brands, their marketing strategies and their advertising, investing their time and much-needed funds for India’s growing industries, creating a cultural shift towards Western materialism.

For India, the temptation has been too powerful to resist. The Indian government and the Indian consumer have both lapped it up… just as Lord Krishna had done with his makhan (butter) eons ago (or so the story goes).

It’s time India and the West shared their marketing intel

How do Indian, global and MNC brands survive and succeed in this madness of a market that India is?

Going by the boom in the Indian economy, that’s a multi-billion-dollar question that many marketers want answered. Keeping aside the luck factor, obviously, marketers in India are doing something right. At the core of their marketing ethos is their ability to embrace India’s ethnicity and not challenge it – nor insult it, nor impose upon it – by offering one product or brand that fits all consumer segments.

Applying a global marketing formula for India isn’t necessarily the best a foreign brand can do. Just because a brand has succeeded in the United States or Europe – or even Brazil or Singapore – for half a century (or more) does not mean it’ll top the charts in India as well. MNC brands like McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Nike, Reebok, Motorola, Levi’s, Ford, IBM, among others, including famous Hollywood films, have had their setbacks and have finally resorted to more amenable offerings for the Indian consumer.

The buying habits of Indian consumers differ according to regional preferences (geography), religion, cultural and socio-economic conditions. Not that these conditions don’t apply to other countries, but, in India, consumer ‘idiosyncrasies’ which determine buying behaviour have been embedded over thousands of years. Successful Indian marketers have accepted this diversity, taken the trouble to understand the sentiments (not just the habits) of Indian consumers, found ways to reach out to them, and persuade them to buy the brands which they will benefit from.

However, this is one-half of the story. Indian marketers lack in the left-brained structured approach to marketing which is the domain of Western marketers. Indian marketers come up short in terms of building systems and procedures; in conducting the enormous amounts of research that are needed to understand consumers and markets; in terms of the analytics that go with this research; and in terms of building marketing and communication models which have launched so many successful brands in the West. There is much that Indian marketers can learn from their Western adversaries.

Maybe it’s time India and the West shared their marketing intelligence.

Indian marketers understand ethnic behaviour better than others

Ethnic, multicultural, mainstream or whatever term marketers wish to use to describe their consumers, it’s foolish not to accept the fact that we share this planet with others. These ‘others’, like us, belong to various races, religions, cultures and social groups. They speak various languages. They practise various rituals and customs. They come from various economic backgrounds. Like us, they consume products and services – directly from nature or manufactured for them. They pay for these products and services like everybody else on this planet.

Because we have diverse backgrounds and lifestyles, our needs and wants are different from those around us. Our consumption patterns may also be different from those around us. Yet, together, we make up ‘the market’ for a multitude of products and services – and create demand in the marketplace. Marketers need to assess this demand for various products and services, produce them, brand them, sell them to consumers who can afford to pay for them, and make a profit for themselves.

The genius lies in accepting this fact or phenomenon – and finding ways to offer the right product/service (usually as a brand) to the consumer. Consumers will buy this product/service, consume it and, therefore, express their demand for it. However, not all consumers will buy/consume all products and services offered to them. Nor will they accept the form or format or formulation or price in which the marketer chooses to offer the product/service. That’s because consumers belong to different races, religions, cultures, economic backgrounds… and they have different needs and wants.

Indian marketers understand this well – perhaps better than their colleagues from other parts of the world. That’s because Indian marketers operate in a marketplace with over a billion people from diverse races, religions, socio-cultural and economic backgrounds.

Indian consumers speak in 20-odd languages and over 200 dialects. Close to 1,000 newspapers and magazines are published in India, and over 200 TV and radio channels address this billion-strong media-consuming population. All of them, presenting news and entertainment, and persuading these billion consumers to buy a plethora of brands they are pushing to sell. Added to this is a 5,000-year-old history, with matching heritage and lifestyle, making up one of the world’s largest markets of multitudinously-diverse consumers. Virtually every one of India’s 35 states and union territories is a melting-pot of (unique) ethnic behaviour.

