In a world dominated by isms of many kinds, there is a need for advertising to reflect on the efficacy of emotion in advertising. But before that, an understanding of whether we are at all emotional people needs to be established. I, for one, believe the average Indian is selectively emotional—he looks for emotions that he can express in public where he seeks peer approval or in private which I guess happens most of the time. For advertising to look at emotion as an idiom can both be tricky as also tiresome.
Just like in theatre, in advertising too, it is frightfully simple to be emotional. However, the Fevicol ad which shows the man fishing or for that matter the recent Dravid commercials depicting advise as a strategic requirement in the insurance business (Max New York Life) represent a paradigm shift in Indian advertising. Is this going to last? If you ask social scientists they have another perspective. They believe that the average Indian does not have the capacity to laugh at himself. They also suggest that we as a nation take ourselves very seriously and this seriousness is contrarian to the kind of humour that perhaps Indian advertising depicts.
There is, however, only one issue that I have with this argument.
Advertising is meant to create brand preference and possibly brand purchase. So it can and does work both ways. There is the advantage of using fear if you want to establish recall both of the category and the brand—as Cease Fire extinguishers did many years ago—or create a reward value proposition for Cadbury’s chocolates which Bachchan hands out every time Pappu scores a minor victory.
In both these cases, the objective was and shall always be to create preference; but it is also the criticality of the brand to your life that often dictates the sobriety or seriousness of the message and what idiom it will be couched in.
Country brands are more easily built around undiluted emotion, which is why we still remember with fondness the Mera Bharat Mahaan television commercials. Now take the fabulously funny Airtel commercials promoting their Rs 200 prepaid offer. Here humour takes the dimensions of emotion because it establishes a certain equality, no matter which station of life you emerge from. Hence, there are instances where humour itself becomes the emotional leitmotif of the communication.
That doesn’t mean the rational and the emotional cannot co-exist. In emerging econo-mies such as ours they just have to and they do with aplomb. It is this trend that deserves comment and commendation.
Even if our politics hasn’t, our advertising has instilled that rare ability to laugh— be it at ourselves or at others and if this is the only contribution that Indian advertising can truly call its own, in terms of re-defining India’s sociological landscape, then so be it. It is truly worth the effort.
The writer is CEO, Equus Red Cell
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