Brand Watch : Reverse Snob Value

Bata is an ubiquitous shoe-product in Bengal, so much so that it gets an honorary mention in the movie 'Namesake' by Mira Nair, where the loving grandmother specifically tells the house-help to pick up a pair of  bathroom slippers 'only from Bata' for her visiting NRI grandchildren. It truly captured the spirit of association of the brand with the Bengali middle-class customers that have grown to love the brand for years. 

There is very little to dislike about Bata - the products are reasonably priced, quite fashionable for the price and sasta-tikao for Indian use. It is also the  inventor of curious style of pricing - where it often charges 1 paisa less than a whole figure, to create a psychological impression on the mind of the customer that a product costs less its price. Say, instead of INR 400, the product is often priced INR 399.99. My entire childhood was spent being trying to riddle this quirky marketing tactic, which Bata became famous for.

With time, Bata has now become more of a middle-class product, not associated with a snob value that it once was in a more stagnant market with fewer players. As a brand, I would think it would want to sell its trusted brand image, or position itself as a fashionable up-market alternative if it wished to change its target customer base. Instead, it goes ahead and decides to stamp the price of its products on the products itself - because reverse snob-value of shaming a customer's cheap shoe can't be such a great idea.

Yes, my feet are pretty small, but that apart, tell me - Why would a company do that ? Shoes in India are opened at doorsteps before entering houses, thereby making the price tag very visible. While it wouldn't impact much of its older customer base, who are more value conscious and less status conscious, it would surely not be a great way to rope in younger generation. 

I am at loss to understand why a company like Bata would do this. Then again, it isn't just Bata, but many more Indian shoe makers who keep adopting the same style - Khadims, Heed over Heels, etc. 

Again, same question - why ?

Where The Rivers Meet

Somewhere in the middle of last year, a couple of months into entering the pharmaceutical industry, I realized that I probably needed to understand basic chemistry, biology, physics and a little bit of mathematics. The stalwarts tell you to go way out of your comfort zone to do business and do things you are not prepared to. And, there I was – a fish out of water, dabbling in subjects I have dreaded (and barely managed to scrape through) all through high school.

The romanticism of bracing the unknown was one thing, and then reliving dreadful memories of science phobia was another. Mathematics was something I absolutely dreaded since school - so I had a very, very clear memory and opinion on the subject. I somehow managed to rot my way through biology, but chemistry and physics had totally whooshed past me like a rocket.

If you ask me now, what about chemistry did I even remember from those days, I probably couldn't tell you - may be a formula of water and carbon dioxide, or memories of a rather tall and unfashionable chemistry teacher queuing up all the girls to the chemistry laboratory, which was mainly for use for senior science students, as a "special treat with special permission" she got from the school principal, and then the nearly abominable smell of weird gases that always came out of the lab, right next to my classroom. That was all that chemistry was for me, which circa 2001, after my high school board exams, became absolutely irrelevant and redundant in my life. Of course, till circa 2015, as it turns out.

In India, probably like so many other places, STEM subjects are for the "smart ones", and a vast majority end up studying sciences, anyways. Everybody talked about sciences as the smarter subjects, that required “brain” unlike studying humanities (which required memory, as if memory wasn’t a brain function). I always wondered what could study of science give, other than the joys of discovering this and that. What is it like for a chemist to see the world through the lenses of chemistry or physicists through physics?

By high school, I had discovered my love for humanities. My first useful tutor of any merit whatsoever was an average level government clerk doubled up his income as a private tutor. Born to an intellectual elite family of a barrister, but torn into relative poverty by partition of India with his native Bangladesh, he wasn’t an achiever by any counts. His only claim was that he believed inherently that he was the bearer of the family pedigree - an intellectual, and hence, kept an absolutely meticulous but superficial knowledge of academia. For a ten year old, even such superficial knowledge was useful, given the sheer lack of imagination my school life had become to represent by them. It was this man who taught me basics of linguistics, historiography, and semantics, and got me introduced to myriad concepts like Emanual Kant and Amartya Sen. Deprived of cable television as part of my puritan upbringing, my only refugee became 2 hour programs on All India Radio’s own FM channel called Rainbow FM, which had a host of smart people from anthropologists, feminists, psychiatrists, poets, and all, that I listened more attentively for five years, than I did my school work. My life by then had split into lives – one where I went to school, dreaded sciences and mugged up humanities, and the other where I spent hours staying up wondering about the various tribes of India that an anthropologists just updated on, or constantly trying to understand the evolution of a language.

