The fact is that advertising industry has not created any of the stereotypes, but they certainly have strengthened and propagated many of these stereotypes in order to sell many brands and categories. Advertising does not necessarily depict how women actually behave but how we think women behave.

Today despite changing gender roles, increase in literacy levels, greater number of women joining work force, increased financial independence, greater ownership of cars and bikes certain gender stereotypes have not changed.

These are four stereotypes that the advertising industry refuses to let go off.

1.Curse of dark skin: This is one stereotype the world of advertising has just refused to give up on. Possibly the origination of this stereotype could be the rule of English in India where the fair skinned women were thought to be the epitome of beauty. The entire fairness category is stuck in this time wrap. The women protagonists can be good singers, working women, Cricket commentators, budding entrepreneurs but they cannot succeed in life if they are not fair. Wish the advertising and research industry stepped out to see how dark skin need not be a curse.

2.The ultimate smell test: As a housewife earlier she lived by the kitchen test, today she lives by the smell test. She wasn’t a good wife or daughter-in-law if her kitchen wasn’t sparkling clean; today she is a failure if her toilet is not smell free. Bad odor has become the final frontier of womanhood, mom hood and everything else. Seriously!

3.The melt by diamond wife: As clueless husband you are allowed to make as many mistakes as you can make, only until you can break the bank to buy a 3 carat princess cut sparkling rock for your wife. If only this mistake and make up situation was as simple world will be free of domestic strife and divorces. A sparking rock does not lead to domestic bliss; this is one stereotype that is not going away soon.

4.The fairy Godmother: she knows it all has all the answers. She knows where the missing socks are, she knows which cooking oil will produce tastiest food, what exercise regime you need to follow, how using a home made medicine will make acnes vanish! Yet the fairy godmother knows nothing about finances, insurance, holidays, credit cards, driving, computers and mobiles. So either she knows it all or she knows nothing! It’s time the industry made up its mind

The reality is that women have changed. Working women don’t always wear pants to work. Their husbands don’t sleep hungry in the night.  Their kids do very well in school. If such concepts are ever tested in focus group, women will react with disdain. Some of these portrayals have started to diminish, but most are going strong.

Stereotypes are shorthand, they simplify complex ideas, it’s time the advertising and marketing industry become change makers and sow seeds of new stereotypes. Its time the advertising professionals themselves changed

Original Article was published in Marketing Booster Magazine of March 2013

Not really, you actually take a snap of the packaging,  upload it on the social networking sites and enjoy the admiration! The admiration will peak, your social chatter will make you feel good about your buy, and only then will you sit back and enjoy the laptop you bought.

In today’s expectation economy where the consumers want to buy the best, they want to boast about it first. This is what I call Sociomerism.

Sociomerism is bold new powerful driver of consumer choice. Infact what your social network will say about what you buy almost predisposes the consumers’ choice. In today’s hyper-connected world where social networks define rules of engagement in personal life, they are doing so in brand choices also.

While this is a relatively new phenomenon, some maven brands are catching upon this new trend.

The Coke honesty commercial is clearly an example of leveraging Sociomerism. As a consumer you are least likely to talk about Coke the brand and the liquid in glowing terms. Who will ever want to upload a picture consuming Coke? Who will ever hear good comments about your love for Coke? But when the same Coke honestly opens up and speak about sugar, obesity and possible ills of the brand, the world doesn’t snigger at them. The world stands up and applauds.

What coke has done is that It had made people talk about Coke the brand, the liquid and people’s love for the brand! This otherwise would not have happened.

So why would Sociomerism big and powerful as we move forward? Here are four possible reasons

1. We live in a world of choice saturation. Buying new thing no longer gives the same joy and hearing applause on the choice
2. Status is the differentiator humans seek. Brands are the equalizer, celebration of choosing the brand is the differentiator
3. Consumerism is not a good word consumerism cannot be celebrated. Consumer movement is a different ball game. Sociomers will actively seek newer consumer movements to enhance their social status. They will force more and more brands to come out of closet and be Honest.
4. Sociomers will seek more and more customizing options to drive online chatter. Till now buying was not really a two way street. Buying things did not generate conversations. Today Sociomers want buying to generate chatter. This makes them feel powerful.

The younger consumers who are wired differently drive the new experience economy. Merging experiences with ownership is something that comes naturally to them.