I doubt if marketers from other countries possess such expertise.

The coloured nature of the future American consumer

Much to my dismay, Americans are rather fond of the word ‘ethnic’ (I prefer ‘multicultural’), using it to demarcate the white Americans of European origin – defined as the mainstream population – from ‘the rest’. ‘The rest’, as you can guess, is ‘ethnic’ – people of non-white race, culture and skin-colour. This, of course, has cultural, socio-economic as well as political ramifications; but, for the sake of this post, I’ll stick to the marketing point of view.

From the marketing point of view (which includes demographics and consumption patterns), ‘the rest’ of the American population is made up of African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Even Native Americans (the original ‘Red’ Indians) don’t have enough purchasing power or command over the marketplace to make a difference to the American economy – and be counted.

This means, American marketing has primarily had an Anglo bias. Marketing strategies and communication campaigns, historically, have been targeted to the white American audience, and white Americans were by far the dominant consumers in the marketplace. Consumers of ethnic origin were ignored because of their lack of purchasing power.

It’s been some 40 years now that advertising targeted specifically to African-Americans have appeared in the mass media; with the Hispanics coming into focus in the mid-80’s, and the Asian-Americans more recently, probably from the beginning of the new millennium. Today, American marketers are clearly aware of the growing power of ethnic consumers – coming from ‘the rest’ of the population – and responding to the need of the hour with targeted marketing efforts.

The need for ethnic marketing is not a sudden phenomenon, but has grown over the last 40 years. Predictions were made about the growth of the ethnic population and their purchasing power, but were ignored by mainstream American marketers. It’s only in the last 10 years that any serious attention has been paid to understand this market. Here’s an excerpt from a 1999 article by Lisa Skriloff and Dawn Cornitcher of Multicultural Marketing Resources Inc.:

“Population growth and economic force tell a powerful story. The African American, Hispanic and Asian populations have a combined buying power of over a trillion dollars and minority populations are fast becoming the majority population in major markets. Not only is this trend fuelled by the growth of traditional ethnic segments but a growing influx of immigrants from Russia, Poland, and the Middle East continues to shift the mainstream view of how to define ethnic markets.”

There’s been a big hue and cry about this in America. Billions of dollars have been (and still continues to be) spent on researching and understanding ethnic groups, their culture, their media habits, their behaviour in response to targeted marketing, their brand associations, and their consumption patterns. To complicate the issue, differences have been found in the characteristics of immigrants (new on American soil) compared to their second and third and subsequent generations.

Questions abound: What language to use? Which cultural symbols have relevance? How to avoid controversy and not offend the audience? Are their communication and/or cultural pitfalls to guard against? Are there differences in consumption between or within groups for the same brand? What kind of communication stimuli generates the most favourable response? Etc.

To find answers to these questions, research is littering the streets and entering the households; studies and reports are being filed; monitoring tools and tracking devices are being created; specialised advertising, marketing and communication agencies are being set up. The mandate is clear: reach out to ethnic audiences, gain their approval, and sell to them. For, therein lies the future American consumer – the consumer of a different race, culture and skin-colour.

Targeting the ethnic market

Marketing and advertising professionals, internationally, recognise the importance of ‘targeting’ (to consumers) while creating effective marketing and communication strategies. In this regard, it’s said that direct and 1-to-1 marketing specialists are better at it than most communication professionals, as they actually reach out to individual consumers (in flesh and blood, and by name) through personalised communication and the tools they use. The rest of the industry is left to do the best they can with the media options available to them – newspapers, magazines, TV, cable, outdoor, the world-wide-web, etc.

To be good at targeting, communication specialists (and, really, everyone in sales and marketing) need to know a great deal about the consumers they target. The effectiveness of their communication, and the response to it, depends on it. However, this is no easy task. When you look at the millions of consumers in your country, many of whom you may not want to target in your communication because they do not fit your brand/consumer profile, the task can be daunting. The problem becomes more complex when you need to reach out to various ethnic consumer segments with your brand.