A year into this intellectual exercise, I watched the first influential person of my life person – danseuse Ranjabati Sircar and her mother Manjusri Chaki Sircar on television. I had learned Bharatnatyam for a few years and had a knack for understanding dance, and as much as I loved the technical prowess of the dance form, I felt stagnated with how constant, un-changing and rigid the traditional dance form was, both in its grammar and content. There was little scope to rewrite the rules, and even less to rewrite the existing social biases that the dance form represented. All the hereos were Brahmins and the women nearly always coy  and wanted to put garlands on their hairs in various renditions. The mother-daughter due of the Sircars changed my world, because now, I saw a new form of dance called Nava-Nritya, that not only created a language that was more egalitarian (with steps taking from tribal dances to classical brahmanical dance forms), as also the renditions which constantly questioned and challenged existing social norms.

By fifteen I had known for sure, that humanities was a wonderful discipline, that helps one understand one’s social conditioning to really choose consciously one’s identity. The self, as we knew it as repository of various given identities of sex, gender, caste, community, religion and nationalism, could not be re-created as a self-chosen identity. We could all choose to be the kind of Hindu we wanted (or any other religion), the kind of sexuality we wanted to practise, the kind of food we wanted to eat to represent our caste biases (and lack of it) and such.

I was sorted for life, and felt more at ease with myself, for my lack of skill at STEM subjects.

Yet, as time went by, I realized how humanities and fundamental sciences were intertwined as knowledge outflows, like all knowledge sources was, and just by understanding the world through humanities, was never going to enough, if I completely didn’t understand science.

Even though Physics and Chemistry evaporated from my life for years after high school, unlike mathematics which continued to haunt me with stamp duty calculations and I moved on with my dedicated humanities studies, I spent hours in an eerie uneasiness when I was still haunted by the same question as to why people study sciences.  The world isn't a laboratory after all, where one could go around concocting strange chemical combinations. And even if one one knew how to balance ions and neutrons and whatever it was, how does that help one unravel complex questions of human identity? 

So I asked many engineers (the most ubiquitous clan pursuing sciences in India) for years and what I got was that chemistry is everywhere - from the shampoo one uses to the drugs one takes : everything was a complex network of chemicals. Like they also said Physics is needed for everything – from switching on the fan to the light. Of course,  same logic applied for mathematics. Now, this wasn't the kind of answer I was seeking - the response was a lot like telling someone that law is a wonderful subject because it will teach you how to do your tax planning, or file for property documents. As we know, an understanding of law does more - from understanding the entire rights discourse to assessing one's life through an understanding of jurisprudence. What I wanted to know was basically if there was anything equivalent to philosophy or jurisprudence in chemistry or physics - sadly, no one I knew had answers.

A failed venture later, when I finally ended up running the small pharmacy my family was running for years, I knew that chemistry could no longer be ignored and entire journey of merely beginning to understand a rather unknown, and erstwhile dreadful subject, turned out to be tougher that I ever imagined. For a while, I spent long, long hours just contemplating on the modus operandi to tame the dragon called chemistry - should I by-heart all the names of all possible medicine brand names in the world (and then die of memory burst) or begin slowly and steadily with basic biochemistry and move upwards ? The problem (or blessing) with beginning to learn subjects from scratch at an advanced age (like thirty, for me) is that nobody wants to teach this group. Either one stumps upon material aimed at kids, or more advanced pop-fiction literature aimed at those with some basic idea. Clearly, thirty plus aged students is no one's favorites ! 

Left to myself to fend for my own inadequacies of high school science failures, I began searching for a book that was going to introduce me to biology and chemistry without intimidation. Nearly all of Isaac Asimov’s books turned out to be a great help as a substitute for text books, Asimov was nonetheless a great science teacher, and not the types I met at school that was intimidating and boring, and reading through his books like the “Human Brain” was a real treat for my scared, doubtful mind.  Just like that, in a page or two, he would explain what amino acid was and how chains of chemical bonds worked – and then go about cracking some joke on its roman origins. As if there was never a better way to explain Amino Acid to anyone who has hated chemistry any better, Asimov was a kind teacher, and a great first teacher as well.

