Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles

by Ambi Parameswaran

  So air travel was for the maharajas, right! Then something happened.

  Captain GR Gopinath launched India’s first low-cost airline, Air Deccan, on 23 August 2003 with the first flight from Bangalore to Hubli. The airline with its tag line ‘Simplifly’ offered never before deals on air tickets. The airline commissioned Leo Burnett/Orchard Advertising to create a poignant ad for the airline. The film depicts an elderly carpenter in a small village getting a letter from his son. The postman who opens the letter for the illiterate old man announces that it is an air ticket from his son, to fly to Delhi, where the son is probably working. The film then, through well-composed vignettes, takes the viewer through the dreams of the little boy, the carpenter’s son, to fly and how the carpenter makes him a wooden plane to play with. The film culminates with the old man making his first air journey with a simple bag, which incidentally contains the aforesaid wooden plane. The film went on to win the hearts and minds of middle-class Indians and took away the fear of flying from many of them. Air Deccan opened the gates for many other low-cost carriers to enter the market. Unfortunately, Air Deccan hit several air pockets prompting a merger with Kingfisher Airlines in December 2009. And that turned out to be a sad story.

  Fortunately, for first-time and economy-minded air travellers in India, other low-cost airlines moved into this space and IndiGo seems to have made a lasting impact with its no-nonsense pricing, no business class, no frequent-flier programme and no hot beverages (on short haul flights). IndiGo, set up in 2006, has managed to build for itself an interesting brand personality with smart airhostesses (who may be wearing wigs), nuts sold in reusable tins, and some interesting song and dance advertising, very artfully created by Wieden & Kennedy, Delhi.

  The Indian tourism industry has tried many tricks to get the middle class to travel for leisure. Traditionally, all travel has been for family reunion purposes or for religious reasons. In fact, till recently, religious tourism accounted for anything between 40 to 70 per cent of all domestic travel – excluding travel for work or family events. National Council of Applied Economic Research estimated that in 2012, around 50 per cent of all packaged tours were religious tours, while leisure accounted for 28 per cent2.

  Indian government has tried to build domestic tourism traffic. One of the most successful domestic tourism campaigns was the one orchestrated by Amitabh Kant when he was the Tourism Secretary of Kerala. He put Kerala on the map of all domestic tourism-minded Indians with his ‘Kerala – God’s Own Country’ campaign. The captivating films, the print ads and the brochures showed the North Indians – who were the least aware and thought that everyone from the south of the Vindhyas was a ‘Madrasi’ – a different South India, with great beaches, backwaters and festivals featuring thirty-plus elephants.

  Taj Hotels has probably done more for Goan tourism than any other body. During the mid-’80s, Taj, which had set up two excellent properties in Goa, ran a cinema film campaign touting the virtues of Goa during the rains. The then marketing director of Taj Hotels, the irrepressible Camellia Punjabi and her advertising agency partner Frank Simoes made a great team. It is said that during one such meeting as Camelia began on one of her long discourses – and these could last an hour or more – Frank slipped out of her office with no one the wiser. But the campaign and the magic they created together resulted in the hotels in Goa experiencing a significant uptick during the monsoons, which till then was seen as a very very lean season. Camellia and her sister, Namita, went on to create the upmarket Indian restaurant Chutney Mary in UK. Frank retired some years later to live a life of peace in Goa – where else!

  Advertising and marketing has the power to change perceptions and drive traffic to ostensibly the poorest of poor holiday destinations. Advertising legend David Ogilvy narrates a little story about tourism advertising: ‘I once found myself conspiring with a British cabinet minister as to how we might persuade Her Majesty’s Treasury to cough up more money for British travel advertising in America. Said he, “Why does any American in his senses spend his vacation in this cold damp of an English summer when he could equally well bask under the Italian skies? I can only suppose that your advertising is the answer”’3.

  Mary Wells Lawrence who broke the glass ceiling for women in advertising recalls how Milton Glaser, who was the most respected designer of his time, was asked to create posters for New York because the state had nothing to help its tourist programs, no poster, no maps at railway stations, no bumper stickers for taxis and no money to make such things. She says it was love of New York which took Milton Glaser to her office with a batch of posters. While they were ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ over them, he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and said, ‘I like this, what do you think?’; it was the ‘I love New York’ logo with a heart in the place of the word love. Bang, ‘I ♥ New York’ was born. Possibly the most imitated of all tourism logos4.

  One of the most memorable print campaigns was the one done by Trikaya for Mauritius Tourism in the early ’90s. With copy by Alok Nanda and art by Vikas Gaitonde, it would rank among some of the best print advertising produced in India. The ads had evocative headlines like ‘We have no branches’, ‘Shaken. Not Stirred’. Great photography by Prabhudda Dasgupta added to the look of the campaign. One fascinating feature of the campaign was the typography choice; the headlines had interesting long extensions for the letters ‘l’, ‘g’, ‘h’ etc. Vikas Gaitonde explained in an interview that he had created that particular English font to reflect the spirit of Mauritius, where no man-made structure is allowed to stand taller than a fully-grown coconut tree. Hence, the taller ‘l’ and ‘h’. Those were the glory days of Indian print advertising where copy and art made a great combination to woo the affluent audience. As an aside, you would be fascinated to know that in the city of Athens, no structure can rise over the ancient Parthenon temple that sits atop the Acropolis; similarly, in Paris no structure can be taller than the Eiffel Tower.