Brands now have to be ready to face them

Original article is published here:http://blog.creamglobal.com/right_brain_left_brain/2013/02/social-consumerism-or-sociomerism.html

There are, many things that the movement is asking for: capital punishment, public lynching, castration, e. fast trials and many more. May be all the demands are right. May be all of this should be agreed upon. May be this will improve life of women in our country.

To do any of this requires executive action. To make all our 400 plus MPs to agree on a single agenda is not easy. They may eventually come around to drafting and legislating a new law. The new law may improve the situation visibly.

. The society has always placed the males on a higher pedestal than females. The desire to dominate the females has been the driving force of social codes in the country. The changing gender roles, increasing independence of women, the drive from women to be independent is creating a pressure on males that they have never faced. This competition and knowledge that you are losing out is possibly behind this social malice of today.

I have always believed that only laws cannot change deep rooted social malice. To change them the society needs to take positive action.

While the desire for better laws, sensitive law enforcers and faster court indictments is all fine, this will take too much of time. The cops will still not record every event of eve teasing, the victims will not always go to the cop station, the social stigmas attached to such events will ensure that the crime is continued to be committed every day.

The current mass uprising has been ignited, fuelled and spread by the social media networks. They have truly become the change agents. The same power of social media can be unleashed to drive a really powerful change. This change can be long lasting and a radical social change driver.

Let’s start with eve teasing, the more widespread of two evils. This is one evil that is not as widely reported as it should be; the victims are forced to treat this as part of life, and this is an evil that seems to have a no cure.

What we need is to create one central eve teaser registry. Every event that ever happens should be reported and recorded here. As far as possible the names and identities should be reported on the site. As a registry this should be open to every woman in the country, and registering a complaint can be through a simple SMS. Once registered the entire onus of proving that the person is not guilty should be on the shamed person and not the one who registered the complaint.

The entire Police Force in the country should pick up the complaints from this site and investigate the incidences. Let them apply the principle guilty until proven innocent.

The entire registry needs to become more than just a complaint redressal forum. This needs to become the registry that drives your entire life. Let parents check the grooms out on this registry first before they seek match for their daughters. Let the corporates check potential employees here before they hire. Let the insurance companies refuse insurance policies to the guilty, let the Passport Authorities refuse passports, or mark it on the passport of their status, let every government deny jobs to the perpetrators of crime.

A lot of these steps are voluntary; they don’t need an official sanction and can be implemented easily.

Lack of credible deterrent is the prime reason for a host of crime that happens against women. Legal deterrent is one way to minimize the crime, but social deterrent is a far bigger motivation.

If we as a society stand up and drive the change within, insensitivity around such crimes will come down dramatically.

Admittedly it will drive the change in the slightly higher echelons of society, but culture trickles down and becomes a rampaging flood. It’s time to unleash the collective force of our society.

Let’s stand up!

A word can paint a thousand pictures, or so said an old adage. This is how the world has been for all these years. Everyone communicated with each other through a series of coherently connected words that people made sense of. Poets described beauty of the world, writers wrote about the joys of discovering something new, and the world’s craving for information continued on the textual search has been the back bone of internet for all these years. Google has a text box to search; most of internet is driven by getting the ‘words’ right, phone networks became popular on ‘texts’ fuelling consumers’ desire for instant information gratification.

All this has dramatically changed and the vey devices that spread the cult of text are responsible for ushering in the new revolution. This is the beauty of today’s evolving technology, it moves on changing the course of society in the process. Today a picture can paint a thousand words.

Everything is going visual, even the thesaurus has gone visual. If you haven’t then check out to know what visual can do to words. Yet this was early day experiment with visualization.

The new visual society behavior will have implications for the future

Rise of V-commerce:
Shazam has been changing the way music is being consumed today. The app ‘hears’ the music and identifies the music. This allows you to hear, learn more and share the music with your friends. Imagine the same being done to e-commerce. Consumers will be able to point their camera to any object, identify the brand, the retailers that are selling it, the best bargains on the web, order and complete the transaction. Imagine holidays, gadgets, schools, college courses all being sold through the power of visuals. eCommerce is really small, V-Commerce can change the face of retail.

