Aditya Save + Santosh Desai= Transformational insights about contemporary Marketing & Advertising through SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

 12-13 March 2013, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad

Marketing is increasingly being visualized beyond the context of need + impact + change. We have to know that why there is a need? How the impact can be made? What change is aimed at? Aditya Save talked about how great organizations always articulate about purpose of their existence and about their vision rather than how they do it and what qualitative they communicate? 

We are in a constant state of flux. Today is outdated already. Pace of change is faster than our efforts to update ourselves. We have to take a relook at definition of RELEVANCE. Many institutions refuse to take note of changing circumstances because of weight and burden of goodwill, legacy and heritage. Then how to go ahead in future?

‘Creative Destruction’ is changing the way organizations think about change. Creative Destruction is a historical concept describing how new technology, new ideas, business practices, introduction of new methods, products, services radically disrupt establishment; in industry. Because of failure to adapt to new ways of understanding/interpreting changes around us; our behavior to approach to change is very slow.

Change shapes our mindset to get out of comfort zone by experimenting. Merging old perspectives with new ones is most important aspect. It becomes more difficult as we realize that people don’t want to change.

We have to understand change by i) Deciphering distinct phenomenon/icon/leadership, ii) Looking for critical mass and iii) How combination of phenomenon and critical mass leads towards transformation. How the masses are connected to convictions of great ideas or phenomena? How people-data-things are connected in the framework of processes which is aimed at attaining human welfare.

Marketing Process Journey is going through transformation. Understanding consumer insights—concepts—proposition—composition. 4Ps of Marketing Product, Promotion, Price, and Place have also gone through some kind of evolutionary mutation. It has given rise to 4Cs i.e. Customer, Category, Competition, Company.

Now we should carefully understand how Brands are going through transformation compared to earlier times.

i)          Previously brands were Leaders but today Consumers are shaping the brand.

ii)        Previously brands were influencing culture but today brands are playing catch-up with behavior of consumers.

iii)  Previously brands-messages were universal in appeal to population of consumers but now brands cater to individual, diverse needs of markets.

iv) Previously knowledge about traits and features of brand were known to all but increasingly tacit knowledge about particular brands is limited to closed groups.

v) Previously people were following changes in external features of brands but now brands are following changes in benchmarks of thinking of people.

Brands make certain promises to its audiences and then try to learn from them to grow.  These days amidst the scarce resources, brands are making multiple promises to multiple audiences. This thinking is inspired by 'outliers' and inspiring innovation. Thus thinking is increasingly being shaped by:

i)                   Perceptions of well experienced customers;

ii)                Decreasing attention span of consumers;

iii)              Graphical/Visual/Textual literacy of consumers;

iv)               Preparedness of consumers to accept out of the way/innovative ideas .

Thus, marketing and advertising world is learning by listening to Revelations, Understanding and interactions within their closed group and interactions in open fora.

How change is triggering markets, societies and how thought leadership in various walks of life is inspiring people in businesses, marketing, advertising to think differently is most interesting aspect to think about in this context. Traditional purchase funnel is being replaced by new type consumer decision journey.

Core role of marketing is first to create preferences and then move consumer towards harnessing monopolistic behavior about brand loyalty i.e. to create obsession about brands. But this is also changing. These days it is more to do about adding value through the paradigm of RELEVANCE and IMPACT for target consumer, who is likely to be brand`s loyal partner, not customer. Norms of collaboration, innovation are transforming notions of consumers. Increasingly companies are visualizing, allowing consumers to have equal stake in defining consumer needs, benchmarks, quality criteria, service parameters and likewise.

Thinkers, sociologists, journalists, political leaders, psychologists, technologists, lyricist, scriptwriters, historians, novelists and all type of people who are engaged in creative—intellectual pursuit of ideas give great insights about how the world is changing around us. This dynamic perspective about changing world is always carefully, diligently being watched in business world.

Assumptions guide our behavior. Therefore we should stop one moment to give a glimpse on upcoming ideas before beginning any journey. Imagination is definitely important than knowledge.

As Seth Godin says, “As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring.” It refuses to recognize the changing needs of the operations people are interested in. Last few years have seen vanishing of many great companies from markets. (eg. Xerox, Kodak) On the contrary century old companies like IBM have redefined their role and transformed themselves from leaders in purely manufacturing industry to ITES/R&D organization.

