CONVERTING GREED TO WANT TO NEED- GAMES PLAYED ON CONSUMERS

Book : Brandwashed Price in India Author: Martin Lindstrom Publisher: Kogan Page

Rs.495.00 Printed Price GBP 14.99 First Published 2012

The outbreak of the Swine Flu was effectively used by makers of hand sanitizers to grow their sales to a few billion dollars. It is established that this flu spreads through virus in the air and using a hand sanitizer is a totally ineffective thing. When I go to an Udipi restaurant, I gladly drink the water kept before me. If I need bottled water, I have to ask for it. Today, in most fine dining restaurants, they take it for granted that you will drink the overpriced bottles of water. I refuse to give in. I ask the steward/waiter whether the water in their hotel is potable. No hotel can afford to serve unsafe drinking water. But still, we are getting conditioned to asking for bottled water. A new industry is born. As we make material progress in life, it is but natural for our needs to keep growing. There is an entire set of people who make a living by ever increasing this list of needs. Call it marketing, selling or advertising if you will. In 1957, Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders which was perhaps the first book to break in the murky world of manipulating mans mind to plant new needs. The world has progressed beyond that and today, there are many more tools available to influence mans choices. Additionally, there is a continuous manipulation of our minds that is going on. Companies and agencies are busy using data mining, sociology, neural sciences, biology, psychology and everything else that can help them to push sales of their products. The methods used by them would leave us thinking that insurance agents are a combination of Mother Teresa and Bhagwan Sriram rolled in to one. The mind manipulators stop at nothing to sell products. Brandwashed is written by Martin Lindstrom, a leading brand consultant. In other words, he is a guru in helping brands reach wider and deeper markets. His website (www.martinlindstrom.com) is very informative and we learn that he has authored a few books on branding and consumer behaviour. The book is his documentation of the science and art that goes into creating more and more customers for a product or a brand. In short, he is a selling agent using modern tools of data mining and other behavioural sciences. For selling and creating an enduring brand, companies stop at nothing. They use human emotions viz. fear, panic, addiction, sex, peer pressure, nostalgia and any other possible human weakness to ensure that a need is created for what they sell. Businesses start creating clients even before they are born! Marketing is done even before we are born! The experiences that a mother has when she is pregnant, has influence on the child. Suppose someone offers you a concoction which you know contains six teaspoons of sugar, a lot of caffeine and water, what will you do? Will you drink it? But, if someone gives you a can of Red Bull (some of you may be aware of this so called energy drink) will you accept it? Think. You will perhaps throw out the first and try the second. And once having tried it, you will be a Red Bull fan. Now if someone tells you that the first and the second are the same things, what will your reaction be? This is the power of selling or marketing. Red Bull has been positioned so well and the ingredients hidden from the consumer. Is it not all smoke and mirrors?

Martin Lindstrom has packed his book with anecdotes on over a hundred products or brands. This book is very American or European in its approach and is very relevant to the advanced countries where the per capita is sufficiently high for the brand persons to keep chasing the consumer and trying to convert him to an addict. For India, there is less relevance at this juncture, perhaps relevant to the top of the pyramid. However, the marketing men will be battling it out soon to plant aspirations in the mind at an early stage. We all talk about privacy of data. Alas, the moment you use internet or a credit card or anything plastic (loyalty card etc) or a mobile phone or any gadget, your personal profiling is out there somewhere. All these data gatherers, including credit information bureaus, social networking sites, schools, colleges sell the data whether you like it or not. To get better bang for the buck, a company has to try and spend its advertising rupees on focused target groups. The funny thing is that when we dont have anything, we aspire to have many things and having got them, we want to rebel against the manipulative world and society. No problem. The marketing gurus are out there to offer you salvation or nirvana through gods and Godmen, who have now become brands that are competing for your soul. Martin Lindstrom has done a brilliant job of writing about the extent to which corporations will go to create and retain a customer. In this game, ethics and morals have already been compromised decades ago. Of course, many people are upset with this consumerist world and are trying to rebel. There are groups like Enough (www.enough.org.uk) which are angry at this excess of consumerism and have started a movement. Not being familiar with most brands in the market place, I thought that the book was a bit too long and probably could have conveyed the point in less than half the pages. However, it is possible that a younger generation that is already into consumerism could identify more with the brands and the names. Brandwashed is a must read for the Indian consumer. It will definitely set you thinking on the way you buy and what you buy.

R. Balakrishnan (balakrishnanr@gmail.com) March 23rd, 2012