Aachi Masala’s ad – Malayalam transliteration from Tamil – has been providing unintentional humour for a while now. It reminded me of Karthik’s post on Quartz a while back- “How brands are hurting themselves with pan-India “Hinglish” ads“.
The crux of the post is marketing effectiveness and how, by not communicating in the language the audience uses every day, the communication is losing its effectiveness and its ability to persuade. “Advertising is not mere communication. It’s persuasion” is a reasoning that’s hard to argue with. The common justification given my marketers are apparently “everyone knows Hindi” and “cost”. I wondered though – can marketers be that callous? Could there be other reasons? A brief thought exercise followed.
One immediate perspective was the media mix. The brand might want a regional daily for the reach, but use language (English) as a filter to qualify the audience. I have done this in the past, in Kerala, where the English dailies weren’t sufficient to give me the reach. I released an English ad in Malayala Manorama. Another was that its intent was mere presence in print/television (while competitors advertise only on digital) to help it get into the consideration set. Or maybe it was communicating a celebrity association that could work for trust-building and/or a reflection of the brand’s values and personality. In essence, what a brand expects the consumer to register from a communication could be a bunch of things. Thus not using the regional language need not be ignorance or lack of intent, but just a trade-off. Let me attempt an explanation.
But to get there, a step back. Intent is actually a great place to start! The brand’s intent would be based on business factors including, but not limited, to the category and its maturity, the brand’s position in the category, how competitors are using media and what they communicate. All of these also affect the consumer’s decision making process too.
That decision making process is complex, and hence persuasion is not necessarily a singular thing. Even simplistically, it could be any layer of the basic AIDA marketing model, or recall, or retention! From a communication strategy perspective, there are multiple jobs – flavours of persuasion – to be done.
Finally, media strategy. In a traditional media – only world, a print/television ad, arguably, was expected to do the heavy lifting across the decision steps, with just the retail promotions/branding, and the physical product as help. But media and consumption experiences are now diverse and fragmented. Even an FMCG brand could provide a digital experience, and use a print/television ad could just be a thought starter that leads to one. The point being the role of the ad.
But isn’t all this just better with language? Enter the trade-off. With all this background, the usage of local language in persuasion could end up lower in the brand manager’s priorities. The effort of changing language in the larger context vs its impact on the consumer’s decision making. Would the customer really decide against a brand because it did not use the language? If the answer is largely negative, the brand manager might just let it be.
Do these serve as justifications for all the ads you come across? Not necessarily, the attempt was only alternate perspectives. 🙂
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