  FONT CREATION: Advertising has had some great font creators. RK Joshi created the unique Ulka font that used features of Devnagari for Roman characters. Vikas Gaitonde created a special font for the Mauritius tourism campaign. Ravi Deshpande created a special font for AAAI’s Goafest.

  Time share resorts too started emerging in India during the late ’80s. The pioneer Sterling Resorts grew too rapidly and as a result could not service the demand it created. Club Mahindra followed but has been able to build a significant national presence. They created a product that was more personal than a hotel holiday with special facilities and activities for children.

  The ’90s saw a dramatic change in the way Indians booked their train tickets. IRCTC set up a great online booking system that took a lot of the toil out of train booking – though the website is a bit slow and unresponsive due to heavy traffic, something that should be of concern to the authorities. Redbus has done the same for bus travel in the 2010s. Interestingly, a lot of bookings for train and bus still happen through agents, but now the agent does the booking from his office. In a sense, Indians have developed a hybrid model for managing the transition from standing in a queue at the railway reservation counter to using the Internet to book on the computer.

  The late ’90s saw average Indians starting to travel abroad. One big driver of international travel is Bollywood films. Yash Chopra shot so many of his films in Switzerland that the country accorded special status to him; in fact, his favourite shooting spot, the lake Alpenrausch was rechristened the Chopra Lake. The idea of using Bollywood to help international travel has been adopted by several other countries as well, such as Spain in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Germany in Don 2 etc. So instead of running short ad films, countries have used Bollywood to run full length country ads.

  In spite of the rapid strides made by the tourism industry, for a 2 trillion dollar economy, travel and tourism contributes only $80 million (2011). The flip side is that tourism employs almost 37 million people. So the potential to create more employment and jobs through
tourism is indeed tremendous.

  No wonder the government of India roped in Amitabh Kant to pilot the India tourism campaign in the 2000s. His campaign ‘Incredible India’ has been seen in many parts of the world. In a first, the campaign used many innovative media to build awareness in the high potential market of New York. The whole city got a taste of India through a range of activities including India Parade, buses with full wraparound of the ‘Incredible India’ message, Times Square display and more. Amitabh Kant, who had cut his teeth as Tourism Secretary of Kerala from 1997 to 2001 when his campaigns made Kerala the number one tourism hotspot in the country, played a stellar role as the government of India’s Joint Secretary Tourism (2001-07). It was a time when tourism was hardest hit. After the 2001 attack in New York, air travel gained a notoriety of its own. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then PM of India speaking at a chief ministers’ conference, spoke eloquently about the need to build tourism to combat terrorism. Amitabh Kant and his agency team, Ogilvy & Mather’s V Sunil and Satbir Singh, along with a host of other agency partners managed to make an impact on the global stage with their ‘Incredible India’ campaign. During the campaign period, tourist arrivals in India went up from 2.38 million in 2002 to 5.48 million in 2008. A remarkable feat5.

  While we could be happy with the increase of tourist inflow to India, a tiny country like Thailand gets more international tourists with 26 million vs our 6.7 million in 2013. Not only are we not attracting enough tourists, we have more Indians travelling overseas than tourist arrivals in India, 16 million vs 6.7 million in 2013; and over 1100 million domestic travel were recorded in 2013. So obviously, as far as tourism is concerned, we seem to be a ‘consumption’-driven nation and are yet to fully tap the international potential offered by the many wonderful destinations we have dotted around the country.

  Tourism, which was meant for the rich maharajas of India, is no longer restricted to the rich. The growth of low-cost airlines, the ability to book train and bus tickets from home, the falling cost of international travel (and ease of travel) are some of the contributory factors that have helped Indians adopt a leisure travel habit. I don’t think the surface has been scratched as yet. The potential is really sky-high.

  What gives me this confidence and why am I sure it will happen?

  JWT’s Changing India Report published in Campaign India magazine, 7 October 2011, points to ten broad travel trends. Snacking travel: holidays are now extending beyond Diwali and summer; a long weekend is a time to take a break, travel to Kerala or even Singapore; Informed Traveller: access to information has taken some of the surprises out of tourism travel, websites like Tripadvisor are seen as more reliable than the report from a travel agency; Technology changing travel: mobile and Internet are changing the way travel is being planned and enjoyed; Social capital of travel: social media has created bragging rights out of travel – photographs, food and more are crowding social media sites, so you travel to share on your Facebook page, Twitter etc; Staycation: people are trying out home vacations, coupled with visits to the local spa, shopping mall, entertainment destinations; Sports Tourism: local and international sporting events are spurring new travel destinations; Couch Travel: the growth of travel and Discovery television channels has created a new market for travel – from your couch. Add to this the travel magazines, and you can stay at home and vicariously travel around the globe; Active seniors: today there are special packaged tours aimed at senior, sixty-plus citizens, specially curated for their needs and pace6.

