The Hindu Business Line : Building Incredible India

The summer months witness several brands of tourism dominating the advertising-scape. How do brands of tourism work? Is there a difference from the soap and candy?

_ Joy Menon, Kochi

Joy, tourism in any developing country is an upper-end brand. It is a category that really sits atop the hierarchy of needs. If you draw a pyramid, brands of food and beverages would occupy the lowest rung. Once a society satisfies these needs, you have the detergents, clothes, personal care and basic cosmetic brands sitting just atop this bottom pile of food and beverages. Just above that pile will sit more higher-end-need brands such as those of cosmetics, perfumes, and so on. And higher than this sit the brands that promote holidays, tourism and such pursuits as sport and adventure.

Right at the peak (as I build it conceptually) would sit brands that help a consumer self-actualise, like yoga, meditation, spiritual brands and movements such as the Aurobindo movement, Mahesh Yogi and so on. Brands that seek charity work also sit here. Tourism is therefore a relatively higher-end brand in the consumer stakes for markets. As consumer markets mature and as the economic affordability of consumer segments improves, consumers tend to climb the brand mountain higher and higher.

With the current economic prosperity of India, there is a great degree of interest in the tourism brand. This is so for overseas travel and adventure first and then it moves to domestic tourism destinations. The recent World Cup Barbados travel package, exciting Australia Tourism packages, Sri Lanka packages of Rs 9,999 and every other destination of import, whether it be `Surprising Singapore' or `Malaysia, Truly Asia', everyone has played their roles in enhancing the image of this segment.

The paradigm shift lies in the fact that Indian consumers now want to travel and spend money. The Indian is willing to spend more money on foreign shores than Indian. That is a shift. The Indian is suddenly getting comfortable with dollar-denominated rates of expenditure and does not cringe as much as he used to in the old days. This is another shift.

Tourism brands are built differently, using the fact of higher-end want and need colouring this category.

How does one build brand India? There is a lot of talk about it in the media.

_ Nalini Arya, New Delhi

Nalini, Brand India is built in one of two ways. Either you take India Inc and brand its efforts aggressively in the markets of the West. It is something like what the IT industry said at Davos: India Everywhere. I do, however, believe this is top-down branding.

A more solid way of building Brand India would be by the sheer effort and merit of a hundred offerings from India. This would be bottom-up branding.

Yoga, TM, Mahesh Yogi, Mahatma Gandhi, non-violence, IIT, and sundry other such offerings are items that help such a bottom-up branding of India. When you aggregate these many offerings, they brand India in a positive manner. I am for this second manner of building Brand India.

If there is a big trend in media terms, what is it?

_ Sarayu Ghosh, Kolkata

Sarayu, Sarayu, Sarayu! You have given me such an open-ended question, that I can go on and on. And I will.

One big trend that I spot outright is the fact that marketers are believing more and more in the power of below-the-line (BTL) media versus the traditional besottedness with above-the-line (ATL) media.

There is what I call creeping-BTL eating into what would have otherwise been the rather large share of pie occupied by ATL. You might call this the loss of potential for ATL media.

Something that will not be noticed if you look at the ATL media numbers growth.

Let's backtrack. In the early Eighties, when colour television first made inroads into India, with Ms Indira Gandhi literally opening a low-power transmitter (LPT) and high-power transmitter (HPT) every alternate day, ATL advertising led the way. Marketers plonked their mega-bucks on ATL. The Asiad spurred on the ATL movement further. The popular soaps of the day helped the movement on with TRP levels of Buniyaad and Hum Log hovering in the dizzy 73 TRP stratosphere. Something unimaginable today, where a TRP of 17 is considered hot. This continued right up to the early years of this decade.

Today, things are different. The ATL media is completely splintered with 126 television channels to pick from as options for viewership. Add another six specific programmes on these 126 channels and you have a splintered media that has a very, very, fractured viewership! So fractured that marketers are literally groping in the dark. Our television viewership data is again one that is up for grabs. My key criticism of the TAM (Television Audience Measurement) data is that the sample size of homes tapped is just not representative enough. While the data may be more representative of viewership patterns in the eight big cities of India, I am afraid it is utterly lacking as far as the 52 towns of one-million population is concerned. And let's not talk of the 236 smaller towns and 6.42 lakh villages!

India is a complex media market. Further still, India is complex due to its heterogeneity of peoples. Tracking media viewership reliably is a nightmare. In the wake of this complexity, advertising delivery is at best a grope-in-the-dark exercise. With markets getting even more complex and demanding, ATL is working less and less. Further, there is a degree of advertising cynicism creeping into the mindset of consumers in the big cities and towns. Therefore, over the years, savvy marketers have focused their attention more and more on BTL. Today, the best marketers have a skew that is 55:45 ATL to BTL. There are, of course, maverick examples of 30:70 as well.

BTL has risen in several forms. There is BTL that is complete trade-leveraged activity. This is where the marketer is greasing the distribution system and the front-line selling capability of this nation of 12 million-plus shopkeepers. A substantial chunk of money is going into discounts, shop-windows and incentive schemes of every variety, which include strategies that create a chain of company reliable outlets, like the HLL Super-Value stores.

Other BTL forms are the advertising forms below the line. Point of purchase has emerged in a big way here. Current available data indicates that as much of 76 per cent of purchase behaviour can be swung at the point of purchase in some categories such as apparel, FMCG and consumer durables. Marketers are, therefore, plonking their monies here as well.

And then there is out-of-home media of every kind. A lot of money is going out into hoardings, and newer forms that are just about emerging, such as street furniture and aero-bridges at airports. More newer forms are slated to emerge. This industry is slated to hover around the Rs 960-crore mark as of now of the larger Rs 13,500-crore advertising industry.

(Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Email: askharishbijoor@thehindu.co.in)