The United States, which leads the world in advertising, invests a lot on research to find suitable ‘targeting’ models. The hope is to reduce the ‘chance factors’ in formulating marketing strategies and designing communication packages tailored to reach a specific target audience effectively. The strategy and the communication differ according to the brand and the target market; and there are questions, of course: What specific consumer segments is the brand addressing? How different are they? Does one communication reach and make sense to all segments? Are there any ethnic consumer segments – i.e. consumer segments with cultural differences – which need to be addressed?

American brands and advertising have mainly tailored their communication to the white American. Over the years this has changed, and their advertising has gradually included the African-American, with several brands – not to mention extensions and variations of existing brands – specifically created to sell to the African-American consumer. Today, American marketers and advertising agencies realise that the ethnic market holds a much bigger promise than the white market. Largely made up of African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, the ethnic market in the United States is growing at a faster pace than the mainstream white American market, and is a potentially huge market.

The question is, can America find a successful formula for marketing its brands to this growing ethnic market?

Sub-cultural viewpoints

I guess, today, very few countries in the world can claim to have a 100% homogeneous population in terms of cultural purity. Even Iceland, an island nation with a population close to 300,000 people, has Nordic and Celtic origins going back to the days of the Vikings; not to mention a smattering of immigrants from various parts of the world. Perhaps a Polynesian island would prove this axiom wrong. For, to maintain cultural purity, a tribe or a nation would have to be ‘untouched’ by tourists or immigrants or invaders – or the media.

Cultural or ethnic differences are bound to exist in populations of countries. India is a prime example of this, being endowed with her ancient tribes (the Adivasis), a debate over Dravidian-Aryan roots, and a history of invasions – both political and economic.

Whether we monitor ancestry and language (which is difficult enough for India), or complex variables such as self-identification and ethnic individuality in the age of globalisation, cultural diversity is a fact of life. A fact, that is forever changing, as migration between (and within) countries, national populations, and interracial marriages are increasing. Add to that the spread of global and MNC brands, and we have a new economic and socio-cultural order. And then, there’s the Internet. The fact is, new identities are forming everyday on shared relationships and socio-cultural experiences between individuals and groups of people… all over the world.

Within this changing world lies a host of sub-cultures: racial, religious, political, professional, popular, physically-impaired, environmental, social, historical, traditional, gender, genetic… the list is endless. These are groups of people, centred on an ideology, claiming some point of difference from the others, and from what is considered to be the mainstream population and culture. All these groups feel marginalised at some point or the other, expressing a loss of dignity and of their civil and political rights. They feel their contribution to the mainstream cultural movement, as well as to the economy and society, is underrated and often goes unrecognised. This feeling, sadly, is true in India as it is in the United States or anywhere else.

However, the mainstream population is not always sympathetic to these sub-cultural viewpoints, even if the governments of these countries are. The mainstream regards these sub-cultural viewpoints as politically motivated, with little to do with culture or civil rights, and responds with its own rhetoric: Are all sub-cultures equally valuable to a nation? Are they all worthy of our support? Do they deserve special treatment? Do they all deserve inclusion in our mainstream cultural movement? If these sub-cultures are given equal status and included in the mainstream cultural movement, would they still continue to function as sub-cultures?

The ethnic conundrum

The word or term ‘ethnic’ puzzles me. I believe ethnic means belonging to a specific community; sharing a language, a culture, a religion; practising rituals and exhibiting certain types of behaviour common to a group of people. I also believe ethnic means sharing a lineage, since it is common practice to marry within a group and procreate. However, I do not use the term ‘ethnic’ to describe my many friends, neighbours and colleagues at work who come from various parts of India, carrying with them various languages, religions, cultural practices, food and shopping habits. Nor do I use this term ‘ethnic’ to describe people who have arrived from other parts of the world and now live in my country. These people share their land with me. To me, they are all Indians.

