The brand Prestige very aptly captured the emotion of a newly-married couple and in an ode to this famous ’70s campaign, in 2014 they even ran a print campaign with the same line, but featuring arguably the most famous star couple of India, Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan. Interestingly, this print ad has Abhishek saying, ‘Nothing impresses Aishwarya quite like a healthy meal prepared by me.’ The famous line ‘Jo biwi se kare pyaar…’ remains but now it is Abhishek who is doing the cooking.
How can marital love be equated to a ‘gasket release system’, you may well ask. And do consumers really believe such claims?
Advertising often has to marry a rational promise with an emotional one and I think the Prestige commercial did a great job of doing both.
But that ad was meant for an era that was different. Today the same ad may provoke a violent outbreak in social media. How can a humble pressure cooker be equated to true love? – would be the argument on Twitter. To be fair, there have been many claimants to the symbol of true love, including diamonds and life insurance. There will be numerous wise rejoinders including those that will take the side of the husband.
Let us now go back to 2014 and look at an ad that featured a couple once again.
It is a swanky office and in the cabin is seated a smart young lady manager. She has short hair and is wearing possibly the latest cotton saree from a designer house. In walks a young man, rather nervous. Obviously he is her subordinate and has not done the job assigned to him properly. You can see her berating him and asking him to finish the work by tonight. The clock winds down, people start leaving the office, so does the lady manager. Our young man is hard at work. The film then shows the manager at her home, preparing a wonderful dinner. She makes a video call on her Airtel mobile connection. Who is at the receiving end? None other than her subordinate who is still at work, and who is also her husband. She calls him on video chat and asks him when he would come home as dinner was ready.
This ad written by Agnello Dias of Taproot Dentsu for the mobile services brand, Airtel, presented the married life of this millennium. A working woman. A man who is a subordinate to his wife. However, the executive woman is also a loving wife; ready to cook up a storm for her hard-at-work husband, who she berated a few hours ago in office. It is not shown, but maybe she even used a pressure cooker to make his favourite dish. The advertisement was lauded by the experts as a great ode to the new Indian woman and her drive to do better than her husband. Many others lamented that Indian advertisers and agencies are still stuck in the ‘wife-as-cook’ mode. Senior human resource executives blogged about corporate governance issues of a husband or wife reporting to their partner. The arguments can go on and it is not our job to take sides here, but to point out how in a span of forty years, Indian advertising has moved in so many different ways in which it presents the dynamics of husband-wife relationships.
It is possibly true that in most Indian homes, the woman is the homemaker and the man is the breadwinner. But the Airtel ad presented a scenario that flipped the argument around and managed to gain a lot of social currency and talk value. In many ways it reflected the direction the society was moving in. From strict gender-defined roles for man and woman to a more confusing arrangement.
Married couples and their relationships have been fertile hunting ground for advertisers. Take for instance, the campaign for Wills Navy Cut filter cigarettes from ITC that ran for many decades. One particular print ad that ran unchanged for a decade in the ’70s-’80s showed a happy smiling young couple reading a Polish joke book. The ad had a captivating slogan, ‘Made for each other’. The explanation provided the link, of how the tobacco and filter were perfectly matched in Wills Filter – as it was known then – cigarettes. The campaign made the brand the largest-selling filter cigarette in India within a few years of its launch. Powered by this strong promise, the brand dominated the cigarette market like a colossus. I was told by a senior manager at ITC that at one time Wills Filter made more profits for the company than all other brands and divisions put together. It would be naïve to assume that the success of Wills was solely due to the advertising claim, as the brand also captured the imagination of a young post-freedom fighter generation with their ‘Wills made for each other’ couple contest. This contest, launched in 1969, ran for almost two decades and was a very eagerly anticipated event in the key Indian cities. I know of a friend who even started smoking socially in order to enter the contest!
How have society’s views of married life changed over the last fifty years? Do we still see married life and gender roles through predetermined rose-tinted glasses? Or have we started viewing them differently?