The coming of age of V-Social Networks:
We all know that social networks have been the biggest drivers of adoption of internet all over the world. The ‘like’ button on Facebook makes life simple for a host of newbies who join the social networks. It reduces the barriers for them to join the conversation. Going forward this simple like button may transform into ‘own’ and ‘desire’ button. For a host of consumers who use the web to search before they buy (the virtual version of window shopping) the search dynamic can change permanently. By knowing if the right people own the brand in their own social network, buying the same thing will become that much simpler, and possibly quicker

Mainstreaming of V-Activism:
Of all people the traffic cops have been the ones to spot the potential of Visual Activism early. By allowing ordinary citizens to upload pictures of traffic offenders, and then prosecuting the offenders the cops have made ordinary citizens into activists. The simple act of being able to take a picture, post it on online networks and allowing it to spread across the social networks will make the world a place full of activists. Today a large part of this is political kind, to mobilize public opinion for very large causes. This will quickly trickle down to brands and every day issues. Tweeting about a faulty product with a picture definitely will get you a quicker and sharper response then just words. V-Activism is for all, and all it takes is a mobile camera. The entire visual society will make the world of brands a little more transparent. It will also blur the difference between real and virtual.

The merging of real and virtual with Visual will be the big driver of apps and acceptability of technology in near future

Original article is published here 

A word can paint a thousand pictures, or so said an old adage. This is how the world has been for all these years. Everyone communicated with each other through a series of coherently connected words that people made sense of.

A word can paint a thousand pictures, or so said an old adage. This is how the world has been for all these years. Everyone communicated with each other through a series of coherently connected words that people made sense of. Poets described beauty of the world, writers wrote about the joys of discovering something new, and the world’s craving for information continued on the textual search has been the back bone of internet for all these years. Google has a text box to search; most of internet is driven by getting the ‘words’ right, phone networks became popular on ‘texts’ fuelling consumers’ desire for instant information gratification.

All this has dramatically changed and the vey devices that spread the cult of text are responsible for ushering in the new revolution. This is the beauty of today’s evolving technology, it moves on changing the course of society in the process. Today a picture can paint a thousand words.

Everything is going visual, even the thesaurus has gone visual. If you haven’t then check out to know what visual can do to words. Yet this was early day experiment with visualization.

The new visual society behavior will have implications for the future

Rise of V-commerce:
Shazam has been changing the way music is being consumed today. The app ‘hears’ the music and identifies the music. This allows you to hear, learn more and share the music with your friends. Imagine the same being done to e-commerce. Consumers will be able to point their camera to any object, identify the brand, the retailers that are selling it, the best bargains on the web, order and complete the transaction. Imagine holidays, gadgets, schools, college courses all being sold through the power of visuals. eCommerce is really small, V-Commerce can change the face of retail.

The coming of age of V-Social Networks:
We all know that social networks have been the biggest drivers of adoption of internet all over the world. The ‘like’ button on Facebook makes life simple for a host of newbies who join the social networks. It reduces the barriers for them to join the conversation. Going forward this simple like button may transform into ‘own’ and ‘desire’ button. For a host of consumers who use the web to search before they buy (the virtual version of window shopping) the search dynamic can change permanently. By knowing if the right people own the brand in their own social network, buying the same thing will become that much simpler, and possibly quicker

Mainstreaming of V-Activism:
Of all people the traffic cops have been the ones to spot the potential of Visual Activism early. By allowing ordinary citizens to upload pictures of traffic offenders, and then prosecuting the offenders the cops have made ordinary citizens into activists. The simple act of being able to take a picture, post it on online networks and allowing it to spread across the social networks will make the world a place full of activists. Today a large part of this is political kind, to mobilize public opinion for very large causes. This will quickly trickle down to brands and every day issues. Tweeting about a faulty product with a picture definitely will get you a quicker and sharper response then just words. V-Activism is for all, and all it takes is a mobile camera. The entire visual society will make the world of brands a little more transparent. It will also blur the difference between real and virtual.

The merging of real and virtual with Visual will be the big driver of apps and acceptability of technology in near future

Original article is published here http://www.afaqs.com/planning-room/detail.html?id=5

Last night Twitter suffered a global outage. The Microblogging site for down for many hours and users across the globe could not access the site. While Twitter officially did not attribute the outage to Olympic Tweets, the tech bloggers refused to discount the possibility. Today Facebook seem to be suffering the same fate. Again is London Olympic a part of the reason?