Fortunately for me, this feeling is reciprocated. In India, with its 35 states and union territories, 23 official languages, several established and practising religions, food habits, costumes and cultures too many to name, I am never classified as someone belonging to an ethnic group. Yes, since I originally come from West Bengal, I am identified as a Bengali – perhaps explaining my mother tongue, some of my preferences for food and literature, and my work ethos – but the identification ends there. Never has my status in India been described or defined as ethnic… though it probably has every reason to be described so. Yet, in the UK, the US or in Australia, among other countries, I am clearly categorised as someone belonging to an ethnic minority group.

This makes me wonder: Does ‘ethnic’ mean not belonging to the mainstream? For, it is true that, in the UK, the US or in Australia, as it is in other countries, I do not belong to the mainstream white majority population. I do not share their preferences for food or literature or music in totality. And, when I’m not communicating in English in their presence, I’m using one or more languages unknown to the white majority population in that country, putting them through some amount of discomfort. Curiously, this also happens in India, and people in India do mind if I speak in Bengali which they do not understand. Still, in spite of my Bengali antecedents (and perhaps poor social decorum), they do not go so far as to describe me as someone belonging to an ethnic group, let alone categorise me as ethnic minority.

Across the seas in the United States, the story is somewhat different. In the US, the white majority, defined as European Americans, makes up approximately 80% of the population. The balance 20% of the population is made up of various ethnic minority groups (this nomenclature is used by the US government and seems to be a socially accepted term): African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Alaskan Natives, etc. Nobody seems to mind that the European Americans of the mainstream White America are made up of European immigrants and their descendants: English, Irish, Italian, German, French, Scandinavian, Polish, and Russian, among others. Even though, in this case, each group makes up a small portion of the majority European American population.

This makes me wonder once again: Is this classification of ‘ethnic minority groups’ really a matter of language or culture or religion? Or, is it about race and the colour of one’s skin? And, perhaps going a little further, is it something designed by the white population of the world?

Restructuring our lives

Our perception of who we are is a dynamic process. The change in perception of our own identity that occurs as an immigrant, and once again upon return to our original homeland (which I’ve described in my previous post from a personal experience), reifies the fact that our identity has a social context. Shifts in perceptions of our identity occur with social (and geographical) displacement; and, once again, with adjustment with the new environment.

Although we talk about our culture, ancestry, language and religion, our identity is usually rooted to a place. A change in location unsettles us. Going back and forth between two (or more) places rocks our sense of identity. We then tend to ascribe ourselves an identity on the basis of where we live at a particular moment, in the present context. We build bridges between the past and the present, restructuring our lives, in order to create a culture which is acceptable… habitable.

Sometimes, of course, we are suspended between cultures, even though we are stationed in a locality. We then identify ourselves in a continuous process, in the order of our experiences.

Identity: views from my childhood

I had always considered my identity as something I always had. Like an inheritance. By virtue of being born and raised in a country called India, geo-politically, I had a nationality. I was an Indian. By virtue of my parents being from West Bengal (a state in Eastern India with a distinct history and culture), I was born and raised in a Bengali family, thereby, adopting Bengali as my language, and Bengali customs and traditions as standard practices of a life well-lived. Since my parents followed the principles of The Brahmo Samaj (as laid down by Raja Rammohan Roy some 150 years ago), I had a religious identity as well… right from birth. All these facets of my existence were inherited. They were my possessions, my identity.

Growing up in Australia I learnt that the colour of my skin was also my identity. Along with my ethnic features which identified me as an obvious Asian. So was the accent with which I spoke English. However, upon my return to India five years later, the process of forming a pseudo-Australian identity was reversed. The accent with which I spoke Bengali as well as English identified me as ‘foreign-returned’ and, therefore, not 100% Bengali or Indian. By virtue of an Australian orientation during my formative years, some of my Indian uniqueness had been replaced by a preference for westernised clothes, food, books, films, music, habits, lifestyle, the friends I chose to hang out with, and even my ideology (to an extent). These changes added a new dimension to my life and defined my identity in a whole new manner. The difference was, these facets of my existence were acquired; not inherited.