Sadly, Asimov’s books were written long back and even the updated versions were out-dated, so I knew I had to look for more sources. Multiple google searches later, I picked up Primo Levi's ‘Periodic Table’, having read that it had won the award for the best book on science, beating Richard Dawkins to the second place. I had assumed that it was going to an introduction to periodic table and basic concepts of chemistry - a lot like ‘Codes’ by Charles Pretzold, which introduced Coding to me, or 'Naked Statistics' by Charles Wheelan, which introduced statistics to me.

So I began reading the Periodic Table, with great interest and enthusiasm, ready with note book and pen to jot down notes as I was to go ahead with chemicals in the periodic table. Like I usually did for more technical books, my reading position was upright on the chair in front of my study table, as opposed to the rest which I read lounging on my bed or a couch. And then, ten pages down, and I realized Primo Levi was never going to talk about chemicals in the periodic table !

The book, as it revealed to me, isn't on chemistry at all, it is about his life. And while I was fooled into believing that may be after a brief intro into his life, he was going to get to business and teach me periodic table, I ended up reading a few chapters at first rather resentfully, only to realize that I have now, officially, stumbled upon gold mine.

Never have I read a science book, as potent and as poignant as this one and as Tim Radford of The Guardian puts it much more succinctly than me, that "If you were looking for a good book, a really good book in every sense, this is it."

Radford goes on to write : 

 "And yet, on the fourth or fifth reading in the 24 years since UK publication, The Periodic Table still seems to me to be the nearest match to the ideal science book. At some point – for me it was page 33 of the original Michael Joseph edition – the reader begins to understand that chemistry is not a "subject", not an arcane and sometimes bewildering intellectual scaffolding laboriously erected to frame reality: it is reality. Chemistry is what happens when we breathe, when we touch, when we react, and even our behaviour with others is chemistry at some greater level."

What I also loved about the book is it states Levi's life, through his words, as non-judgementally as anyone writing about life should. This isn't one of those steroid high books on an entrepreneur making the largest company in the world, or a chemist making the most important discovery in the world. Levi was neither. In fact, he was a chemist, who gave up chemistry to become a salesman - and that hardly makes him the best poster boy for pop-business genre. But at heart, it was chemistry which taught him how to deal with life. He drew his life’s learning from the way various chemicals reacted with each other and from their nature. It was then possible to understand chemistry and life together, and that was greatest philosophical learning from the book for me.

That was a good beginning to understanding how science is fundamental to our lives, but it wasn’t enough. Primo Levi’s work was poetic, but not as strong on philosophy as I wanted him to be. It helped me understand how external conduct can be guided by how various chemicals reacted with each other in nature, but it didn’t still give me a full-blown answer to whether that understanding could help us re-create the self.

Quite accidentally, the rest of my quest ended in a Vipassana Camp teaching the old Buddhist technique of Vipassana. I hadn’t of course gone for a Vipassana meditation retreat to find answers to science and philosophy. I had been working long hours, but I wanted longer hours in a day to finish all the tasks I set out for myself every morning. The task of understanding pharmaceutical industry felt daunting every day, and I was tired at the end of day to get down to learning anything new. And barring the tiredness, there was constant fear – of how time was just flying by, and I was still running a small shop, ignorant of market trend and future action plans. I wanted an energy drink, and an anxiety pill, all in one, but naturally, and Vipassana seemed like my only option.

Forced to do 100 hours of vipassana over ten days in absolute silence and isolation without phone or any human contact, it was of course great in increasing one’s mental health quotient. My mental alertness increased, and my mind became less tense, less restless, less volatile.

As I was taught the art of intense alertness of one’s body through breathing, a very animated Guruji Late SatyaNarayan Goenka, through video lectures, poignantly asked – what have we known about ourselves all this while, except when physicists, chemists and biologists have cut through us, put us under the microscope, studied us diligently and come to a conclusion as to what we are made up of. What is the point of understanding one’s self (and its physical manifestation of the body) through external investigations by scientists, when one can look inside through Vipassana and come to the same conclusion?

