Why the bloody hell are you here - how communication is decoded

 It was 2006 when I had first seen the Australian tourism ad and I remember it to date. The bold copy caught my attention and it also was quite unlike any overly-crafted-full-of-beautiful-things tourism ad.

This is what my mind registered of the ad since the precursor to this ad was an article titled - curse at them, they will come? The title of the article was the lense through which I perceived that ad. Having done that, I started spinning my own yarn.

What a quaint way to get people to their country…compare this to the effort launched by the Indian tourism authorities, preaching all and one to treat the guest as God, this was rather bold !!!

Why would someone go to their country I wondered? They are a plain-speaking and friendly lot. Maybe that is what they wish to project through the advertising.

And that is how most communication gets decoded.

A thought experiment on communication decoding

Fast forward 17 years, yesterday morning I randomly watched the Rajasthan tourism ad (complete coincidence it was about tourism again :)

After a few seconds of watching, the thought that crossed my mind was

Pehle woh giri, ab yeh bhi girega (First she fell, next he will). I couldn’t stop laughing. I wanted to change the Monday morning mood for a few of my friends and sent it to them.

A fitness enthusiast said

“This guy has to be incredibly fit to carry her all through the honeymoon”

A senior citizen said

“40 years after marriage, you’ll start wondering…Aisa bhi hota hai kya?!!

A brand-led growth specialist said…

TG: Rich NRIs, so they got that right.

It begins with her ankle breaking so you get hooked on. And they’ve stitched different parts of Rajasthan nicely in the story. Showing how he cares about her brings up emotions. Music and lyrics are typical and boring in Rajasthani style, but people will remember khamma ghani which is the signature they want people to remember.

Tg part- by showing an NRI girl with a white guy, they’ve made it relevant for NRIs, white people and Indians

Someone who works with underprivileged girls to restore agency said…

I think the ad only caters to people who want to splurge and get married in Rajasthan. And it doesn't quite capture everything Rajasthan offers. The art is missing entirely, it's only romanticized as a 'love destination' which is so reductive.

Of course, there's the damsel in distress and saviour narrative too, which is cringy, but theek hai, at least they look like they're in love and nothing wrong with that too. Bachara itna mehnat कर raha hai.

Tourism का ad kam, Made In Heaven season 3 का ad zyada hai.

A storyteller and a documentary filmmaker said…

Bandish Bandits

Do you see the connection between the ‘who’ and the ‘what was said’

Bottom line - we see the same stimulus using the lens that matters to us the most and we spin our own yarn  And that is how most communication gets decoded. This lens might change depending on the shift in values, what is top of mind or a trigger situation or an unforgettable memory and the same person might think of the same stimuli differently at different points in time depending on which fragment of thought he/she pulls out of his/her subconscious mind at that moment. I have seen this happen even when people read print material - books, posters etc - the same message gets interpreted differently. 

Memory is not static, memory is constructed - subtly different each time you recall an incident. Likewise, reality is also not static, but a construct of our mind. 

In my case, I had a foot fracture on a holiday a few years ago while walking down the steps! And my mind could not ignore those steps in the Rajasthan tourism ad.

Why I say most communication and not all, is because there is another interesting way in which communication gets encoded - which is playback. But that takes a big fat media budget and the same message being heard/seen over multiple exposures. That is why we still remember   

Sunday ho yaan Monday roz khao Anday - a tagline from the 1980s when life and media vehicles were uncluttered.

I have seen the instrument of ‘playback’ working very well these days, not in the context of communication but in the context of narrative building that happens through the informal flow of information that moves across social media vehicles, endorsed by celebrity opinion leaders and regurgitated by individuals who simply buy into that story without verifying the fact. Since that is the beauty of playback. Superfoods that come as pills and capsules - remember Ginseng?

When a big company tells its unsuspecting consumers that its bottled spread is full of the freshest fruit with the goodness of vitamins, most of India believes it since subliminally the message seeps in and gets reinforced and hardwired over and over again - unless you have reason to doubt or question it.

Coming back to the Australian tourism ad which I misinterpreted. It was actually something like this…

The ad begins with characters saying: "We've poured you a beer and we've had the camels shampooed, we've saved you a spot on the beach ... and we've got the sharks out of the pool."

A bikini-clad woman then asks….