What are we when we have nothing?

Possessions can be extensions of the self (see my previous posts). According to a ground-breaking paper on consumer behaviour by Russell W Belk, “The functions that possessions play in the extended self involve creation, enhancement, and preservation of a sense of identity.” In his paper, Professor Belk cites William James, who laid the foundations for modern conceptions of self, as having said that we are the sum of our possessions. He, then, goes on to review the basic states of our existence – having, doing, and being – following streams of thought more famously identified with Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism.

Since Professor Belk’s work is on consumer behaviour, we must be fair to him and grant him that his construct of ‘possessions and the extended self’ (that’s the title of his ground-breaking paper) works perfectly well on consumers – i.e. on people who have the ability to create, or express, demand for products and services in the marketplace. And that, we know, is a function of our ability not just to desire a product or a service, preferably in a branded form, but also the money to back up that desire. It’s certainly a good case for capitalism – if not existentialism.

Does that, then, mean that our identity is really an economic entity? That, it’s really a matter of our purchasing power? And, if so, does that also mean that economically weak persons have weaker identities than those with more purchasing power? If, according to William James and Russell W Belk, we are what we have, what are we when we have nothing?

Possessions

Here’s some more wisdom (see yesterday’s post) from Russell W Belk, sociologist and consumer behaviorist, and his inquiry into consumer behaviour and consumption:

“…Possessions are an important component of sense of self. The most direct form of evidence is found in the nature of self-perceptions. Additional, especially striking evidence is found in the diminished sense of self when possessions are unintentionally lost or stolen. More evidence in the role of possessions in sense of self comes from anthropological studies of the way possessions are treated ritually and after death.”

We are what we have. It’s a simple concept, and a basic premise of consumer behaviour. But, it has boggled the minds of the best psychologists, sociologists, consumer behaviorists, advertisers and marketers for half a century at the least. For, as it turns out now, this simple concept is really a combination of two others. Not only are we what we are seen to be (the ‘me’ concept), we are also what is seen to be ours (the ‘mine’ concept). It seems we, as human beings, create our identities using both these – the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’ – concepts.

A lot of research is available defining the ‘me’, but it is in the inquiry into the ‘mine’, in the last 20 years or so, that has now led us to believe that our identities are not complete unless we take into account all our material possessions, the people we are connected with, and our experiences. Even our memories of the past.

That’s where Russell W Belk, among several other notable psychologists, sociologists and consumer behaviorists, comes in. Professor Belk contributes the metaphor of an ‘extended self’ as a possible explanation for the reason why we tend to create meanings for ourselves with, and through, objects and our surroundings. Why we tend to extend ourselves into the objective world around us; and, in turn, create our selves. Professor Belk suggests that the answer lies in our desire to possess… to collect… to acquire.

Dr Jan S Slater, who pursues this point further, elaborates his thoughts on possessions in his dissertation, ‘From Trash to Treasures’. He refers to Russell W Belk throughout his dissertation, particularly in ‘Chapter Two: Collecting Literature’, where he gives us a meaning as to why we would want to possess: “To possess something is to have it under one’s mastery or control and to identify it as one’s own. Possession may be individual, joint, or shared. Although objects of possession are most often tangible, possession may include certain experiences and knowledge, symbols and, in some cases, other persons (Belk, 1982).”

What are we, really, without these possessions?

Self, extended self

“In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If the wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if the dwindle and die away, he feels cast down – not necessarily in the same degree in each thing, but in much the same way for all.”

[William James, from his book The Principles of Psychology, Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self (1890)]


“We cannot hope to understand consumer behaviour without first gaining some understanding of the meanings that consumers attach to possessions. A key to understanding what possessions mean is recognizing that, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves… That we are what we have is perhaps the most basic and powerful fact of consumer behaviour.
The premise that we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves is not new… If we define possessions as things we call ours, [William] James was saying that we are the sum of our possessions.”