Television provides some interesting snapshots of how the depiction of married life has changed in India. The ’70s saw the presentation of idealized role models for husband and wife through the long-running serial on Doordarshan, Hum Log followed by Buniyaad. Both were set in North India and had woven in stories of the freedom struggle, the ever-suffering wife and the wayward husband or son. Depictions of married life changed with the satellite television boom. The battle lines were drawn between the saas and the bahu, the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. The saga of saas-bahu battles ruled the roost almost for two decades. But over the last few years, we are seeing television channels exploring more nuanced roles for husband, wife and the ubiquitous mother-in-law. One of the bigger hits of 2012-13 was the serial Bade Achhe Lagte Hain (I Like You a Lot) where the husband-wife relationship was taken beyond the cardboard cut-out of working man and suffering wife. The actor playing the main protagonist in the serial, the perpetually overweight Ram Kapoor, became one of the most widely-loved actors, simply because he appeared more real to the viewers.
Bollywood, Kollywood – named after Kodambakkam in Chennai – and Tollywood or Telugu films too have started looking at relationships between couples a lot differently from how they were presented in the early years of Indian independence. Mother India, the famous Hindi classic to the more recent Kahaani, the roles assigned to the wife have dramatically changed. The concept of love marriage and elopement, a standard fare from the days of Bobby to the days of Raja Hindustani, too changed with the release of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.
Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London, has observed that Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge was a watershed movie in Hindi cinema in many ways. It anointed Shah Rukh Khan as the biggest superstar of Bollywood, but at another level, it redefined the concept of marriage and love marriage. The hero of the film does not run away with his paramour, but seeks parental approval. And is willing to walk away, or literally take the train if there is no approval1. The movie completed an uninterrupted run of 1000 weeks at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir movie hall in December 2014.
In an ode to DDLJ, today’s young men and women are looking for a combination of a love cum arranged marriage. While this may be a topic of a book in itself, it is suffice to say that compared to the generation forty years ago, who yearned for a love marriage but had no opportunity to find ‘love’ and so opted for an arranged marriage, the current generation of 2015 are opting for an arranged-love marriage, even though they have enough opportunities for a pristine pure love marriage. While newspapers report the prevalence of khap panchayats that rule against inter-caste marriage in many parts of rural India, we have found that in many villages, the panchayat approval can be obtained by paying a suitable ‘fine’.
Demographers will inform us that there has been a steady growth of nuclear family homes, homes where it’s just the mom, dad and kids. It is a myth that for centuries Indian homes were all ‘Hindu Undivided Familes’. Sociologists tell us that for centuries, in most Indian societies, the eldest son stayed with the parents, while the younger sons and, of course, the daughters moved out – but for matrilineal societies as in Kerala. So we have had the concept of nuclear families in India for many centuries. But undoubtedly, the trend has gained speed with rapid urbanization and migration in search of w
ork. According to the Indian Readership Survey, in the last twenty years, the share of nuclear homes in urban India, has gone up from 35 per cent to 45 per cent. The concept of nuclear families in itself changes some of the dynamics of the home. The absence of a mother-in-law gives a lot more power to the wife. The husband has a counterpoint to his power in the house. The ancient concept of the ‘karta’ or the head of the household is no longer prevalent in a large percentage of homes. All these are empowering the woman of the house to do a lot more than she has ever done, redefining her role in her own eyes as well as those of the society at large.
It is true that, unlike in the developed markets, the Indian woman is still playing the role of a homemaker. Rena Bartos, American demographics researcher, has through her research shown that the simplistic approach used by marketers of classifying women as non-working and working is flawed. Even among working women, she has shown that there are various shades of commitment to career and to family.
The role of the wife in India has now expanded beyond the home and the kitchen.
