Aamir Vs Aamir

Is there a Lesson in Marketing from one of the most talked about celebrity outbursts?

Let me begin with a disclaimer. This is not a piece about how celebrities should conduct themselves in public or in media. It is not about whether or not they should get involved with or voice their opinions on politically or socially sensitive matters. It is not about whether they should do research on a controversial subject, acquaint themselves with ‘facts’ from both sides, and only then form an opinion instead of forming lazy opinions.

Enough and more has been written or spoken on these subjects. We have heard Aamir and his supporters from the ‘industry’ and elsewhere. We have seen other celebrities such as Arundhati Roy and Rahul Bose share their opinion with us on several news TV stations. In fact, only recently, I read a beautifully written piece by Rahul Bose on intentblog, one of the best open blogs I have seen.

My goal here is a little different. A little less selfless and more commercial, if you may. As a practitioner of marketing and communication, I am intrigued by the issue the Aamir-Narmada-Fanaa episode raises, even after the episode itself seems to have blown over.

If you try to simplify an otherwise multi textural issue, it’s Aamir the celebrity that endorses half a dozen high profile brands versus Aamir the concerned citizen who is compelled to raise his voice against seeming injustice. In fact, even more importantly, it’s Aamir the actor who acts for a living versus Aamir the brand whose equity must be protected, grown and leveraged.

Now look at what the brand did. It [doesn’t sound right to refer to Aamir, as ‘it’, does it?] jumped out of its popularly accepted, rather linear domain of acting-to-entertain, into an uncharted territory. Out of the larger -than-life fantasy world of the big screen, Dolby sound, and carefully directed retakes, into the grimy and sweaty world that millions live in every day. It could not have been easy choice. Particularly when a brand extension [Fanaa] was weeks away from its launch. I know there are people out there who believe Aamir’s Narmada outburst and rather ‘suddenly’ found social conscience were part of a carefully orchestrated bridge strategy between Rang De Basanti and Fanaa. If that is true, I wonder how many product or service marketing managers would take such a risk before a launch. In fact, whether Aamir’s Narmada voice was a marketing tactic is not the real issue here.

To me, the issue is whether brands need to learn a new lesson on how to communicate with their customers. Ever since brand management started as a discipline, most brands have tried to create and maintain a squeaky clean image, polished regularly by advertising. They have lived in a fantasy world where problems always disappear at the end of 30 seconds, ‘ordinary’ names always fail, rivals draw blood on an imaginary street. They have stood on pedestals and delivered sermons about the good and the evil, while obedient disciples listened with patience. Not unlike how Aamir and others in his profession talk to us in a theatre, if you think about it.

But the truth is, brands live in our minds and hearts and we live in a society. The society isn’t a fantasy world; it’s where we return when the three hours of fantasy are over. It’s where parents give interviews, so that kids can get admission into a school, where neighbors fight over relatively trivial issues, where corruption is something we practice in day time and watch on TV at night.

Do brands live in our society? With us? Should they?

If we want to move from an era where consumers move from just knowing our brand to liking it, a thought that is finding increasing acceptance amongst seasoned brand marketers, we should perhaps think of brands as social beings.

Not everyone in our society is our friend. Some people whose ideas and opinions are similar to ours, who have interests and hobbies common to ours, who help us face a challenge or leverage an opportunity, become our friends. Others become someone else’s friends. People fight normal fights, but we are most often loyal to our friends regardless of who is fighting against them. And while we might have many types of friends and some times we lose touch with some of them, we don’t change with friends very frequently.

Do we see our brand as a friend like this?

Here comes the provocation. In a world where people [consumers?] are getting increasingly cynical of marketing, advertising and brands, should we start breaking down some of the practices that built our powerful brands yesterday? Should we attempt to make the simple principles of friendship and social relationship work to create a relationship between our brand and attention challenged consumers?

Should our brands step down from the hallowed pedestal and mingle with the masses? Should they take stances on issues of social importance and urgency, even if some of them might be controversial and ‘politically’ sensitive?

Net, should brands take a social stance? Or should they avoid any kind of controversy and stay sanitized and clean?

How come Aamir thought of doing something that Shah Rukh, Amitabh, Aishwarya, Lataji and Hritik haven’t done? Is Aamir the only one? How about Shabana? How about Gere?