[Russell W Belk, from his award-winning paper Possessions and the Extended Self (1988)]


Russell W Belk goes on to say that there’s a relationship between our possessions and our sense of self. This relationship is important not only “to the understanding of consumer behaviour, but also on the premise that understanding the extended self will help us learn how consumer behaviour contributes to our broader existence as human beings.”

Identifying ourselves with brands

I’m sure we identify ourselves with the brands we wear, carry, consume and use. Or desire. We feel good about them; even feel proud to own them. Which means, there is obviously some connect between us and the brands we use. What that connect is, and how do advertisers and marketers take advantage of it in order to create marketing communication that attracts consumers, are issues that have dogged the best of us from the marketing profession.

Let’s take the TAG Heuer brand for instance (see my previous post) and ask ourselves a few questions: Do we know who we are? Do we know what we are made of? Do we know what relationships we have with the brands we use?

The answer is ‘yes’ every time. Of course, we know – at least, to an extent. If we were to be interrogated intensively (or, perhaps, under hypnosis), we may be able to tell who we really are; explain our actions; or justify the brands we use. Even then, our answers may not correlate with our behaviour in real life. Why not? Is there something wrong with our answers? Well… not wrong, but there is definitely a gap between our understanding of ourselves and who we are. That’s because, knowing who we are requires self-awareness, which is a subject of spirituality, rather than psychology or marketing.

Sure, TAG Heuer can ask us ‘What are you made of?’ and rejoice over the cleverness of their advertising. But answering that question requires us to gaze inwardly towards some mental model we have of ourselves. That isn’t easy because we have several mental models of ourselves, each one quite different from the other; some of them are quite incomprehensible. Psychologists, social scientists, advertising and marketing professionals have been working hard at finding solutions to this, and one possible explanation seems to indicate that the answers go back to our ancestors. That, our ability to recognise ourselves, and explain our present behaviour, has anthropological roots.

What do we mean by this? Well, why not let British Neuropsychologist Paul Broks do the explaining?

“But evolution did not equip us to recognise ourselves. How could it? The mirror is a novel artefact. For most of our history, the most singular emblem of our identity – the face – has been invisible to us.

Recognition of oneself in the mirror requires mental manoeuvres beyond the activities of the brain’s outwardly oriented, automatic face recognition units. It presupposes an inward gaze towards some mental model of the self: in other words, self-awareness. Humans are almost, but not quite, unique in this regard. Before indifference sets in, animals generally react with alarm or curiosity when placed before a mirror. They behave fearfully, aggressively or affiliatively, as if confronted by another animal. Chimpanzees, though, share our fascination with the reflected image.”
[Excerpt from Prospect Magazine article]

Closer home, the advertising and marketing fraternity is also chasing this elusive phenomenon of consumer identification with brands. After all, a brand’s future rests on their ability to make successful consumer-brand connections of the nature TAG Heuer is well-known for. Much of this chase is through brand personality research using anthropomorphic research tools, among many others, based on translated theories of anthropology, human personality and behaviour.

There are many notable models on this subject, but let me mention just one from Young & Rubicam, a leading advertising agency based in New York. According to Young & Rubicam’s BrandAsset®Valuator and The Four Pillars model, a brand’s ‘esteem’, or consumer regard for a brand, reflects a brand’s popularity and perception of quality in the consumer’s mind. In their model, ‘esteem’ is a determining factor (they use the term dimension) in diagnosing a brand’s health, strength and stature.

TAG Heuer's search for self-recognition

To keep pace with changing consumers, market forces and new technologies, brands need to change their marketing strategies and the brand communication that is created from it. Successful brands are quick to respond to changes in the marketplace, so as not to lose their market share or brand salience, but there is always one question that haunts marketing professionals: How often should a brand change its positioning and marketing strategy? The answer is not simple. It varies from situation to situation, brand to brand, and therefore foolish for anyone to provide a single formula to resolve this problem.