Guruji’s discourses happen each day at night, after ten long hours of meditation, that begin at 4.30 am in the morning. On the first session, as I was busy nursing my back from the unbearable back pain I felt after sitting upright for ten hours, I was jerked out of my numbed body – Wait ! Did I just hear Guruji saying that scientists and scientific knowledge were now redundant to understand the science of one’s own body and self  - as in I didn’t really need to learn periodic table, structure of atoms and various positions of glands and ducts inside my body to know what’s really that I am made up of ? I had mostly made up my mind to sleep through discourses, the only time one sit in a relaxed position, but instead now Guruji was all but ready to become my science teacher. As I squinted my eyes and bent forward in attention towards the huge screen at the far end of the meditation hall, S N Goenka ji mentioned in no ambiguous terms to leave all the intellectual activities outside. Do not seek the truth through external knowledge and intellect, but through one’s true experience, he urged as it reassured that each day of Vipassana was going to take each of us meditators closer towards that truth.

Each day, through focusing on normal breathing, I felt an acute awareness of my self. I wasn’t all bones, muscles, fat (a lot of it) and water retention (since I suffered from Edema) or fungal infections and allergies, but a lot of tiny particles that tingled through my body as I felt the signal of one nerve signaling towards another, and electric waves getting transmitted. All the body part that I had allergies, heated up, like it was a biochemical rave party, and as I learned to accept the pain of the swelling heat and itchiness, it resided.

I had been a well-read person by my own account. I read, if not voraciously in numbers but certainly voraciously with passion. Pyschology was one of my favourite subjects, and Bhagwat Geeta was my favourite book. I wasn’t dumb, and I had believed I knew an awful lot of what was to be known of mindfulness meditation.

Yet, what I experienced at Dhamma Vipassana was a sub-body alien experience like nothing I had experienced before and nothing that I had read earlier, had prepared me to face these experiences. There were days when I felt I had a bad attack of Parkinson, or Dengue, and there wasn’t going to be any way I was going to stop the shivers coming from deep inside the body. And then on some days, so much heat just left my body, that I felt like a furnace. As days progressed, we were taught to feel our internal organs and I could feel my heart pumping and stomach crunching, but nearly nothing on the right side of my stomach – So I ran to the resident teacher and asked him if that meant bad news because I was meant to feel the intestine and I wasn’t. He asked me to keep my biology knowledge out of my head, and told me whatever is there, you will feel it yourself. He assured, as Guruji had, that over years and years of Vipassana practice, one can scan every minute centimeter of the one’s body and remain alert of the happenings.

In those flipping moments that stretched over ten days, I found the answer to the question, whose answer that I have been looking out for so long. All these years, and all those lessons I had learned and byhearted in Physics and Chemistry, that the world consists of matter and matter is made up of atoms and molecules, was now true and couldn’t have been true-er that experiencing it in real-time. I was a matter, and made up atoms as well, and various chemicals and energy flows worked all through my body.

But the moot question was still unanswered – how does an understanding of the fact that matter was made up of atoms and molecules do anything to deciding my conduct - what is the greater philosophical takeaway from it, if there is one any ways ?

It turns out there is. For one, everything as minute as atoms and molecules as its unit destroy the understanding of self as we know it through the lense of hubris. None of us are solid structures, but smaller units, that are impermanent, and hence, will last temporarily before going into another form.

If everything is impermanent, then, well, so are our joys and sorrows and our failures and success. The fleeting moments of the heart beat, the crunching of the stomach, the pain in the bones – as I realized through Vipassana – taught me how everything is fleeting and intransient, and that realization in itself was the greatest philosophical revelation.

Thus, in a nutshell, physics and chemistry do not teach us how electric bulbs work or how medicines work. They teach us how we don’t exist as a concrete self but rather as minute small units of atoms and molecules, and how there is no greater truth than acknowledging the intransience of nature. That, coincidentally, is what the Bhagwat Geeta, a seminal piece on Indian philosophy teaches, that atma is intransient and we must acknowledge the intransience with “stit-pragna” or disinterested alertness. It also what historiography teaches us that every narrative is transient, true-r to the moment it exists, and then un-true for next, as also our entire trajectory of scientific knowledge, which as Isaac Asimov explains magnificently, in “The relativity of Wrong” where he argues that physics theories are never really right or wrong; rather they are outside the binary distinction of right or wrong, and what happens is that theories gradually get improved in such a way that they are always a bit less wrong than the previous version, which means there is no ultimate theory that is going to be permanently absolutely right.