How come we regard Benetton, Bullet, MTV, Diesel, Harley, Zippo, Apple, Red Bull differently from countless others?

If we think of brands broadly as mainstream and leading-edge, how they have built, what chances they have taken, who owns them and how they behave, we might find some directions and explanations. But, then, that’s a broader subject, isn’t it?

[Published on indiantelevision.com on June 20, 2006]

To play safe; start taking risks.

A friend of mine met a stranger on the net and they got married within three weeks. Several top executives – Sunil Alagh, Shripad Nadkarni, Nabankur Gupta – chucked very comfortable positions to strike out on their own. Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3, which most people would have expected to be a parallel film, became a mainstream rage. Aparna Mafatlal became Ajay Mafatlal, teaching many of us a new phrase – gender dysphoria. More young people than ever before went into live-in relationships. The Metrosexual badge traveled beyond designers and fashion models, and started getting worn by people I know. Doctors nearly challenged the government to sack them on the reservation issue. Himesh Reshammiya made sufi hip and started overshadowing mainstream singers. Aamir slapped Gujarat politicians on the wrist on Narmada barely weeks before the release of high stakes Fanaa.

Isolated events? Parallel and un-connected trends? I see a strong common undercurrent.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932. I am not sure he would have imagined his satire to take a new meaning in fewer than 100 years.

We are in a brave new world and the undercurrent of many things happening around us is a four letter word called risk.

Risk is all around and more and more people are embracing it; not avoiding it. That is something our uncles did. As people, we take personal risks, professional risks and social risks. It takes a bit of boldness; but more importantly, it takes a whole lot of pragmatism to embrace risk.

It’s not as if before last year people didn’t take risks. They did. But the risk embracing behavior of people is now getting more pronounced. And it is manifesting itself in the way they live their day, earn their living, raise their children, choose their friends, form their communities and support groups and perhaps decide on their brands.

Some of us hold brand clutter, media fragmentation and consumers’ flirtatious behaviour responsible for the severe strain brand loyalty as a concept is under. What we need to understand is that the real reason behind this symptom of disloyalty is the consumers’ boldness to experiment, to try new things, to take risks. We need to go beneath the apparent trend and read the undercurrent.

When is the last time we saw a brand taking a risk? Or a brand manager? Or an ad agency honcho? In fact, next to doctors, if there is one community I have noticed who, in general, have a mortal fear of risks, it is us - the marketing community. Most of us have been handed out a brand that we must ‘manage’, and the last thing we want to do is to leave a legacy of a setback to the brand. So we play safe, glamorize incrementalism and kill innovativeness in the name of ROI.

Do you call a new product launch, or a line extension, or brand extension, or a new communication as taking a risk? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Sure there is risk in each of these activities; but is that what you call taking a risk? Not really. Which is why most brand extensions fail and re-launch is such a nice phrase, because it allows us to blame the previous brand manager or the agency.

Benetton takes risks. Star Plus took a lot of risks in the days before KBC and for some time after. Zee TV is taking risks now. Apple took a risk when it got into the portable music player business. General Motors in the USA took a big risk earlier this year when it asked consumers to create commercials for Chevy Tahoe that’s available for everyone to see. This is not the place for me to pass judgments on which risks paid off and which didn’t. My argument is different here.

In my view, it’s time brands took well planned risks. Tested the boundaries of sensitivity. Communicated in ways and at places that made consumers sit up and think something, feel something, do something. Instead of producing the most boring pieces of communication and attempting to force them into the consumers’ unsuspecting minds.

It’s time we marketers allowed consumers to play with our brands, include them into their lives. The truth is consumers shape brands, brand managers don’t. Ask a Palm user or an i-Pod user. They get more information about the brand from a user group site than the corporate website of the brand. Who is giving the information? Another user, of course. Not all comments on user groups are favourable. Some of the biggest critics of a brand live there. Should brands be scared of user groups or encourage them? Think about it.

Like most people today, I am positive. I am confident that the ability to take risks is what will differentiate winning brands in the future. For the others, marketing has a nice phrase – also-ran.

Think.

[Published in IMPACT 2nd Anniversary Special Edition, June 2006]