No washing machine ad defined the concept of a washing machine better than the original Videocon washing machine ad. Featuring the girl who had been made famous by Rasna, the film has her getting out to attend a kiddie party only to have her dress spoilt by the overfriendly dog. Her mom is nonplussed, takes her clothes and gets them washed in her Videocon washing machine. The song that went something like ‘Videocon washing machine, it washes, rinses and even dries your clothes’ sold the generic promise of a washing machine and went on to win consumer’s hearts as well.
Indian homes were changing, dramatically. When I came to Mumbai, for the first time in 1975, I was fascinated by the flat culture of the city. In most cities of India, we lived in ‘houses’. The poor lived in huts made of mud walls and a thatched roof. The middle classes lived in rented houses, often a portion of a big house was rented out – the barsaati concept continues in New Delhi. The affluent lived in their own houses. Millions of Indian families in urban India never got to own a home. This has changed dramatically in the last forty years. The growth of the apartment culture has been spurred by nuclear families. As the size of an average Indian family has moved down from 5.5 in 1981 to 5.0 in 2011, and if you consider urban India, the decline may be a lot more. Marketing Whitebook 2010-11 quoting the Juxt Indian Urbanites study offers some clue on home ownerships in urban India1.The report says that almost 63 per cent of urban Indians own a house or an apartment or hutment, and 31 per cent live in homes that are over 500 sq. ft. The study says that among the higher socio-economic class, ownership is higher than 65 per cent. The growth in home ownerships has undoubtedly been driven by the growth of the apartment culture or condos as they are referred to in the US. The 2BHK has become a part of popular lexicon, across India, in just around two decades.
Along with the growth in ownership, there is also the trend towards better home aesthetics. From the days of having boring white or yellow walls, Indians are discovering the joy of colourful walls. From boring mosaic flooring, they are discovering the multiple options in flooring. Smaller towns now have a growing tribe of interior decorators. Even carpenters have moved up the value chain by calling themselves interior decorators.
The rapid growth of cable and satellite television – all delivered in glorious colour – has taken home décor aesthetics good and not-so-good, into all Indian homes. From watching Independence era soap operas, today families are glued to their television sets watching drama unfold in metro cities, often in homes that have been decorated in the most eye-catching manner.
For the more educated, the internet has been a great medium of education. Nerolac launched a website in 2005 to support their premium paints – Impressions. This website gave basic information on colour combinations as well as other interesting trivia about colour therapy, Vaastu (not trivia for many) and more. Asian Paints too has created a website with a lot of information for home decoration. I remember the magazine, Inside Outside, in the early ’80s was an under-100 page magazine that was struggling to keep its head above water. Come to 2015, the same magazine often boasts of 100 pages of ads. Many other magazines have joined the interior decoration mania, including some international titles. So using a combination of websites and magazines, the collective décor IQ of middle-class Indians is growing by leaps and bounds.
In their own way, advertising agencies have a role in helping improve the art and décor IQ of the average Indian. While working on décor brands, they not only pore through the best of what the world has to offer, they also encourage art for art’s sake within their four walls. In a sense, they are patrons of art by recruiting from leading art schools. From the days of Satyajit Ray, who was one of the founders of Clarion Advertising – an agency that was rated as one of India’s top three in the mid-’70s – to present-day, agencies have been fertile ground for art, photography and film talent. American Cultural historian, TJ Jackson Lears speaks of how the agency Ayer ran its own art galleries in Philadelphia where art directors showcased the canvas’s they painted on evenings and weekends. Interestingly, Indian agency Lowe Lintas too used to organize an annual exhibition in the ’70s and ’80s to showcase the artwork of its artists2.
While art and crafts are slowly replacing the traditional calendars in middle-class homes, the year 2014 also saw the entry of yet another game-changing innovator group. Using easily available venture capital money, e-commerce sites have exploded in the furniture market. Brands like Urban Ladder are creating a new trend of ordering furniture on the net.