During the 2010s, we have seen several ads which have tried to present the man-woman relationship in a more edgy manner. Havells brand of juicers had an ad created by Lowe Lintas where the rather portly husband comes home after his morning walk with a buddy and somewhat patronizingly shouts out to his wife (‘Babes’) that she should quickly drum up a glass of fresh carrot juice and another of orange juice. The young woman brings him the new Havells juicer along with a carrot and an orange, and asks him to make it himself because she was stepping out for her morning run. Or in yet another ad, this time for the matrimonial website, Bharat Matrimony, the young man’s parents suggest that since he got a promotion at work which allows them to live comfortably, perhaps his wife should stop working now. He – an antithesis of the Havells husband – responds that his wife is working because she likes to work and will continue to do so as long as she wants to. Shutting up the parents in the process.
Ariel, a laundry detergent brand from the global major Procter & Gamble, is running a major campaign called #ShareTheLoad, encouraging husbands to share the laundry load with their wives.
Are we seeing a revolution in the way marital relationships are evolving in modern India? The concept of marriage, the roles of the husband as provider, the wife as caregiver are as yet the most common paradigm in India. Ads have been able to capture this well and, as we saw, have started exploring the fringes of the stereotypical roles like in the Airtel advertisements. But I would submit that the Airtel ad was a depiction of a future, not the current reality. And in a sense, good advertising is an attempt to always stay one step ahead of the consumer.
Such a move, sometimes, results in accolades but sometimes it results in stone pelting, especially in our country where there are enough stones on the roads and enough idle minds and hands to throw them.
What may have caused this sea change? I think the transformation has been caused by a few distinct phenomena. Firstly, women in urban homes are a lot more educated than their mothers. So the big educational gap between the husband and the wife has narrowed dramatically in just twenty years. Given this education, the woman is a lot more vocal in expressing her desires. Advertising captures this eloquently. Secondly, couples are moving out of their home towns, more often than ever. This movement in itself has forced the couple to become more self-sufficient, putting more pressure on the man of the house, who now needs his wife’s help and cooperation to carry his new burdens. Thirdly, growing financial needs have pressurized the woman to start working, with the support of her husband and often her in-laws. From being a thorn in the side of the ‘bahu’, the in-laws are slowly becoming a valuable source of help, at least in taking care of the children.
Once, we were doing research for a mosquito repellant brand in a mid-sized town in UP. Our planners and creative directors were speaking with consumers in a free and frank discussion, which we call ‘Mind & Mood’. When we started probing the joint family system and the support a couple gets from their parents and vice versa, we came across a new phenomenon aided by the growing flat/apartment culture. The couples we spoke with said that they did not live with their parents, instead just close enough. Often they lived in the same apartment complex, or a short walk away. The lady made an interesting comment, ‘Choola alag chalta hai, lekin hum saath khana khate hain’ (Our kitchens run separately but we dine together). This separate yet together is the new paradigm in urban India and this is having its own impact on couples and how they manage their work, life, children etc. It turns out that we did not discover something new. Social scientist Professor Shyama Charan Dube had also noted that a large extended Indian family may live together and may also jointly carry out some economic pursuits, but it is likely to have separate domestic arrangements for its nuclear units. They gradually come to have separate hearths (chulhas) and independent arrangements for cooking and dining2.
Obviously, this helps increase the number of women who can join the workforce, at least till professional day-care centres come up – any venture capitalist reading this should examine investing in a day-care chain. Finally, the age of marriage is slowly but steadily increasing and as a result the wife is no longer a shy, coy teenager. One number is enough to bring this alive: as per the Census of India, the mean age of an Indian female at marriage has moved up from 18.3 in 2001 to 19.3 in 2011; the increase of one year in just a decade in demographic terms is a big jump, and if we were to take urban India, this number would be significantly higher3.
The future will throw up newer issues and changes in relationships. For instance, live-in relationships are still scorned in most Indian societies. I was delighted to see the Tamil movie O Kadhal Kanmani by Mani Ratnam exploring this new dynamic. Chances are that we will see a lot of this happening in society leading to major issues for parents to tackle, which will also be reflected in Indian advertising. Fastrack has an ad where a young girl gets up from bed – she had spent the night with a guy in the boy’s hostel – quietly slips out of the room, runs through the corridor, jumps over the gate and runs off into the street, all while putting on her clothes and shoes which were in her Fastrack bag. The brand asks its users to ‘Move On’. Brooke Bond Red Label tea also has an ad which shows a live-in relationship. So brands are experimenting with the way man-woman dynamic is presented in advertising.