The Olympics Games Organizing Committee emblazoned the giant screens inside the stadium with hashtag ‘savethesurprise’ during the games rehearsals. Yet the details leaked out forcing the organizers to even delete the videos from You Tube. The social media is putting tremendous pressure on the organizing committee to keep things under wraps.

This is a prequel to what I think is about to happen. London Olympics will be the catalyst for the social media’s growth and adoption world over. The adoption of social media will put pressure on traditional news media even more, even altering the entire business dynamics.

Till now the audience globally has had to depend on news media for ‘breaking news’ for ‘inside information’ and have driven it by ‘our channel exclusive’. All this might take a back seat this olympics

The first thing we will remember the games for is Twitter. The games can truly revolutionize Twitter and pose a real serious challenge to more established Face book.  Suppose the players Tweet their opinions; the coaches Tweet their reactions; and the spectators too Tweet their experience. We as spectators can know how the player thought, planned, performed and felt all in first person, and that is just one of the many new ways of connection. The news channels will then have to find alternate means of connection. The fans will be able to follow their stars without boundaries any time, all the time. Twitter can go really main stream in India if that happens.

The videos of Opening Ceremony rehearsals found its way to You Tube. The videos of official ceremony are bound to find their way to You Tube. This means as an ordinary viewer you can watch the opening ceremony with hundreds of different viewpoints. The Games will push the entire user generated content phenomenon to a new level.  The real story of games will not lie with what is being telecast on TV, but in what the players, coaches and spectators are saying. The ‘insiders’ point of view will always carry more weight than the telecast version of the games. The viewers will be spoilt for choice as they would get to see very vantage point that is there to see or experience.

All this will be fuelled by the new age high quality video enabled cell phones. A slew of mobile apps dedicated to Olympics are already available on Google Play and App Store. These games will be the games of  mobile phones, apps on phones, streaming videos on phones, videos shot on phones and a virtual medial networks created by phones. The true massification of apps can be fuelled by the Olympics games.

Faster, higher, stronger, this time around also applies to all the viewers, followers and those who like.

It seemed that Indian cup of woes was overflowing.
Meanwhile Indian sport was mounting a strong challenge to Cricket. Hockey was played to a packed stadium, boxing was drawing crowds in the World Boxing Series. And a host of sporting events were attracting eyeballs.

It seemed that the dice was loaded against IPL
The opening ceremony did nothing to perk up the interest, and the first week of cricketing action left television audience cold. Ratings dipped, inventory piled up, and generally it looked like IPL 5 will fare worse than IPL 4. Add to it the controversies of fixing and rape, the league should have folded and gone belly up. Admittedly it’s easy to criticize IPL. The auction process, the international players, the cheerleaders, the focus on entertainment, the money power, the franchise system, the actors and businessmen are more than enough cannon fodder.  I have no intention of either criticizing or adulating the league.

Let’s evaluate the league purely as a media property. Has it worked or not?
If TV audience is the only measurement, then may be it hasn’t been very successful. But looking at IPL merely as a TV spectacle will be foolhardy. There are three indicators that will tell that IPL is headed in a slightly different direction.

First the online viewership has seen a phenomenal jump. The official IPL site has seen page views explode. Indiatimes, the official internet partner saw a 56% jump in viewership in first two weeks of the league. Since then, it would have only gone up. Clearly the action shift from the analogue world to the digital world has been stark. Additionally the online following of all the teams combined has doubled since the time the league started. That is impressive performance.

Second, the matches have been played to packed houses. 146 matches have already been played, and there are just two left to play. An estimated 44 Lakh people have watched the match live. That’s a staggering number, and it will go up to 45 Lakh at the end of the league.  No live event has ever created this kind of reach in India. The viewer enthusiasm has been unmatched with matches being sold out weeks in advance. Live events in India are usually chaotic, not IPL this year, it’s been impeccably organized

Thirdly, the quality of the product has improved, and that is the most important indicator. The improvement in quality of cricket did lead to increase in TV viewership too. It may not have produced new stars this year, but it did produce moments that captivated the country and the world. The traffic on social media sites is a testimony to that.

IPL seems to have filled a long existing gap in the Indian entertainment scenario, which was the lack of a good sustainable, scalable live entertainment property. While cricket has always attracted crowd in India, specially the ODI variety, the matches themselves have been very few in numbers. The live audience was so miniscule that it didn’t matter in overall count.