Let us take a look at another few quotations of Seth Godin:

--> “Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea- shipping person.”

-->  “Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”

---> “Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.”

--> “Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”

--> “Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential; otherwise you’re just a middleman.”

                               --> “Give up control and give it away … The more you give your idea 
                                       away,   the more your company is going to be worth. “

---> “Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific.”

--->   “Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.”

--->   “Good marketers tell stories. They don’t talk about products.”

Pentagon, in which sides are: Societal plane, Brand plane, Competitive plane, Product plane, Category plane; to discover truth or all possible shades of truth engraved in this pentagon is the ultimate task at hand.

Consumers cannot be isolated from culture, society and historical lineage they live, travel, think and share. People negotiate about their aspirations on the boundaries of tradition and modernity. In a sense tradition is being revived and modernity is being reinterpreted in terms of age old traditions. Many times festivals are being used for magnifying celebrations, to enter in the continuous alliance of conservative beliefs and free-market, liberal, individualistic initiatives.

So, understanding the past, evolving and contemporary patterns of social context, emotional patterns, language diversity, everyday political happenings, happenings in art and literature gives immense possibilities to analyze the situation according to the foresight/planning exercises of any organization, business or otherwise. 

Santosh Desai uncovered many layers of Indian mind when he discussed various advertising strategies regarding FMCGs. While doing this, he provoked the imagination in a sense to think like a social scientist while working on the problems of marketing, advertising, business development, strategic planning, and foresight analysis.

The Hindu Literary Review where Mr. Desai`s book was received, says:

“Desai examines everything from the ethos of the Hindi film hero to the place of the Bajaj scooter in our collective consciousness; from the deeper meaning of Western vs. Indian-style toilets to a deconstruction of the golguppa (or bhel-puri); from the semiotics of scratching ourselves in public to our deep-rooted dynastic urge, in everything from politics to cinema (Tusshar Kapoor ki jai!) And, refreshingly, when he writes about these things, he writes not as a scholar, or, heaven forbid, an MBA, but as a kind of poet of social anthropology. Thus he says of the humble, phut-phutting autorickshaw:

The auto’s appeal comes from its ability to provide a real luxury; it offers us the power of individualized motorized transport. When one hires an auto one is placing a value on one’s own time. Rather than wait for public transport, an auto is hailed and one’s precise destination is reached. The auto rickshaw’s implicit deal with us is that while it gives us this wonderful luxury, in return it strips everything else in the experience that could remotely reek of luxury … It is both deeply comforting and dissatisfying. It captures the variable and uneven nature of life in India that is not too poor to have no choices, yet not so affluent that it can take life for granted … It reaffirms and gives substance to the Indian belief that life may be hard but there is always a way.” 

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Objectivity and Subjectivity: Social and Scientific.....

Objectivity and Subjectivity are always been subject of contentious debates. There is a saying, “We all are objective in our subjective ways.” When considered from point of view of ‘scientific method’, then this enquiry acquires many frames of analysis inspired from sociological, philosophical, hisotiographical perspectives. Feminist enquiry of growth of science and technology as a discipline and as a rigorous investigation approach for descriptive, inductive writings of Science Technology Society has been lately very much being discussed.  

The concepts of objectivity, truth, and the authority of empirical standards have come under serious challenge by some critics of the social sciences in the past several decades.  Feminist critics charge that the concepts and methods of the social sciences reflect an essential patriarchalism that discredits the objectivity of social science knowledge.  Marxist critics sometimes contend that the social sciences are enmeshed in a bourgeois worldview that makes objectivity impossible. And post-modernist writers seem to disdain the ideas of truth and objectivity in the social sciences altogether, preferring instead the slippery notions of multiple discourses and knowledge/power. (http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/POSITIV6.htm) 

Feminist thoughts like any other critical perspective challenges hierarchy, patronizing attitudes and patriarchic mindset which is historically been not absent from science-technology enterprise. Before someone enters the arena to understand what feminist enquiry of academic writing in history, STS studies, social construction of S&T; it would be better to understand a) What is the structure of academia, b) Whose academia is it?, c) What are the relations between learned and people learning, d) Interfaces through which knowledge is shared, disseminated and appropriated. (Donna Haraway, Fox Keller, Erich Charles Conrad, Helen E. Longino, Peter K. Machamer, Gereon Wolters, Karen Cordrick Haely, Philip Kitcher, Georg G. Iggers)

Since the publication of first journal Philosophical Transactions in 17^th century, it took 300 years for Royal Society to admit women as its prestigious member. (On 22 March 1945, the first female Fellows were elected to the Royal Society. This followed a statutory amendment in 1944 that read "Nothing herein contained shall render women ineligible as candidates", and was contained in Chapter 1 of Statute 1.)