According to ‘Meet the Modern Dad’4, a February/March 2012 study by the Parenting Group in the US, fathers say the following tasks are mostly their responsibility: grocery shopping (49 per cent); cooking (43 per cent), driving kids to/from school, activities and appointments (39 per cent); getting kids ready for school or day care (36 per cent). I suspect these numbers will be similar for most parts of the developed world today. American retail marketing guru, Paco Underhill has noted that US women confess to devoting just around thirty minutes a day to food preparation. One expert has pointed out a connection between drop in home cooking and the United States’ soaring obesity rate. This is why in the United Kingdom, where obesity rates are closing in on those of Americans’, the British government recently passed a law mandating secondary-school students to attend cooking classes5. I wonder how this has panned out and if this is true, what an interesting way to get both boys and girls to learn about gender equality, healthy cooking and eating!
Indian couples are still negotiating the next phase of their duties but with women taking up successful careers and starting big and small businesses, we may see more stay-at-home husbands, who will be in charge of bringing up the child, attending PTA meets, visiting the family doctor, housekeeping and more. I am sure we will soon see ads that predict this future.
It is amusing to recall that in the ’70s, the government of India used to run long commercials in cinema halls and on the television extolling the virtues of using a pressure cooker. In a boring monotonous voice, the ad explained to its viewers how a pressure cooker can save almost 30 per cent of fuel cost, since food cooks faster when cooked in a pressure c
ooker. I suspect the ‘Jo biwi se kare pyaar’ tag line sold millions more cookers than the fuel-saving litany from our then socialist-leaning government.
Ab Main Bilkul Boodha Hoon, Goli Kha Ke Jeeta Hoon!
BAJAJ BULBS AD circa 1985 – ‘Jab main chota ladka tha, badi shararat karta tha, meri chori padki jaati, jab roshan hota Bajaj. Ab main bilkul boodha hoon, goli kha ke jeeta hoon, lekin aaj bhi ghar ke andar, roshni deta Bajaj.’
(‘When I was a young kid, I was very mischievous, my mischief used to get discovered thanks to the light from Bajaj bulbs. Now I am an old old man, living on tablets, but even now, I get caught with lights from Bajaj bulbs.’)
This jingle-based film written by ad veteran Mukul Upadyay still resonates in the collective consciousness of the country, at least with anyone who is over thirty years of age. The ad, shot in a style typical of the Doordarshan days, was almost a caricature of the old age lived by Indians. This simple ad for Bajaj bulbs showed a small kid trying to read comics under his blanket late at night with the light of a torch; but his parents would catch him because of the light from Bajaj bulbs. When the kid grows up to a ripe old age and has been living on medicines, he continues to be mischievous, trying to raid the fridge in the night for a slice of cake, only to get caught by his wife.
If you look at the societal coding of the ad, you would realize that in the ’70s and ’80s, old age was equated to a life of popping pills. And for those adventurous old men, beware, Bajaj bulb is just a click away.
Let us now move into the 2000s and see how the depiction of old age in advertising has changed.
The film shows an old man, well over seventy, wooing his over sixty-year-old wife. He shyly says that he has bought her something special for Valentine’s day, and pulls out a small jewellery box. The old lady opens the small box and is shocked looking at the big diamond ring inside. The old lady says, ‘Ab is umar mein kaha pehenungi heere?’ (Where will I wear diamonds at this age?). To which the loving old man replies with the killer line, ‘Heere ko kya pata tumhari umar?’ (How would the diamond know your age?). The brand, SBI Life Insurance, and the writer of the ad, Piyush Pandey, managed to present a new dimension of old-age in modern India. Just because you are old and retired, you need not live a life of ‘tablets and tonics’. If you buy a big enough policy from SBI Life Insurance, you can even afford to gift your wife a diamond ring.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 5