What it means is that IPL this year probably has transformed from a TV only property to India’s premier live entertainment event. Yes the viewers want to see scintillating cricket, but they also want to
experience the big arena feel. The energy, the feel and the joy of enjoying a live event made the viewer’s go again and again to ‘see’ the match.

IPL 6 will be a true marketing challenge. The audience appetite for IPL action will mean brands can have a two pronged strategy to engage with IPL. There is the conventional TV/internet as a property to leverage; and there is also the live audience as an opportunity to engage.

If there are 5 Million viewers who are watching the league, these five million are people who have sought out the league, they watch, they tweet, they have a conversation on Facebook, their multiplier effect is actually immeasurable. The 5million may actually impact another 50, driving either the TV audience or online viewership. For once the audience becomes the medium. Imagine the opportunity the brands can have to engage the in stadia audience through gigs and acts in the break, without stemming the flow of the game. And the impact of such acts will be far greater than any amount of passive TVC that brands can buy on TV. For once the gigs will not be dependent on the TV audience, but will be fuelled by the camera totting all sharing audience.

This is not to say that IPL doesn’t need to fix a few issues. It does, and I am sure the board’s working towards fixing them. Cricketing reasons drove the audience acceptance this year, and if the quality of cricket remains this good, fans will flock to watch it

Most brands have heavy consumers and light consumers. Media choices do not allow smarter targeting but both consume similar communication. IPL too has heavy and light consumers, and that means brands can target the two with different strategies

IPL is transforming the entertainment landscape; it could do the same with communication landscape too.

original got published here

http://pitchonnet.com/blog/2012/06/05/ipl-5-its-coming-of-age/

It might be very surprising if I insist that Social Media is not a new phenomenon. Today at a broader level there is a battle raging between physical world and the virtual world. The virtual world is radically altering the physical world. In some cases physical world is trying hard to stick to the old order, but in many cases the virtual world is welcomed by the physical world.

Music and movies are two sectors that have seriously resisted the new order imposed by technology. It resisted the need for music to be mobile and exchangeable. Neither of the two were actually new desires. Music went mobile long ago; in fact mobile music was the driver of music going mass. Radio was the device that made music mobile. The music industry willingly adopted radio, as the industry could control radio. Exchange of music always existed, through records or cassettes or CDs. Internet changed everything. It took control out of the hands of music industry, and the industry resisted in tooth and nail, till it was brought to its knees and forced to surrender. Amazingly the same internet is the savior of music industry today. The entire distribution mechanism has transformed, it has become cheaper and efficient and music industry is singing again.

Technology is a dragon, managing the dragon and riding it requires very different skills.

Now back to social media. It did exist before the entire internet revolution. It did thrive before the internet revolution. And as in modern times it was not censored or controlled by any authority of any kind. Gossip is the true precursor of today’s social media. Gossip is actually far more then precursor, it’s the foundation on which the entire phenomenon is built.

Gossip is an activity that is primary to the entire mankind. Gossip transcends gender, social hierarchies and is essential to social grooming, affirming relationships, displaying bonds, and creating alliances. Our appetite for gossip is insatiable, and this appetite is neither random nor irrelevant. Gossip in general is a corollary of our disposition towards sociality, which helps us to figure out where we and all others stand in relation to each other.

Let’s look at gossip and see how it figures in relation with Social Media

Gossip is a way of affirming one’s likeability in the social group

Gossip helps you make more friends

Gossip spreads new idea and themes

Gossip is eminently enjoyable

Gossip counters authority

Gossip gets you more friends

Gossip can destroy relationships

Gossip can be detrimental

Ditto for Social Media.

Gossip is word of mouth, but today it rides the wings of word of mouse!

Though there is a difference between gossip and Social Media, and the difference comes from reach and accessibility. Gossip creates Social Capital. Social capital is the “glue” that holds societies together and refers to the quality and depth of relationships between people in a community. Social Capital helps merge the boundaries between private and public, between government and public and between authority and public. Eventually an enhanced social capital can do what gossip networks achieve in a small measure: a more responsive society. Once upon time there was word of mouth. Now the word of mouth rides the word of mouse.

What can be the future trends?

Clearly future evolution of social media will be influenced by the real world. Interest based networking has started to make its impact. Hobbies, common cause, government inaction, eradicating social evils are such areas where social media can evolve. Will it be similar to what we have today or will emerge into something very different is hard to say, but the future may be more connected and more engaged.