Androcentrism in Democracy and University is one of the most prominent threats to free thinking. Androcentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history. Breaking the walls in access of opportunities for education remained the pivotal challenge ahead of women before the development of feminist critic of history of science and technology. However before going ahead with the conviction of feminist critic of all the history, understanding the definition of ‘women’ is very essential. Women may be a universal group of vulnerable people who are always fighting for their rights, their justice, socio-cultural and economical equality; but considering the vast array of diverse discriminatory practices in developing countries, the process of defining ‘Women’ becomes more and more contestable. We just have to remember that even though there are consistent efforts throughout the history to treat women as a cohesive group for gaining voting rights, fare wages, access to knowledge, political representation, employment; still the emergence of category of ‘universal women’ is far from realized.

Every scholar, journalist, writer, politician, student, marketing person, business developer, artist is a ‘human body with a context.’ A recent essay published in EPW by Anirudh Deshpande describes the objectivity in history vis-à-vis other natural sciences. It says:

          “The postmodernists criticize history for being a subjective narrative imposed   on selected facts by historians through the use of linguistic devices. In the postmodernist submission, since all historical narratives are poetic acts performed by historians, it is impossible to access a verifiable objective past through the historian’s carefully constructed imaginary plot of events. Hence, and logically following the postmodern submission, all history is  subjective history, and therefore there is not much to choose between several carefully constructed interpretations of the past. If history is thus reduced to a project of cultural relativism and ideological subjectivism, it becomes easy to first denounce and later reject it altogether.”

           

The analysis, either through frame or through any other way, it is necessary to know who is the person arguing, writing and documenting is; from what belief system, vantage point they articulate their opinions. We have to be aware of contexts, situations, personal histories, ideological-professional biases, approach to knowledge creation, method of enquiry etc.

History and biography both posit a dialectical relationship between life (as information) and art (as an expression of subjectivity). Both have a ‘truth’ claim and are represented as forms of narrative. If we were to recall some of the characteristic features of history, we would perhaps expect a coherent, continuous narrative, with objectivity and sufficient analysis, thereby enabling us to produce some ‘generalisable typicality’. Even a complex history should yield points of significance that would enable us to understand/interpret in its light events, movements, and large sections of time. (Recovery, Recontextualisation and Performance: Questions on the Margin by Rimli Bhattacharya; Biography as History, Indian Perspectives; Ed. Vijaya Ramaswamy, Yogesh Sharma, Orient Blackswan)

In his more specialized collection in 2009, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, Chris Mantzavinos offers this description of the field:

“Philosophy of science examines "scientific knowledge." It tries to illuminate the specific characteristics of science, the way it is produced, the historical dimensions of science, and the normative criteria at play in appraising science…. The philosophy of the social sciences, on the other hand, traditional deals with such problems as the role of understanding (Verstehen) in apprehending social phenomena, the status of rational choice theory, the role of experiments in the social sciences, the logical status of game theory, as well as whether there are genuine laws of social phenomena or rather social mechanisms to be discovered, the historicity of the social processes, etc.”

Producing, creating, constructing, shaping scientific facts depends on many attributes of scholarship and their history. Scientific objectivity depends on method of investigation—qualitative, quantitative—understanding of scientific method—grounding in sociological, humanities orientation—setting of arguments in ideological mesh—impact of tools used—influence of different technologies being deployed for finalizing the data collection or field visits etc. Scientific objectivity may be defined as rigorous fashion consistent with any particular philosophy of science. According to Popper, scientific objectivity consists of the freedom and responsibility of the researcher 1) To pose refutable hypothesis, 2) To test these hypothesis with relevant evidence, and 3) To state the results in an unambiguous fashion accessible to any interested person. (from ‘On Scientific Objectivity’ by Emery N. Castle)

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