As Indian homes change, it is apt to recall a particular research project Ramesh Thadani once told me about. Ramesh Thadani was the CEO of IMRB, India’s largest marketing research agency in the ’90s and my long-term mentor – he passed away at a relatively young age in August 2000. I have spent many evenings at his feet learning about the intricacies of doing consumer research in a country as diverse as India3. We were once discussing homes and cleanliness of homes. Ramesh pointed out that Indians have a peculiar definition of dirt. There is dirt that is inside the house and there is dirt outside the house. The outside dirt is bad. So when you enter an Indian home you leave the footwear at the doorstep. Then there is dirt inside which is perfectly fine. Finally, there is this great disdain for what is not your own home, so an Indian housewife will be happy to dump her household garbage just outside her doorstep. How do you explain that? Is it that she is not bothered how dirty her outside environment is, as long as her home is clean inside? Or is it just ignorance that what is dumped outside indiscriminately can easily drift back inside?
Indian government launched the Clean India or ‘Swaach Bharat’ movement in 2015. Will Indians learn to clean up just because there is a nice slogan exhorting them to do so? Unfortunately, Ramesh passed away more than a decade ago, but I am sure he would have been able to give a theory and maybe a solution as well.
Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!
A FARMER IS transplanting paddy crop and he has a young man helping him. The older farmer enquires of the young farmhand, ‘Now that you are a father of a young girl, what are your plans? Are you planning to have one more child?’ The young man replies, ‘Yes, brother. Soon hopefully!’ To which the older farmer replies, ‘Just as we have to leave space between paddy saplings, so that they can grow better, we need to leave space between children, so that they can get the right amount of attention from their parents. So take my advice and space out your next child.’ The short ad film to promote family planning and ‘spacing’ was aired in the government-owned television channel, Doordarshan during the mid to late ’70s. I saw the film when I was not even contemplating a career in advertising. But all through the many years, the film has stayed fresh in my mind. I think it managed to build a vivid analogy on the need for ‘spacing’ by using something every farmer knows: when you are transplanting crop, you need to leave sufficient space between saplings.
While that piece of advertising was aimed at all men and women with a clear rural tilt, I think Indian media has seen a significant amount of advertising aimed at the rural consumer.
Professor Chitta Mitra used to teach marketing research and rural marketing at IIM Calcutta in the ’70s. He had served at ITC in its marketing research department before entering the world of academics. His classes used to be full of war stories from ITC or Imperial Tobacco Company as it was known when he used to work there. One such story involved a cigarette brand called Red Lamp. Prof. Chitty Mitty – as he was fondly referred to by the students – spoke of an advertising tag line that was used by ITC to popularize Red Lamp in rural Punjab: ‘Paani pump da. Cigarette lump da.’ A rough translation would be – for water think of a pump, for cigarette think of Lamp. Here again, you can see how the marketer used a simple analogy to build the brand connection. Some rhyming lines also helped. Prof. Mitra went on to set up a very successful marketing research company, C-MARC, that specializes in pharmaceutical research. A third innings, if I can call it that.
Who is a ‘rural’ consumer? Pradeep Kashyap, the guru o
f Indian rural marketing explains that there are many definitions of what may be termed ‘rural’, and it differs from source to source. A rural consumer lives in a social unit that is reasonably small but over a 5000 population where the primary source of income is agriculture; this definition from the Census seems to be the most popular. Studies have shown that by 2010, almost 60 per cent of the rural households got their livelihood from the non-farm sector; Pradeep Kashyap has predicted that this will grow to 70 per cent by 2020, thanks to urbanization, jobs in towns, better connectivity through roads and growing automation in the farm sector1.
Indian marketers have been trying to communicate with rural consumers through several media. In the ’50s and ’60s, the general hypothesis was that any brand aimed at the rural consumer, primarily farm inputs, had to have clear graphic codes that can be communicated through primitive modes of advertising, like wall painting. So ICI has ‘Chand Chhap’ urea; Zuari had ‘Horseman’ urea and FACT has ‘Two elephants’ as its logo.
