Strategic Brand Management
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Indianising the western brand

	Santosh Desai Executive Vice President: Strategic Planning & Consumer Insight, McCann Erickson .
The story so far: Multinational companies came to India armed with their smug self-belief of many market conquests under their belt. Ran their Made-in-New York strategies, only to run into serious consumer indifference. Are today suitably chastened and are looking to Indianise their brands. Kellogg’s, MTV, McDonald’s… the list is impressive. Instead of running over the same ground, let us focus on the underlying conceptual issues that emerge from what we have seen in the last few years. The most fundamental question that arises from this is the validity of the very idea of global brands. In becoming Indian, are these brands becoming less global? If Reebok is available at a very low price point in India, will it compromise the brand in the long run? Is MTV in India a different brand from MTV worldwide? The Pillsbury Doughboy, for instance cannot possibly evoke the same set of associations in India as it does in England, just as a Gattu would leave a lot of Westerners cold. So, what are the principles that govern successful localisation? What would make a brand global and local at the same time? The first principle of successful localisation would be to understand the core essence of the global brand. The more upstream the definition of what is it that makes Nike the brand it is (answering the human desire for limitlessness), the greater its ability to navigate cultures. The more specific and downstream the definition (worn by the world’s best athletes), the less its ability to travel across cultures. This is because the relevance of the specific benefit offered may be highly contextual. A brand of cereal aimed at children rooted in a sports setting may be relevant in some markets but in a culture like India, where sports are still seen as eating into studying time, that definition will be a burden. It would be much better to define the brand in terms of the underlying idea that led it to associate with sports (striving for perfection) than try and take on the mantle of promoting sports in order to promote the brand. The problem becomes much more tangible when the brand’s meaning is expressed in terms of a brand icon (Pillsbury Doughboy, The Cheetos Cheetah). Symbols are powerful because they communicate at many subterranean levels effortlessly. However, when culturally adrift symbols like these are used, brands spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to breathe some meaning into these lifeless creatures, diverting their energies from their main task of communicating the underlying intent behind the symbols. The symbols become ends by themselves, in the mistaken belief that marketing these symbols is part of ensuring that the brand presents a consistent face across markets. The Pillsbury Doughboy, for instance cannot possibly evoke the same set of associations in India as it does in England, just as a Gattu would leave a lot of Westerners cold. At a conceptual level, for a brand to travel across cultures, it must express what it stands for in human terms. What makes brands global is that they manage to reach beyond individual personalities, beyond filters imposed by cultures into that stratum of human beings that is universal. If a brand desires universal acceptance, then it must define itself in human terms rather than in terms of what the product delivers or even in terms of how the brand is different from competition. Product benefits and competitive advantages can be contextual; primary human motivations are likelier to be universal. If brands do appeal to universal human emotions, why then localise? Why not try really hard to arrive at that universal brand core and communicate that everywhere in the same way? Because that universal core is mediated by an intermediate lens: that of culture. Culture, in the sense of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’) for the governing of behaviour.” This is the lens of our mind, through which we comprehend reality. At a collective level, bound by a common past and a shared value system, people belonging to a culture share a similarity of perspective. Every culture particularises a universal emotion, converting it from an abstract value into real life actions in the form of rituals, beliefs, etiquette, language etc., thereby making it its own. Take the universal need for families. Every culture values families, but the expression of that varies vastly. To illustrate, the word ‘nephew’ is borrowed from French, since the English had no need to give that relationship a specific name. In India, we have a specific word describing all relationships, whereas the English language bands all of these together under ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’. Like wise the ritual of Raksha Bandhan, for instance magnifies the brother-sister relation in a distinctively Indian way. Overall, the meaning of a family, the priority accorded to it over the considerations of any one individual and the way it is represented is very different from the West. For a global brand to communicate what it stands for in human terms, therefore, it must translate that universal human emotion into its specific cultural counterpart. It is only then that it can truly resonate with the local ethos. For this to happen, brands must understand how the local cultural filter works. Localisation is not about ‘ethnic’ representations. Being ‘Indian’ in a self-conscious coffee-table way is nothing but an advertisement of one’s foreignness. Nor is it about using local celebrities and associating with cricket. These might help, but these are first level connections. The more critical questions exist at the value level. The meaning of MTV is the same the world over (hip, irreverent exuberance), but the role it plays in India is more specific (helped make what is ‘local’ cool) Take the example of health and hygiene. The desire to protect oneself from the hostile external environment is perhaps a universal one. However, the Western concern with germs is not shared in precisely the same way by the Indian consumer. The Indian notion of hygiene is closer to that of symbolic purification. The Indian need for cleanliness, and the insistence on taking a bath everyday, comes not so much from a desire for hygiene defined in a clinical way, but by way of feeling cleansed and purified. Which is why we have the paradox of excellent personal hygiene co-existing with terrible civic sanitation. Which is why we clean the house twice a day but dump the garbage right outside our doors: the cleaning was symbolic, and outside the door, symbolically lies the outside world. For a brand that is rooted in the idea of hygiene, an understanding of this cultural interpretation is critical. In the absence of this understanding, the brand is in serious danger of talking at cross-purposes with the consumer. If a brand does take note of this difference, will the meaning of the brand not get altered? Will the understanding of what the brand stands for not be different than in other parts of the world? If a brand stands for hygiene in the west and for symbolic purification in India, is it really the same brand? It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that the brand is decoded in an exactly similar way the world over. We can control what we emit, but in any case, have little control over what is received. What is received is determined by the specific characteristics of the receiver as well as the larger culture she belongs to. It is perhaps useful to instead allow for this difference in the framework itself. Brands stand for the same thing the world over, but the role they play in the consumer’s life varies by time and place. The meaning of MTV is the same the world over (hip, irreverent exuberance), but the role it plays in India is more specific (helped make what is ‘local’ cool). This role is unique to India and comes as a result of the interaction of the global brand meaning with the local context. What this splitting of the brand meaning and the brand role allows us to do is to reconcile the seeming contradiction of a universal meaning and a local expression. It allows us to factor in local imperatives while keeping the ‘globalness’ of the brand idea intact. The implicit model of a global brand then becomes one with a universal core, but that plays different roles in different cultures as the core meaning gets filtered through the refractory lens of local context. This is pretty much what we have seen in India; the global brands that have successfully Indianised have managed to hold on to their global character at the core essence level, but have not been shy of playing a typically “Indian” role in the lives of the consumer here. Michael Perry, ex-head of Unilever once said, “The only way to build a global brand is to build a local brand many times over”. Multinationals in India would certainly nod in agreement.
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