I hope this is a story you will not forget. So the next time you are planning to use your communication budget, if you know in advance whether it is a playback you are expecting or a spin-a-yarn in return, that could change the way your communication is designed.

Time travel

The confluence of brands, music, nostalgia, reverse ageing....

A few years ago a Nissan Micra television commercial featured Ranbir Kapoor yodelling on the streets of Mumbai of the yesteryears. His fantasy comes to an end abruptly as the context changes and he is suddenly finds himself scrambling for a parking slot. Na woh purane din wapas aayenge ; na woh khali sadkein (neither will those days return ; nor those empty streets) but thank God for the Micra.

Nostalgia is a tricky emotion for a brand to use in communication. Tricky since it is alluring yet impractical. Quite like ‘snow’ – easy to admire from a distance and difficult to experience first-hand. Its no surprise then that very few brands have been able to leverage this emotion despite knowing how strong a connect it makes with people.

A product that has done a brilliant job of leveraging nostalgia is the SaReGaMa Caravan. Right from the physical product form down to the content, every small detail only works to recreate so perfectly, the experience of listening to music the way we did as children.

In the late 70s / early 80s, there were few electronic devices even in homes in urban India which perhaps makes some of those unforgettable. The radio was one such object of adoration. Perched on a high cabinet to make sure it was away from the reach of little fingers and close enough to a window to catch uninterrupted signals. Its brown exterior often covered by a leather cover cut at just the right places to manipulate the silver buttons. The large silver dial on the top-right, a few other buttons hidden away on its side panel. Ameen Sayani’s unmistakable voice on the Geetmala. The crystal clear sounds of non-digitized musical instruments. The appetite and appreciation it created for a variety of music genres since there was no way of predicting what came next.

The Caravan seems to have captured it all. Right from the sound quality to the retro content and even the random order in which the tracks play recreate the nostalgic experience of listening to music on a radio down to the last detail.

In the 70s a psychologist called Ellen Langer carried out an experiment to understand the effect the physical environment had on the mental thought process of an individual in the context of reversing ageing. In 1979 a group of geriatrics were taken to a retreat for what she called ‘the week of reminiscence’. Everything in that space belong to the 1950s – the furniture, the newspapers and the music. There were no mirrors in that space, the group was not assisted in their everyday chores and were tested on physiological parameters before and after that week. In the interim they spent their time living as though they lived in the 50s – they spoke about events as though those were happening in real time, listening to musical tracks that were popular in the 50s etc. At the end of a week the results astounded everyone when the group had wiped several years of their age tested on physical parameters. The BBC team was so intrigued by the experiment and the results that they decided to follow up the study and later create a documentary reporting their findings. 

For me, the presence of a Caravan in my living room does just that. I time travel effortlessly through the decades and feel like a child again. Enjoying once again the music that MTV and Indie-pop had succeeded in wiping off from my memory in the 90s. And when I learn that it can actively contribute to making me look and feel younger, it’s an affordance that makes the product even more endearing.    

The shape of a sound & the taste of a colour

Can you taste the colour blue? Or what does the flavour 'salty' feel like when you touch it? The ability to think of one sense using another or simply put marry two sensory experiences is synesthesia.  It is believed that people who can do that are 'gifted' with this ability. It is also believed such people are mostly right-brain dominant or 'creative' as we know it. 

A friend who plans to pursue her Phd on this subject, and I got talking about this. Our hunch is that synesthesia is a possibility for everyone of us...albeit in a subconscious frame of mind. 

Why do we make this assumption?

The subconscious - seat of language ; decision-making & emotions

But Freud spoke of the subconscious as being 'irrational, lustful and hallucinatory'.




Then why bother?

The concept of 'the subconscious' has evolved over time. 

Where early thinkers felt it was relevant only in the context of people suffering mental problems

The motivational researchers of yesteryears perceived people to be ruled by insecurity and motivated by erotic desires. They attributed sexual motives to rather prosaic consumer purchases

Modern thinking on the subconscious is more holistic

Subconscious = reservoir of thoughts, feelings and emotions that are below the threshold of consciousness

It has an important influence on motivations and regulates involuntary action

It is relevant (for marketers) since it helps understand

•  Emotions
•  The frame of reference within which consumers cast products / brands & how?
•  The meaning that consumers attribute to brands &
•  The REAL NEEDS that brands serve (as opposed to stated)