The Hindu Business Line : Marketing goodies in US... try advertising in India

THERE was a time when the various `universities' in and around London used to advertise in the Indian media. And to good effect, the clientele for these myriad universities — more often than not little better than some of the type-writing institutes that dotted mid-70s Indian towns — claimed its share of international students from India.

Of course, now there are other offshore destinations that beckon with international diplomas and degrees in business management and information technology such as the US, Canada, Australia and of late New Zealand.

Clearly, the advantages of advertising in the Indian media were manifold as the captive clientele, other than the burgeoning Chinese, were the Indians.

If these efforts at marketing wares in foreign lands through the media in India were more compulsions driven by market realities, then try this one for size... The Indians, at least the Malayalees settled in the US, are turning to the Indian media for selling wares back home, in the US.

Thus you have Mr Roy Platt (anybody's guess is good as to the origin of the surname Platt as he surely cannot be any relative of Sylvia Plath ) selling real estate in Texas through the Asianet channel.

And the product is profiled to suit the Indian mindset on buying property at $1.96 `lakh' rather than have the denominator in million or a fraction thereof, as one would if it was an advertisement in the US.

If one thought that Mr Platt had gone in for segmented advertising, then how about Mr Ram M. Cheerath of New York offering his services as a specialist in immigration laws, again to the viewers of the TV channel.

For that matter there are the odd Abrahams selling insurance in the US and the handful of Menons selling discounted air tickets via the Indian airwaves.

According to a media analyst, this is a new trend, but too early to say whether it would take off as a pan-India phenomenon.

"Not every region in India would have as strong a presence in the US or even the UK. One could see this trend limited to places such as Punjab, Gujarat and even some pockets of south India like Kerala, as in the cited case. Closer home, you can see the language newspapers taking on this role of playing the segmentation game, where people settled in cities such as Mumbai turn to these dailies for buying and selling property", he said.

Surely, if one thought that it was a one-way traffic with products and services being beamed across the world via the Indian airwaves then try this one for size.

At the ongoing ICC Champion Trophy Cricket held in the UK, one need not look far to see that almost all the products advertised trace their way back home, to India.

At the Rose Bowl the other day, one could have sworn that every single hoarding around the stadium was of Indian origin.