Kudos for KILB

AEGON-Religare's KILB campaign is a wonderful usurping of a generic benefit of insurance i.e. risk protection, that has been lying unclaimed for many years now. I was fortunate to do a little bit of work almost 6 years ago on the category and at that time only Max New York Life was talking this language. I still remember the first question their advisor asked me- If you die today, how much money does your family need to survive. All others kept asking- What is your budget for premium payment?

India, thanks to LIC, has historically looked at insurance as an investment tool rather than a risk protection one. And as the MNYL advisor mentioned very vividly during my meeting 6 years ago- Sir, selling insurance as risk protection in India is a bit like whitewater rafting- it is very exciting but you are also going against the tide?

Hopefully KILB will do the job of reorienting the whole sector towards its core value proposition.

DNA of a Newspaper Launch

Off late Bangalore has been plastered with gigantic hoardings announcing the arrival of DNA, the newspaper initiative of the ZEE-Bhaskar combine. The campaign, which had an elaborate teaser phase, is now carrying ads which are supposedly insider’s take on what makes Bangalore a place to be proud of. There are references to cult eateries like Koshy’s, lots of software lingo etc. to mention a few. As someone who considers oneself to be a bit of a media-vore, the campaign, although eye catching, leaves me cold. The primary reason being that as an insider in the advertising/media fraternity, it is so templatized a launch, that one can see right through the kind of conventional thinking that has gone into it. In today’s times one is so inundated with exciting creative stuff all the time, particularly on the net, that this piece of work is just too passé. I can recall at least 5 such city launches of big brands across media and telecom space which have tried this hackneyed approach of trying to connect to a city’s culture.
Douglas Holt, whose book How Brand Become Icons, talks about brands that become a part of the cultural landscape and to me that is what a media brand strives for in the long run. He distinguishes three kinds of audiences- the insiders, who may not consume the brand but their nod of approval is necessary for a brand to get accepted, the followers, those who form the core consumption base of the brand and the feeders- who just emulate the opinion leading followers.
For DNA in Bangalore, the insiders are people in the media, advertising, journalism, theatre space i.e. the kind of crowd that populates a place like Koshy’s. While they may not buy DNA as they source their information and opinions from the net and the blogosphere, they feeling acknowledged and understood is critical for a Bangalore brand to be treated as an insider. To me this campaign, with its superficial understanding of the city, just doesn’t cut it with this audience.
Ideally this campaign should have focused on the core anxiety of the Bangalorean which is around the loss of innocence of the city in the pursuit of modernity and material prosperity. If DNA has presented an understanding of how Bangalore can make a role model for a dramatic reconciliation of the value of Openness, while simultaneously maintaining rock solid rootedness in some timeless values, my hunch is that DNA could have shown an understanding of the DNA of this city.

Positioning India

Have been a big fan of Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India and frankly, haven't come across a piece of writing that packs so much punch in as few as 200 pages. The book tries to get to the roots of how the Indian identity got created and deeply established in less than a century. If, about a hundred years ago one had asked any one living on the subcontinent who they were, no one probably would have played back 'being Indian' as one of the descriptors. Moreover, in the absence of a clearly defined geographical entity it was something that first needed articulation as there was no common Idea of India that everyone could relate to. The book explores how the Indian leadership, which was seeking freedom, had to first explore and articulate what the concept of India was. Nehru, Gandhi, Tagore, Savarkar etc. went in their own personal quests from various perspectives and eventually Nehru's vision prevailed over others and he even got the opportunity to orchestrate the post-independence India's initiatives to internally infuse the Indian identity on its citizens as well as position India on the global landscape.

Where Tagore reworked the poetic language and Gandhi turned to religious traditions to make their Indian selves, Nehru discovered India through the medium of history. temperamentally he saw the world historically; a perspective that at once defined his sense of political possibility and made him vigilant about attending to how the future would look back on his own actions.

As a student of Organization Brands, this book particularly interests me as a parallel for positioning a complex entity (like a Corporation)in a competitive scenario. In this case it happens to be even more challenging as the entity is marginal in terms of resources, is extremely heterogeneous and complex and exists more as a spirit rather than a well-defined geographical space.

Here is an excerpt from the book which captures the external challenge Nehru had to deal with--

Indianness was constituted out of internal diversity, but in Nehru's vision it was equally an international identity, a way of being in the wider world. In contrast to the sometimes narrowly domestic horizons of most in the nationalist movement, Nehru understood independence as an opportunity to establish India as a presence on the world stage. The international profile of states depended on their economic and military prowess, and India obviously could not make its mark in these domains. A new state like India, weak by international standards, would have to pursue its interests by creating its own opportunities and chances. By speaking the language of morality and justice, it might just be able to surprise and unbalance the more powerful, extracting concessions from their sheer embarrassment. Nehru, in this the follower of Gandhi, turned around the language of victim hood: instead of portraying India as a martyr to colonial subjection which had to turn inwards to find and repair itself, he affirmed India's character as a self confident actor in international politics.

MAD AND DEVINE by SUDHIR KAKAR

Just picked up Dr. Kakar’s latest titled Mad and Devine-Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World and am riveted by it. The book looks at the interplay between the spirit and the psyche and aims at distinguishing between the psychic and the spiritual phenomena. Besides insightfully articulating something as abstract as that, his brilliance lies in the ability to infuse poetry into the subject matter. I have been a keen student and follower of Dr. Kakar’s work and it is great to see him get back to non-fiction after a series of novels in the last 10 years. Although last year he came out with The Indians-Portrait of a People, but it was more a synopsized version of his earlier works. Check M&D out for a breathtaking journey into the inner theatre of the mind!