  Taking off from that report, I can speak of five clear pointers that can be spotted on the horizon. The first is the increasing affluence of middle-class Indians, who are tasting the first signs of prosperity. One way of enjoying that prosperity is to travel for leisure, not for family or religious purposes. The second reason is the growing levels of stress in urban cities. This stress is not just with white-collar workers but is also present with blue-collar workers – for the last five years, even the chauffeurs who work for the senior executives of Mumbai business world plan a four-week holiday, almost collectively. The third reason is the relative ease of planning and organizing travel, thanks to the Internet, online reviews, bargain shopping etc. The fourth reason is the varied segmentation of tourism travel. It is not just families with kids who travel or young adults, we are seeing young girls travelling in groups, senior citizens travelling in groups, even kids going on international tours. Many events are being packaged around interesting places, for example, Goafest, the annual advertising festival and the Jaipur Literature Festival to just name two. I can go on with more reasons, but the fifth reason could be the great social capital that tourism gives, and this was brought alive to me almost twenty years ago. A friend from the US who was in Chennai on holiday decided to go to the Cholamandalam Art Village to pick up some works of art, paintings, sculpture etc. When I asked, he mentioned that after each of his trips, he invites friends home for dinner and the art he picks up on each trip becomes the topic of conversation. In today’s world, Facebook has become everyone’s bragging ground after even a short trip, whether it is to Dubai or to Fort Kochi.

  Tourism advertising is also keeping pace with this thirst for adventure. The digital medium is creating many nano-segmentation opportunities. For instance, you are searching for a hotel in Goa and you get a sponsored message from a tour operator. For MakeMyTrip, FCB Ulka created some very interesting long-format ads that created waves on social media. One film featured a little sardarji boy named Khushmeet Singh Gill. He is a lover of the sea, which he has never seen for real, and claims that his name defines him, as he has ‘Gill’ in it. He wears blue all the time, even goes to sleep in his flipper-slippers. He is now looking forward to going to Goa with his parents, but lo and behold, a cyclone strikes Goa the day they are set to leave for his long-desired beach holiday. He is heartbroken, but his dad gets a call from MakeMyTrip and the agent tells him that he can ‘Uncancel’ the trip; he can take the same trip on a later date with no extra charge. Little Gill finally makes his trip to the sea.

  As the Indian economy continues to grow, we will see growth happen in the tourism industry across many dimensions. The top end will continue to grow and exotic international destinations will be unearthed every year. If it was Machu Pichu in Peru last year, this year it may be an Art Tour in Florence, Italy. The ultra-rich are also discovering exclusive destinations in India. The hotel chain Oberoi has built brand new heritage properties across India under the ‘Vilas’ umbrella. The middle class is discovering the joy of international travel. From Singapore, Dubai and Bangkok, the list has expanded to London, Paris and New York. Now, the list is growing even faster with the addition of countries like South Africa,Turkey and Australia. From holidays being lumped during school holidays, we are seeing an openingup of other months for leisure holiday travel. This will continue to grow as young married and unmarried couples start travelling on short breaks. Also, the elder travel groups are quite time-independent.

  There is a lot of potential to be unlocked in the tourism and travel industry as Ashwini Kakkar of Mercury Travel expounds, ‘The more you travel, the more you realize how little you have travelled’. So banks are planning to tie-up with travel agencies and package tour operators to design unique finance schemes: Why not go to London instead of Jaipur, for just ₹3000 EMI for twelve months? You can expect more action on this front in the next decade.

  At one time, international travel was equated to shopping. I have a suspicion that this will continue as long as we see shopping as a pleasurable pastime, but the main reason for travel may soon become experiencing the new. If so, ‘God’s Own Country’ will be ready to shower its blessings on many million more tourists.

  Naukri: H for Hitler, A for Arrogant

  THE DOOR SLAMS open. The angry husband is back home. He yells at his wife, ‘Mujhe phir yeh job nahin mila. Eise pile kameez pehenke jayenge to decent job kaise milega’ (I did not get the job. Who will give me a job if I go dressed in such unwashed-looking
yellow shirts). The perplexed wife exclaims, ‘Main to washing powder se hi kapde dhulati hoon’ (I get them washed with washing powder).The husband shouts, ‘Kuch to karo’ (Do something) and flings the shirt at her.

  At this, the voice of god – in advertising parlance, this is an omniscient voice makes a dramatic impact on the structure of the film narrative with the characters reacting to the voice directly – says, ‘Presenting the new Wheel detergent washing powder with the power of lime, to make your clothes sparkling white’. The pack of Wheel magically appears in the scene. After the mandatory product demonstration, the story ends with the husband coming home after landing a job, and doing a waltz with his devoted wife.

  The brand Wheel was launched in 1987 by Hindustan Unilever to take on Nirma, and the ad mentioned above, created by Lintas, was a big hit. It managed to tap into the angst of the youth who were not getting jobs. Remember, the Indian economy was going through a meltdown around that time and was saved by the wave of liberalization that was unleashed by the Narasimha Rao government in 1991.