That’s how my world just shrunk into one cohesive truth - one size that fits all disciplines. And trust me, that feeling is wonderful. 

Parallel Lines - When do you "Waste" A Degree ?

When I was quiet and a shy student out of high school, I was asked all too often why I wanted to become lawyer. The practice of law essentially meant ending up in courts as litigating lawyers and courts are not the best place for someone as quiet and shy as me. I lived through that, and became a lawyer nonetheless.

Honestly, it wasn’t out of a crazy desire to go to courts, fight fiery cases and change the constitution. I couldn’t ever remember having such fancies even as a child, given that I did once fancy winning the Wimbledon (note, I play no sports till today). And no, “To Kill a Mockingbird” played no role in it, as well.

With everyone around me already decided and certain about what they wanted to be when they grew up, I only knew that I loved consumer psychology, having spent hours watching advertisements and street shopping for my fodder, and I was disheartened to know that I could not study psychology without mathematics, which I couldn’t do to save my life. Worse still, I didn’t even know what profession really allowed me to research on consumer psychology. So when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, even till the end of school, I had no answer.

As disheartened I was, I still loved humanities, and not knowing ‘exactly’ which under-graduate course was going to help me with a closer to understanding human behavior, I decided I would do a lottery and choose whatever chit I picked up. Fortunately, such extreme measures were not needed, because I came to know that I could study four humanities subjects + law through an integrated five year course and it was going to get me a job at the end of five years. So there, that’s how I became a lawyer – as the best practical way-out to my crisis then.

Then, a decade after that, I realized I still loved consumer psychology, and now the love had turned into crazy love that I could no longer ignore. Now, I knew of professions that would let me delve into it, but I was already five years into law profession and I lost count of how many professionals asked me why I wanted to change “streams”, and if I wanted to, I needed a professional degree like an MBA. I didn’t want to study more, and yet more, and yet more, and wanted to get to working on field directly. I had been O.D-ing on behavioral psychology literature for years, and I couldn’t bear the idea of doing it for some more.

The only option I was left with was now the only option I didn’t have the courage to pursue – quit job, don’t give a fuck, and jump into business. How I survived the ordeal for six months of self-loathing and extreme self-doubt to finally jump into deep water is another story, but in essence, I did. And nearly two decades after I fell in love with advertising in newspapers, I approved (still, didn’t write!) the copy for full-page insert I did for a business I ran in Ahmedabad. And, which didn’t get a single response – but that’s another story again.

Irrespective of whatever was happening around me, I was, at this point, very happy with my life. I was un-successful and struggling, but I went to bed with peace at finally being able to make up my mind to do what I wanted to do for so long.

Not everyone was as elated as I was. I thought it was a phase, and it would pass once I sink into the job. But it didn’t.

The same group of people that questioned my becoming a lawyer + some new group of people (which equals 99% of my world) began asking me even more disdainfully why I chose to “quit law”, having put a decade’s effort in completing my degree and then being a practicing lawyer (very few though understood how corporate law was different from litigation). Some went further, and accused me of “wasting a seat” or worse still, “wasting my degree, education and knowledge”. At the age of thirty-one, I often cannot decide exactly what should make me angrier between being asked why I am not getting married, or being asked to justify my choice to “quit law”.

In India, one expects a young adult to have crystal-clear clarity on what she wants to be at 14 years of age, and such pursuit must be pursued doggedly through competitive exams and such till 18. Very few that I know wanted to be beyond engineer, doctors or lawyers. For one, most like me, did not even know of professions like market researcher or advertising illustrator even existed during high school – so the question of choosing them didn’t even arise! But what is more disturbing is that it is socially acceptable that one’s under-graduation degree must define one’s future course of education + profession for the rest of her life, and any deviation is looked as having lack of determination and clarity. I couldn’t choose to study history as under-grad and then choose to write codes for the rest of my life. Or vice versa. Or whatever versa versa combinations that are available.

Why do we feel so constrained and limited in putting our intellectual existence into such air-tight containers? I would still understand if such constraint came from people with less exposure and education, but that’s barely been true for my experience. When I put in my resignation, a partner at my law firm, with more experience than my years on earth, told me with utmost anger (bordering on ‘rage’) that choosing to “quit law’ for starting up a business at this stage showed how less focused I was about life, and that I should done a degree in commerce and not law if that was my intention (which I should have known at 18, of course).  He could reconcile with a young associate quitting law for marriage or a better offer at another law firm, but not for ‘changing stream’, which was absolutely impious.