What will matter will be not a clash, but as coexistence between physical and virtual world.

1. Build something:

Everyone must build something that is your own. This is a true reflection of your ability, skill enterprise and ideas. There is no better way to self-actualization then to say, I built this. Bragging rights don’t come easy in life

1. Nurture your baby

Every new idea needs careful nurturance. The idea is yours, so one else knows the idea better than you. This is like being a father, only you know what your child wants.

1. Dream big

Ambition knows no limits in your own set up. This is truly where your dream and your vision alone control the destiny of your enterprise. There are no approvals to be sought, no forms to fill, just you and your enterprise.

1. Improve quality

The buck truly stops at you. There are no approvals to be sought; there are no conflicting egos to be settled. You can deliver truly great work to your client, sharper and quicker. It’s amazing how layers of bureaucracy can dull the edge of even the sharpest sword.

1. Connect better:

Your connections with your clients are stronger than usual. They are your clients because they like you; you are their partner because you like them. There can be no better way than this.

1. Challenge yourself:

Doing a job tends to make days monotonous. You follow a routine and if follow it well you would be fairly successful. But when you run an enterprise yourself, every new day brings a new challenge to face. If you never want to do same thing twice, go independent.

1. Follow your passion:

You remember those days in school when you woke up early to go to cricket coaching classes or something like that? You did it because you loved it; it even made school more fun. You wanted to get up early, even on the coldest morning. That’s something true of an independent venture. You do what you love, and you love what you do

1. Greater risk to reward ratio:

This is simple, the risk is yours, and the rewards are yours too. This does not mean that going independent is a get rich quickly scheme. It may be years before you see major financial benefits coming your way.

1. No retirement planning

Retirement plans can be put on ice. Your enterprise needs you to do the best for it as long as you can. Every day you will gain experience that will make coming days more promising. There is no point of even thinking of hanging your boots

1. Give back to society:

This is where as an independent entrepreneur you can make a small contribution. Work with the society, work with your Alma matter, and give back in time and effort. This one singular reason can make going independent worthwhile.

The ratings are out and officially it looks like India’s love affair with instant cricket is hitting rocky patches. Official figures indicate a more than 1TVR fall for first six matches of IPL over last IPL, and last IPL was not a very successful one.

There is something interesting at play here though, all 12 matches of IPL till now have been played to packed houses. A quick check from web sites that do ticketing indicate that future matches too may have packed houses, especially the ones involving Mumbai and Chennai teams. Yet the TV audience seems to be dwindling. For four years Bollywood postponed releases during IPL fearing a loss of audience, which does not seem to be the case this year. Houseful 2 was a big release and seems to have withstood the IPL pressure.

IPL 5 this year was flagged off in light of a really terrible year Indian cricket has had. So bad has this year been, that viewership for Indian matches has never been on the same level as what cricket historically has had. Also the advertisers have backed out of IPL this year, hedging their bets and seeing which way the league goes. Though the telecom companies have kept up with the tradition of launching new campaigns during IPL; Vodafone, Airtel, Idea and Aircel all have new campaigns on air.

Social media often can be a good way of accessing what is happening to any big event. Last year for IPL4, I dug into just Twitter data to understand issues with IPL. This is a quick analysis of what has happened for first dozen matches and how the viewers are reacting to IPL5. Today for instance, when RCB is playing against CSK, and Gayle has been plundering runs, the Twitter chatter is about everything but cricket.

First the packaging of the event is coming off the seam. The opening ceremony was tacky, boring and lacked fizz. For most people it looked like a poor film award show that had been put up. It lacked the context of cricket, and became too much poorly conceived dance show. Even the supposed showstopper in Katy Perry turned out to a show buster. Twitter was abuzz with comments, with Omar Abdullah’s tweet taking on Rajeev Shukla’s opening speech in no uncertain words. The opening salvo clearly didn’t fire. Issues with packaging have also pervaded the playing arena. The cheerleaders who added extra spice to on field action have been dressed poorly and dance absurdly. Both have evoked more derision than liking. Possibly the TV coverage and the channel advertising of IPL has better packaging and greater dose of glamour then the event itself.