While working on the fertilizer campaign for FACT in the late ’80s, I got an exposure to some of the nuances of farm inputs marketing and advertising. We were planning to make ad films for FACT Urea and were warned that the films have to run in all the then four southern states. When the pre-production meeting was taking place, the FACT team had their agricultural expert, the agronomist, sitting in. As we explained the need to shoot versions in two languages to handle the lip-sync problem – it was a dialogue-heavy film – the agronomist warned us that we need to be sensitive to the ‘dhoti issue’. I was a little confused and looked at the film-maker, who had made several rural input films. He nodded wisely and said he had planned for the ‘dhoti issue’. After the meeting, I cornered the film-maker to understand the dhoti issue. He explained that farmers in Kerala and Tamil Nadu wore the dhoti in one way, whereas farmers in Andhra and Karnataka wore it very differently. For those of you who are getting confused, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, men wear the white dhoti in the ‘lungi’ style, as popularized by the famous ‘Lungi Dance’ song.
It dawned on me what a challenge it must have been to sell modern farming methods conceptualized by educated experts to Indian farmers, who were largely illiterate in post-independence India. So farm inputs were marketed through word of mouth and opinion leader’s forum. Advertising used to have simple codes such as animals, gods and nature-based analogies.
One of the major modes of communication for farm inputs was through ‘test demonstration plots’ where farm input companies demonstrated the efficacy of their fertilizers, pesticides, hybrid seeds etc. by getting an innovative farmer to participate in the study.
Farm input advertising had to reach the corners of India with very little media coverage. So All India Radio and wall paintings were the only recourse, however difficult or limited in reach they may have been. Communication codes had to be simple and easy-to-translate into various media. Rural advertising experts, like RV Rajan, have had a tough time educating Indian marketers about the challenges of reaching their message to the rural consumers2.
As rural prosperity increased, other product and service marketers too wanted a share of this pie. Brands got tailored to suit the rural wallet. As Pradeep Kashyap explains, brands had to overcome four hurdles to reach rural consumers. First was affordability; average rural consumers had smaller wallets compared to urban consumers, so brands had to tailor packs that were affordable; sachet packs gave a big fillip to brands’ rural plans. The second is the challenge of availability; brands had to reach rural consumers in a cost-effective manner; village weekly ‘haats’, farmer’s markets or fairs became the most cost-effective way of reaching a large number of affluent villagers at a reasonable cost of distribution. Hindustan Unilever created its own network of women sales agents called Shakti Ammas. The third challenge is that of awareness; till the growth of low power transmitters and television, the reach of conventional media was very poor even if we include radio; in the 2000s, television had managed to enter a large number of rural homes and it is predicted that by 2030, or even earlier, all rural homes will have television sets. In 2010, almost 40 per cent of all rural homes had a television set; the growth of mobile phones has also unleashed a new way of reaching rural consumers. The fourth challenge is that of acceptability; there was a mistaken impression that rural consumers will settle for feature-poor cheap products and this has been proven wrong time after time; rural consumers want products that are value for money, but not feature-poor or under-designed3.
Brands like Nirma opened up the world of washing powders to rural consumers. So did Colgate tooth powder and Chik shampoo sachets in the ’80s and ’90s.
There is one big question that begs being answered. Is the rural consumer that different from his urban cousin?
Let me answer it by sharing a story about a fundamental marketing tenet that rose from research with farmers. In all marketing courses, students are taught the concept of ‘Diffusion of Innovation’. This theory says that in every product category, not all consumers will try and accept the product with equal enthusiasm. There are various categories of consumers who will come into the product’s fold at various stages. The first to try the product would be those who are called ‘Innovators’; they are a small minority. Then come the ‘Early Adopters’ followed by the ‘Late Adopters’. These two groups are fairly large in number. Then come ‘Early Majority’ and ‘Late Majority’. Finally, there are the ‘Laggards’. The empirical research to prove this theory was done by Professor Everett Rogers with farmers in the US mid-west on their adoption of Monsanto’s hybrid seeds4.
