Opinion Culture connect marketing

Once the train would start,the compartment would get noisy. Suddenly a betel leaf chewing man carrying a small suitcase would appear and shout,“Gentleman!…” Then in Bengali: “Aeje moshaira … kukurer… shuorer (soft muffled speech interspersed with loud words meaning son of a b***h…… son of a p*g……).” A shocked silence would follow. When he’d figure somebody was ready to retaliate,he’d dramatically add,“If they should bite you,the cure is here!” He’d take out small glass jars from his pocket,saying,“This is Kalipodo Dey’s miraculous ointment (ascharjya malam).” Without bothering to ask permission,he’d lift the shirt of a passenger near him,and start applying the ointment.

As I was a regular traveller,he became familiar with me and told me he had to travel for eight stations,change compartments to finally sell 170 to 200 pieces every day. This was in 1971. I have never experienced such theatrical sales in suburban trains from Paris,London,New York,Tokyo or Sydney. This is India’s typical experiential,cultural brand promotion. The salesman knew how to attract people’s attention in their uncomfortable condition,would articulate the benefits of his ointment and would go on to apply it for the product feel experience to knock-out any doubt about quality.

When I visited my parents in Kolkata in 1984,it was the mango season. Accompanying my father and me to Gariahat market,my eight-year-old France-born son spoke enough Bengali to ask the mango seller if the mangoes were sweet. The seller looked at my son and me and said,“Don’t keep the mangoes near salt.” At home,my son insisted his grandmother keep the mangoes away from salt. Confused,my mother asked my father to explain. My father laughed and explained that the seller’s metaphor for guaranteeing the mango’s sweetness was that salt would become sweet if kept near these mangoes.

The next day I asked the mango seller if my father was right. He said,“Of course.” I realised I’d grown distant with this culture already. But the mango seller’s mystifying selling pitch proved my theory that “Marketing is story telling of a selling proposition which has differentiating extra benefit.”

In 2001,IIM-Bangalore Professor Dr Mithileswar Jha invited me to take a marketing session for a students and guests forum at the institute’s amphitheatre. As I started speaking about my marketing fundamentals of “Visibility,Proximity and Availability of the product to consumers,” three peanut vendors came before the stage with their carts,roasting peanuts and making the familiar iron-ladle-on-hot-iron-vessel sounds. The inviting aroma of roasted peanuts wafted through. The students couldn’t help themselves; they approached a vendor,and came away with a notebook-paper cone that upturned easily to drop peanuts into their hands. In my 90-minute session they’d finished the peanuts of all three peanut sellers.

Nobody had understood that I’d deliberately organised the peanut sellers. I used them to demonstrate their incomparable creation of visibility (the cart,the ladle sounds to attract people),proximity (the inviting aroma,the easy-to-pour takeaway packs) and availability (when hunger came,peanuts are easily available). Knowing that I give lectures,seminars and workshops in prestigious institutes in Europe and the US,the students were expecting sophisticated Parisian marketing jargon from me. Instead,they learnt lessons from a live example of cultural connect marketing that’s very Indian,experiential and practical. At the end,I told them not to waste money on learning sophisticated things while overlooking the basics. Mithileshwar asked,“What’s your message,Shombit?” India’s cultural marketing is simple,I said; people need to learn these tactics and convert them into very effective marketing with strong activation according to Indian culture.

This peanut story may have a sophisticated counterpart in Starbuck’s history. Starbuck’s visibility is emitting a specific coffee aroma into the street,its proximity is that being able to spend as much time you want at Starbucks,and its availability is being ever present in US street corners.

Western marketing is highly related to their cultural aspect. We need to extend our cultural stories as marketing case studies to understand and deploy. We can learn technical processes and discipline from the West,but deployment should follow our multi-faceted culture. In any category,we don’t pay serious attention to product engineering,consistency and coherency. Instead marketers in India spend excessive time in advertising communication. A brand will have good national penetration if you execute the fundamental marketing job of cultural association like Kalipodo Dey’s miraculous ointment,the mango seller and peanut vendor did,and maintain the product’s quality and aspiration at any price point.

Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top management. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com