Second, the teams are not able to build a solid fan base.  “Whole of Calcutta has stopped supporting KKR, they now support Pune Warriors as Dada plays for Pune” said a comment on social media. This highlights the fact that teams are still struggling to build a following, and players are still dominant in drawing the fans. The entire IPL model is built on city vs. city rivalry. The initial editions of IPL did try to build on the rivalry aspect, but now with shifting of players, it seems to be fading away. Twitter following for all teams seem to be stuck at same numbers as they were during IPL 4.  For instance MI has just 2577 followers, up by a few hundred from last year. Pune and Delhi were at forefront of building a community and they have remained the leaders, but the growth has been slow. Are the teams missing an opportunity of connecting with fans and building a fandom?

Third, IPL may be losing its expanded audience base. IPL was the silver bullet for cricket; it helped in expanding the ambit of viewers. IPL the event and Set Max the official broadcaster were able to rope in a fresh bunch of audience who otherwise did not watch or follow cricket. The quick pace and shorter format made it akin to watching a movie. It seems some of the new audience has drifted away from cricket after having sampled the action. As it may happen with any sales promotion, host of new audience walks away once the promotional scheme is over. May be this is the true level of viewership of IPL, may be this is where it will start to stabilize. It may be early days though.

Fourth, quality of cricket is an issue. For IPL as a brand to survive, ultimately it has to be the quality of cricket that it dishes out, and this year there has just been one match that can be called as a thrilling IPL style match. There has not been a major impact innings from an Indian player as yet (except one) and that too is adding to the jadedness of IPL and cricket both. The Aussies or South Africans or West Indians may do very well at IPL, but it’s the Indian players who pull in the eye balls.

Eventually the fate of IPL 5 will be in the hands of major Indian players. Till then it will remain as one more programme that comes at 9PM every day.

April 12, 2012. Published in Impact Magazine and http://www.pitchonnet.com

India has been obsessed with fair skin, since the time the British ruled us. There is a very large category in India that owes its roots to desire of Indians to have lighter skin. For many years, it was women who wanted to be fair, today in this age of metro sexuality; even men have jumped on to the bandwagon. There is nothing wrong if the consumer desires a fairer skin, after all Afghan Snow promised luminous skin much before Fair and Lovely came on stage. The issue is that brands linked fairness to girls getting good grooms, getting success in life or even getting accepted by their fathers as worthy of affection. In a society which is so polarized against girl child, by doing so the brands have only helped the desire for fair skin become mainstream. In the process the brands have heightened the colour divide. Here was an opportunity where the brands could have fulfilled their greater role towards society by being responsive and sensitive. Instead we have brands that promise fairness of all kinds making us cringe with disgust

Then there is this global car brand that promoted its iconic car in India as the most ‘expensive wedding gift’ for your daughter.  The finest silk, the most beautiful jewelry and the most spectacular wedding wouldn’t have made the wedding memorable, if the father didn’t gift his daughter the curvy ‘yellow one’. The print ad promises that it is best gifted as it is ‘fittingly expensive’. In case you haven’t guessed it, here’s where to find them http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8NM3VEMp48

Weddings and dowry are very much a part of popular culture. It is that part of culture that we all can do without. Incidentally dowry is outlawed in India and therefore promoting ‘expensive gift’ for wedding does fall in the grey zone of being illegal. The issue is not of legality, the issue is of sensitivity. By being insensitive to sacred institution of wedding, the brand almost certainly misses being liked or loved. Mercifully, while the whole category of fairness cream sold fair is better, the automobile category did not follow gift an expensive car for dowry as an insight

There also this telecom brand that uses a dog first as cupid, then as voyeur and finally as the guard, to let a young couple meet, serenade and fall in love. The only hitch in the tale is the fact that the young couple is just two preteen children, who may not know the meaning of all the dog does, and definitely leaves the moms queasy. What has a telecom brand got to do with them is another matter of debate altogether.

The usual defense of this too has been that this is happening in the society around us. This is exactly the reason why the brand should have stayed away from giving a romantic angle. The fact is that children make friends easily; they are without prejudices and find joys in new connections. How much warmer the brand would have been if the two preteen children would have been used with sensitivity and care in brand communication

These are not three isolated examples of brands that have bordered on being insensitive. There are a lot of ads today on media which often cross the line of being responsible in order to push a commercial message. The usual defense that these are insights of today may be right, but should the insights be used without being evaluated with sincerity, empathy and responsibility?

Communication has the power to shape society, and we must remember that. Otherwise in these days of connected consumers, the backlash would be hard and fast. These three brands are surely a testimony to that.