If we are using theories developed among farmers to explain the adoption of all products including hi-tech gadgets, I don’t think we should see farmers or the average rural consumer as any less sophisticated shoppers than urban consumers.
The government of India too has had to struggle with the challenge of disseminating their messages to rural consumers. Campaigns like the small pox and polio vaccination drives used a mixture of media, including mass media as well as wall paintings and even puppet shows at village fairs. Thanks to the tireless efforts of thousands of field workers, and some smart advertising in mass media, we have been able to eradicate small pox and polio from India. But the journey towards healthcare for all is yet to be completed.
As the Indian economy has grown, rural consumers have embraced products including toothpaste (56 per cent), biscuits (76 per cent), washing powder (90 per cent), pressure cooker (25 per cent), two-wheelers (11 per cent), LPG stoves (20 per cent) as per the Indian Readership Survey 2010 – RK Swamy & Hansa Research India market report5. The numbers are continuing to climb up, thanks to growing affluence and aggressive marketing by brands who find rural markets less cluttered hunting grounds.
The growth of mobile phones in rural India has opened up a great new medium, as proven by the Hindustan Unilever’s ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ campaign. This campaign created a new way of engaging with rural consumers; they were asked to make a missed call to a number to receive some free entertainment call on their phones. The free entertainment could be jokes, songs or anything else. The entertainment module also included a few ads for HUL brands. This campaign, running in primarily media-dark north Indian markets, is reported to have generated over 12 million users with over 50,000 missed calls a day. Conceptualized and executed by the creative agency Lowe Lintas and the media agency Omnicom’s PHD, this is a breakthrough in rural market communication, where a marketer, by roping in a mobile partner, managed to create a new medium to deliver their sales message. The missed call/call back mode was also used very successfully by political parties during the 2014 parliamentary elections.
The rural consumer is changing and the evidence of that can be seen in the modern farm inputs advertising. In an ad written by Robby Mathew of Interface Advertising for Mahindra Arjun tractors, the star is the tractor, but the person using the tractor is the Andhra superstar, Mahesh Babu. He does not demonstrate the tractor, instead uses it to beat up
the goons by literally drowning them in mud and slush.
Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has for the first time in the country embarked on measuring the television ratings in rural India. On 22 October 2015, BARC published the rural ratings of television programs, a first. Starting October 2015, every week, BARC will put out rural viewership data and this should further emphasize the growing importance of rural consumers to marketers. This move is coupled with the change in the way marketers are analysing socio-economic groups. Till 2013, the Socio Economic Classifications (SEC) were fundamentally different for urban and rural India. For urban India, it was based on the education and occupation of the Chief Wage Earner (CWE); and for rural India, it was based on education of the CWE and type of house the family lives in. With the adoption of NCCS (New Consumer Classification System) by the marketing community in 2013, SEC classification across both rural and urban India has become standardized and will depend on the education of the CWE and the number of durables owned by the household. This is the beginning of our journey towards seeing all consumers through the same lens, rather than tinted ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ lenses.
The rural transformation that is happening is being driven by several factors. Economists report that an increase of 10 per cent in tele-density or mobile penetration helps the GDP by at least 1 per cent. Similarly, it is said that if a village is less than 10 kms from a highway, its economy gets a 10 per cent boost. With the growth of mobiles and road networks we are seeing prosperity reaching the furthest corners of rural India. Better connectivity will allow greater access to education, healthcare and jobs. This coupled with the Unique Identification System (UID), universal banking and direct money transfer, we should see subsidies reaching deserving rural households, pulling them out of poverty and bringing them into the consumption cycle. The slogan coined by our late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965 to enthuse the soldiers and farmers of India, ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kissan’, will finally ring true.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 12