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]