Buyer-brand: what?s love got to do with it?

?Why don?t you take pictures of your leading man and lady and yourself dressed up like Santa Claus, carrying a sack bulging with the silver cans of your film and circulate this image in the media? I assure you this will douse your film with a special emotional pheromone that will draw the consumers to it irresistibly,? I said to my daughter, Pooja, who was battling with pre-release angst, since her film, Holiday, is going to release this festive season and she needs to get people into the halls.

Tapping into emotions to sell products has been an old technique of marketers to sell their wares. The consumer?s mind is full of emotions that are connected to experiences, memories and notions, which, when stimulated and fused with your brand, can do wonders for it. No wonder every shop, every store and every product uses Santa as an icon every Christmas season, provoking shoppers to literally shop till they drop. World over Santa has become a marketing tool. Santa and his elves cater to our childhood memory of dreams being fulfilled in the form of presents at Christmas. So, no wonder that when Pooja mentioned this to her partner, who comes from a completely different background, Bihar, even he jumped at the thought. Simply because Santa and present-giving and the feeling of festivity and Holiday spirit, has become a universal emotion in this globalised world. It?s a feel-good situation that everyone can connect to.

The Hindi cinema has used ?love for ones? country? and fused it with its brand since its inception to make a killing at the box office. The cricket business also uses patriotism, which is latent most of the time, until it is suddenly unleashed by an overwhelming feeling when the Indian team wins a match or the World Cup. Don?t you remember Reliance?s famous ad when Sehwag hit the winning stroke, leading India to victory and millions rush out of their houses and down the streets, hugging perfect strangers to the sound of Kar lo duniya mutthi mein..?

The moral of the story is that when an object is infused with an emotional value, the value is far greater than the actual material value of that object. To put it simply, the marketer uses the emotion of the consumer lying within him and directs it towards himself, to make a purchase.

But how does this all work? Experts say that emotions are nebulous, fuzzy, there-one-minute-gone-the-next feelings. But, once you connect these with memories, experiences and notions, they become more tangible and durable. They crystallise into something that we call an ?emotional node.? How emotional nodes form in our mind is best explained by an analogy. Pour a little salt into a full glass of water and watch the crystals quickly dissolve. The salt is still present in the water, but it is everywhere and nowhere. It is the same with emotions that flit around in our mind, never staying in one place. Drop a thread into the water, however, and gradually you will see the salt bond to the thread and crystallise into a solid, tangible structure. Feelings and emotions act the same way when they attach themselves to a memory, an experience or a notion and create an emotional node. These emotional nodes are tucked away deep into the inner crevices of our mind, waiting to be activated by a word, a sound or an image. And, come December, Santa does the trick.

All my life I have marveled at how people have loved a certain brand with such intensity that they have been loyal to it for an entire lifetime. My father, till his sunset years in his 80s, loved listening to BBC radio. This he did religiously at the crack of dawn till he died. How could this brand generate such intense feelings of loyalty within him? I later learnt that the romance between my mother and him took place around the time of the Second World War and they used to listen to BBC news on the radio together. This explained why, till his death, he was emotionally linked to BBC radio. It?s all about big emotions.

Strange as it may sound, loving objects and inanimate things is something that human beings do very readily. As a child, I remember that my neighbour, a Christian doctor, loved his Buick car seemingly more than his wife, or so he himself claimed. I still remember how he used to whistle as he polished it lovingly till it shone.

My elder sister was a Coca-Cola addict and when Coke was banned by George Fernandes, she used to beg anyone coming from abroad to bring Coke cans. Grown-ups love objects as much as children love their toys. Just imagine if someone picked your little girl?s much used and loved teddy bear and tossed it in the garbage can…what a catastrophe that would be. Replacing it with a new one wouldn?t mean anything to her. Don?t we know that the physical qualities are never in play when you love someone or something?

Quality alone cannot replace the emotional value of an object. Love is always something unique and exclusive, while quality is easily reproducible. We don?t love other people in the same way that we love a particular person. The same applies to the love we develop for brands. Marketers spend billions of dollars to make this ?love? happen between the consumer and the brand. Because once that love takes place, that brand is made for life, till death do them part!

The writer is a Mumbai-based film maker