The Hindu Business Line : Brand pollution

Society will bear with commercial use of its utilities up to a point of time. When things seem to go a bit too far, it will aim to rein in the marketer in his outdoor conquests.

EYEBALL to eyeball marketers Coke and Pepsi (mentioned in alphabetical order), gobbled up precious newsprint last fortnight. Both were in trouble with the long arm of the law! Both were hauled up with warnings and an initial piffling fine of Rs 2 lakh each. The latest news is that both offenders will need to fork out Rs 5 crore and the Himachal Pradesh Government an additional Rs 1 crore to rectify damage. The charge: "commercial vandalism"! Both brands went about town painting hoary old rocks in Himachal Pradesh with their individual brand messages. If Coke did one, Pepsi did another! Till the courts took note and imposed a fine, invoking the charge of commercial vandalism with gusto! Brands are all about visibility. About recall. About reminder prompt-value. What better way to achieve this than dominate the great Indian outdoors!

Look around in your city and you don't notice the trees anymore. They are all hidden behind majestic new hoardings. With cutouts and advertising appeal of every kind staring back at you and all the traffic and chaos around.

Keep looking and you don't see the flowers around. All you really see are the posters that dot the walls for every brand of movie, tooth powder and evangelism on sale! The flowers are still around, but the visual shout of advertising is so high that all else that is natural is subdued into the background. Keep looking keenly. You don't notice the good old architecture of the good old buildings in the neighbourhood. Everything is dwarfed by the paintings on the walls, paintings on the garage shutters and the banners and buntings that scream brand messages, both sublime and ridiculous!

Brand managers and their implementing cousins out in the field have been pushing the boundary of the acceptable for a long while now. It starts with the need of the brand. The brand desires and deserves visibility. The first great thing to do is ensure a wide and deep distribution of the brand in the marketplace. Ensure its visibility at the point of purchase through the means of product display and point-of-purchase aids such as posters, danglers, crowners and wobblers!

The brand also needs to be visible not only at the point of purchase, but also at every point in the visual continuum that a consumer lives through. It starts with pieces of advertising messages that reach the home of the consumer with television, the friendly radio station and the omnipresent newspaper doing their bit.

With advertising in-home having been done and tackled, the brand demands more. More visibility and more attention. The realm of outdoor advertising of every kind is therefore explored. More innovative the brand manager, greater is the variety of media used to promote the brand name. You start with the hoarding, go to the banners, move on to wall site paintings, shutter paintings, temple-wall paintings and even public urinal paintings, if you are really desperate for attention. Barber shops, garage shutters, beauty parlours, cold storages and even the vegetable vendor's cart and your friendly dhobi's trolley get painted in a bid to achieve visual dominance in the marketplace.

The dictum is short and clear. Paint everything out there that stays in the marketplace. Anything that is inanimate offers an opportunity to be painted with brand messaging. The brand manager and those in the marketplace do a pretty good job really! Till public sensitivity wakes up and objects!

The great Indian outdoors provides two types of media. One is paid for and the other unpaid. Most unpaid space is normally available outside city limits indeed. The rest need to be paid for in terms of rentals, corporation taxes and such other outflows. The marketer of the noodle and Nirodh alike go gung-ho in the marketplace occupying outdoor territory by the square foot as their brands ramp up operations.

Brand managers need to wake up to the situation at hand. Society at large will bear with commercial use of its utilities up to a point of time. And then, when things seem to go a bit too far, there will emerge a movement that will aim to restrict and inhibit the brand marketer in his outdoor conquests. Use the utility and use the space. But for heaven's sake, avoid abuse. Brands and their managers need to wake up to the sensitivity, as represented by the charges of commercial vandalism. The future will be full of new phrases one will have to tackle. "Visual shout"! "Brand pollution"! "Brand overdose"!

Time for the industry of branding in the country to set for itself a code of self-regulation that will lay down the dos and don'ts. Much as we have a set of ethics in the advertising of brands, we need a quick set of ethics that will lay down the rules of what outer boundary to stretch in the name of brand innovation, and what not to!

The brand marketer needs to get sensitive to society, the environment and the possible harm (both physical and psychological) that brands can do in the short and long term. Responsible branding is therefore a subject that needs a debate and resolution. The environment at large, and society in particular, are two entities the brand evangelist will need to keep in mind as he rolls out his brand juggernaut into action.

Is it okay to paint those rocks? Is it okay to paint that temple wall? Is it okay to nail those tinplates on to trees in the neighbourhood? Time to sit up and take note. Do it or be told to do it!

(Harish Bijoor is a brand domain specialist based in Bangalore. Feedback can be sent to bleditor@thehindu.co.in.)

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