But, I guess, there’s no harm in discussing the problem in the context of a brand. A brand that has achieved its success while searching for self-recognition.

The brand I have in mind is TAG Heuer; especially since it introduced its latest advertising campaign “What are you made of?” recently, featuring several sports and film celebrities. TAG Heuer, as you probably know, is the market/consumer reference in prestigious sports watches and chronographs – and a renowned luxury brand. It has an interesting history – specifically from 1860, when Edouard Heuer started his Heuer Watch Company in Switzerland – of being actively engaged in sports, making the most accurate measuring instruments and sports watches in the world.

However, it’s not easy to create a sports-luxury – and now, lifestyle – watch or brand like TAG Heuer. Sports brands normally stand for high performance, technological innovation and contemporariness; while luxury and lifestyle brands typically represent fashion and glamour. TAG Heuer had its beginnings in creating stopwatches and water-resistant watches, and being recognised for its high degree of accuracy in measuring time, such as those needed during sporting events. And so, TAG Heuer came to be associated with sports: the Indy 500 and Formula 1 racing, international ski championships, golf, the Olympic Games, among many others.

As its brand profile improved over the years, TAG Heuer adopted a more fashionable and status-conscious appeal for its brand and morphed it with its sports-watch positioning to create the brand TAG Heuer is today. The brand used glamorous models and actors from around the world as its brand ambassadors, including India’s Shah Rukh Khan and Sushmita Sen. The latest advertising campaign “What are you made of?” uses Hollywood actors Uma Thurman and Brad Pitt, as well as Shah Rukh Khan, alongside sports celebrities Tiger Woods, Jeff Gordon, Kimi Raikkonen, Juan Pablo Montoya, Yao Ming and Maria Sharapova. This morphing of sports and glamour is not a new phenomenon for TAG Heuer, but has been cultivated over time.

In fact, TAG Heuer has strategically built its brand over the years, blending in physical prowess with mental strength, passion and beauty. In the last 15 years, the TAG Heuer brand has created one advertising campaign after another: “Don’t crack under pressure” in the early 1990s; “Success. It’s a mind game.” in the mid-1990s; “Inner strength” in the late 1990s; “Another side of me” in 2001-02; and “What are you made of?” in 2003 and its current version this year. TAG Heuer’s latest campaign exudes charisma, from the watches and the celebrities who wear them – successful people, their passion and the glamour that surrounds them. That’s TAG Heuer the brand… as it has always been.

This is what it says about the new advertising campaign from one of the press releases on the TAG Heuer website:

The signature “What are you made of?” has not changed: the question still interrogates but is never intrusive. It opens up a true mental dialogue with celebrities about their exceptional successes in sport or film, as well as the positive emotions they generate among their worldwide audiences.

“What are you made of?” offers values but never imposes them: to each his or her hero, to each to find him or herself in this quest for self-recognition.


[Citation: TAG Heuer brand advertising on the TAG Heuer website and Brandchannel article, Sports Brands Play at Life Style, by Alycia de Mesa (25-Oct-2004)]

What's changing...

Changes in consumer behaviour are also a result of technology: its introduction and its application. Apart from everyday technology-based products such as TV, quartz watches, computers, home videos, microwave ovens, mobilephones, digital cameras, etc. which have changed our lifestyle in the last 30 years, it is digital technology that has really revolutionised the way we do things and live our lives.

The first major change came with TV and the news and entertainment it offered. It offered an audio-visual format like film through which we could find out what’s happening in the world around us. Even beyond. TV expanded our world as consumers, creating desires for more and more products and services by actively stimulating the aural and visual senses. As much of the TV viewing was done by the family together (as it is still done to a large extent in a country like India), a brand could reach out to the entire family, pass on its message, and speed up the decision-making process for buying.

