A world of influence

When we took on this journey of cool-hunting (mapping the aspirations, dispositions and attitude of the people in the age-bracket of 14-34 years), little did we realise it would become so addictive that we would be doing it all the time. So enslaving is this drive that one has to keep the team in check or else they would track every move, every glance and every sneeze of the cool folk.

This time too it is the backroom girls who started the debate that more and more people are watching Euro 2012 because cool folk the world over are glued to it. Not to let an opportunity go by, we decided to probe if what works in Europe or the US has an impact on Indian audiences.

We had, in one of the earlier researches, probed what made a brand relevant and one of the top four factors that emerged was the influence of a reference group (‘most people I connect with talk about it’). We dug out that effort of ours to further probe who made up this reference group and whether unrelated people from the Continent or elsewhere sneak into this set effortlessly.

We cool-hunted 190 people across the three metros and one mini-metro. We clubbed them to get to the top four sub-groups to make some sense of the responses. While the immediate circle of friends/colleagues topped with 30 per cent of the respondents stating that they get influenced by them while making their choices, the next best was ‘global trendsetters or the fact that people across the world are at it’. This came up to as high as in almost one-fourth of the responses pipping the obvious ones such as celebrity /achievers’ endorsements. So no wonder you have global brands arriving in India, piggy-riding on the equity and success of their international achievements. No wonder Apple doesn’t spend much of its marketing money in India and yet has Indians craving it like how! The number of times you are told that Starbucks is coming to India is not funny. So if NBA holds a clinic in India and FIFA considers India to be an important market, it is because we get influenced by what others are doing the world over.

Psychologist Dr Aruna Broota says “not any more is it awe for the West”. For her , it is the much larger trend of us thinking of ourselves as being a part of one big, unified world with technology and travel facilitating it. So don’t feel guilty if you yawn in office, it’s only natural to have stayed up late to catch Lahm’s header or Xavi’s move, our 164th rank in FIFA rankings notwithstanding. Happy cool-hunting!

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