So what exactly is “Changing Stream”? And why are we, Indians, so paranoid about it, and equate it to doing drugs and flunking exams? Is it like three parallel lines of Humanities, Sciences and Commerce that separate at higher secondary level and cannot ever, ever, meet mathematically till eternity?

To think of knowledge as drains running parallel to each other as disconnected entities is very disturbing. Of course, knowledge isn’t disconnected and understanding of humanities and sciences are most beautifully entwined to understand greater philosophies of life. Paul Graham’s brilliant book ‘Hackers and Painters’ talks about how his experience at learning painting, made him a better hacker.

Indian education system choses otherwise. It is impossible for anyone to study physics and music together. And those brought up in the system and ingrained with the same value, irrespective of how professionally successful they are, continue to believe likewise. The only ones to lose out in this is us, for knowledge so limited cannot produce brilliant minds.

In recent years, there has been a significant amount of writing in the pop-business section on how technologists should learn humanities, for it teaches “empathy”, which is essential for better product design and such, instead of focusing just on just mathematics. Literature on finance has been also moving on the same line – asking more and more investors to seek wisdom through understanding of humanities.

All these are true. I agree with all of them. But these writings only focus on the limited application of humanities on one’s professional purpose. None really ever emphasize that there is a difference between the practice of a subject and the subject itself (for eg. the difference between being a lawyer and a student of law).  In this, Professor Noah Fieldman makes an excellent argument:

“Apprenticeship training can’t prepare you to see the world that way. Learning from a master is the most conservative form of education possible: Practitioners of an art or a craft teach their students exactly the skills they themselves have learned through generations of practice. If you want the best shirts, go to the Neapolitan women who learned to sew them from the previous generation. If you want the best shoes, there’s a London shoemaker who apprenticed at his master’s last. You can apprentice to be a good tax lawyer, but that won't prepare you to face the big questions.”

To be an engineer better at making products, or an investor making better share portfolio investments, or a lawyer focusing on tax practice isn’t enough to ever seek wisdom to look at the “big questions” – on the core values of our lives, the underlying philosophy that guides us and to understand greater policy decisions on how our lives are determined and controlled, vis-a-vis others. For that, we must allow for the highest degree of integration of humanities as possible, without limiting it to small compartments. And stop living in the paranoia that any knowledge is wasted like left over food if one choose to diversify and expand to other fields.

Now, back to reality and to the more immediate question – How do I stop people from asking me the same questions over and over again?

Especially now that I have a third question being thrown around at me – How will you become a pharma business-woman if you didn’t do B.Pharma ?

My brief answer is by learning business intuition +  general overview on the technical aspect of pharmacology like anyone doing a B.Pharma degree learned by reading books.

If you are asking the same questions to people, just get the facts right – no knowledge is ever wasted, and no one “quits” any knowledge or discipline. Like, such a thing doesn’t even exist ! Are we clear ? 

Brand Watch: Dabur's Yoodley

Ever since I decided to stop drafting agreements, and abandon my corporate law career, for being a 'shop-keeper' (as most Indians call small to medium scale retailers), my worried mother has asked me what it is about sitting at the cash counter in sweltering Calcutta heat in a 200 square feet shop that I like so much that I continue to put myself through what she clearly perceives to be an 'ordeal'. Every now and then, she asks me tactfully, if I have finally been bored, sitting at the cash counter, with a faint hope that I would concede and go back to being a lawyer. 

But then, the truth is that I have never been bored, and far from it, after years and years of consumer gazing at shopping malls and sabzi mandis, most of which began with my shopping trips with my mother to local markets, getting the first-point perspective of observing Indian customers is probably the most fun thing for a struggling business-woman, while making little or no money on most days.

And, why wouldn't it be ? Indian consumer grass-root shopping experience is so vibrant and nuanced and so little captured in academic business writings (which captures predominantly the western  world market) that there is literally no way to get a hang of it, unless one sits in one of those of God damn cash counters for a while. 

First look at the incredibly diverse and unrelated items all retailers stock up -  in fact, small Indian retailers, popularly known as Kiranas (the colloquial equivalent of 'Mom and Pop shops') are so versatile and diverse in their stock inventory that it is not surprising to find a shop selling radio sets as well as potatoes. And in that, they are not any less diversely stocked than bigger shopping malls, albeit at a much smaller scale. 