Of course, things have changed. Many families have more than one TV set at home and much of the viewing has become personal. Today, there are many more channels to cater to smaller segments of consumers, with the content as well as the style of delivery of the content for these segments having changed over the years. Messages are more personal, playing into the basic nature of the audiences, creating stronger desires of ownership for products and brands. A current trend shows an increase in the demand for versions or models of the same product – TV sets, music systems, mobilephones, cars, computers, newspapers, TV programmes, ringtones for mobilephones, computer software, computer games, etc. – for personal use and families, today, have more of everything in their households.

With computers, the Internet, PDAs and mobilephones, the digital world has further revolutionised the format in which consumers receive messages. Playing on the personal-use route, the new technologies have made two great contributions to our lives: one, they have made life more instant; and two, they have enabled interactivity. Not only can we have access to news, information and entertainment as they happen, we can choose to receive these messages when and where we want them. Furthermore, should we feel the need to respond to these messages, provide feedback, or begin a dialogue, digital technology now allows us to do so.

For the brand and the marketer, this is a great boon. The choice of media has increased. The style and delivery format for the marketing message has increased. The opportunity to design creative messages has increased. The opportunity-to-see for the consumer has increased. The level of personalisation of the message to the consumer has increased. The ability of the consumer to respond to the message has increased. And, with the availability of multiple payment gateways, the purchase mechanism has increased. All this, apart from the fact that the new technologies now allow consumers, their interests and their purchase behaviour to be tracked using various software tools.

So, what’s changing for the brand marketer? Plenty, as you can see. It’s now time for the brand marketers to build their plans on these opportunities created by new and emerging technologies… to address changing consumer expectations, lifestyles and behaviours… to build new relationships, or renew old ones, by adding value to their consumers and their brands.

What lies beneath!

“You think you know who you are. You have no idea.”
(Dialogue from the film ‘Crash’. Also the film’s tagline.)

This bit of dialogue (delivered by bad cop Matt Dillon) from Paul Haggis’ award-winning film ‘Crash’ this year could have come from any frustrated marketer or brand manager. For, this dialogue sums up exactly why thousands of marketing and brand managers across the world struggle every day to ensure their products and brands hold their ground in the marketplace – and continue to win new consumers.

The reason for their frustration is simple: consumers do whatever they feel like with a brand. Accept it, reject it, recommend it, bad-mouth it, ignore it… change their minds about it without giving a clue to explain their behaviour. This has been a great stumbling block for the marketing profession and, no matter how skilled or experienced or gifted the professional is, no marketer or marketing strategist or advertising agency or account planner can predict with any certainty how a consumer will respond to a specific brand or brand communication.

That’s where motivational research comes in, trying to get to the root of the problem, explaining why consumers behave as they do. It tries to dig into the human psyche – using various tests and techniques – to unearth motives that lead to specific types of consumer behaviour. Motivational research can, and does, help bring to surface some of the latent motives – as well as the obvious ones – to explain human tendencies and patterns of behaviour.

But, that’s only one part of the story. Thereafter comes the consumer behaviour model: the interpretation, the correlation with market research and field sales data, even transaction data if a CRM programme is in place, and the application of the motivational hypothesis to a marketing problem at hand in order to predict consumer decision-making processes and behaviour. A question, however, comes to mind: To what degree of accuracy can human and/or consumer behaviour be predicted?

Human beings are complicated creatures. What they say, they may not do. How they respond in a motivational test may not be how they respond to an advertising campaign or a brand displayed in a retail store. Although economic, cultural, sociological and religious influences may be accounted for in a consumer behaviour model, there may still be personal and/or circumstantial biases which become evident only at the moment of truth when the consumer makes a purchase. Even then, future purchase behaviour may not be consistent with the consumer’s previous purchase.

This really is the crux of the matter. In fact, some psychologists – and some marketing strategists like me – believe that human behaviour is not stable. That, it varies according to context and, therefore, cannot be predicted with certainty through motivational research or any kind of psychological assessment or marketing model. What lies beneath the human psyche, what forms the human personality and how it manifests itself in life, what goes through the mind of a consumer, particularly at the point of purchase, is indeed difficult to unravel and predict.