I don't run a Kirana shop. I run a chemist shop. Not surprisingly, Chemist Shops in India often double up as part-grocery stores, stocking up soft drinks, shampoos sachets, nail polish removers, and all and sundry. My small shop is no exception to that. And why not ? Every now and then there is a request for products ranging from Loreal Burgundy Hair Colour to Nestle Qadbury Chocolates, and every foot-fall, as any retailer would tell you, matters. 

So, about a couple of months, the door-to-door sales manager from Dabur, after taking order for its regular ayurvedic medicated products, set out on the front desk counter a few packets of richly coloured drinks in paper packets, and said "Madam, this is exactly like 'Paper Boat'. Dabur has just launched this under the 'Hajmola Brand' and we have good offers. Keep a few and it will fly out of your counter in no time." 

Wait, but what is 'Paper Boat'? The sales-men at the counter had never heard of 'Paper Boat'. Of course, I had and totally been in love with  their Jal Jeera flavour, a regular on most flights, where it is regularly served since its launch in 2013. Clearly, Paper Boat is a niche market product and it didn't have any mass market visibilty like the Coke-s and Pepsi-s  or even the popular Indian, non-carobonated, mango based drinks like Mazza and Slice. That's why the salesmen, who had barely anything more than high school education but an innate skill to remember stock of nearly 7000 odd medicines, had no clue about it. 

And to make things worse, they couldn't even guess what it was. Do you drink it directly ? Do you add it to water ? Do you need to refrigerate it ? Do you need to drink in one go ? After all,  it wasn't a bottled cola drink or any other drinks that came in a bottle, a format they had been familiar with. It came in a  paper packet with a lid on it, a format very unknown to the mass-market, and had only been used by Paper Boat so far. 

The most experienced salesman at my shop looked at the rates offered, and concluded it was a very good introductory offer with very good margins for us. After all, it was priced only at 30 rupees and we could keep one sample of each to see how it fares, right at the front counter, with maximum visibility to all the customers. Dabur has been a very trusted Indian FMGC brand for decades, and Hajmola has been an iconic digestive pill, widely popular, and a common household favorite across generations. In his decade long experience as a pharmaceutical retail salesman, he has been very wary of new companies and products, which do not fly off the counter and then companies which go bust before withdrawing unsold expired goods from retailers, but he trusted Dabur and believed the brand name would sell it easily off the counter. 

Like that, Yoodley ended up on the counter, and instead of flying off the counter in a jiffy, it took a good two months to sell all the six samples !

From my cash-counter view, I saw all the customers, ranging from middle class house-wives to retired government servants, picking it up with great inquisition and asking the same questions which the sales guys had asked in the first place - Do you drink it directly ? Do you add it to water ? Do you need to refrigerate it ? Do you need to drink in one go ?! Each of them would turn the packet left and right, front and back, with some trying to squeeze or smell,  and then keep it back on the counter dispassionately. First, I would tell me them that it was like 'Paper Boat' and it fell blank with them. So then I began to tell them it was like Maaza, a popular mango drink made by Coca Cola and they needed to do the same thing - drink straight out of the packet and refrigerate, prior to drinking, if they wanted it chilled.

Thus, here's my first question  - 

A ) How important is the physical design of a product, esp. for a product that is being introduced into the market, to be in a format familiar to the consumer ?

Clearly, Dabur has missed the mark by completely copying entirely an unfamiliar format of its product based on presentation of an earlier launched product, i.e. Paper Boat. Other than the fact that it was confusing to consumers, even for those who knew about Paper Boat, it made it look exactly like it was copying Paper Boat - which can't be a good branding strategy to begin with, given that both the products are priced similarly. 

Unless Dabur begins spending bag fulls of money on advertisement to educate the customers on what the product is  (which it subsequently began), why not stick to a familiar physical format, esp when the core products in terms of the flavours  (Awaara Aam Panna, Nimboora Shikanji, Go Goa Guava, Jhakaas Jaljeera, Golmaal Golgappa and Kabhi Kala Kabhi Khatta) are all new.

To add to that, Indian consumers like to touch, feel and see a product before buying, and a hidden drink inside a paper packet wasn't going to get them to trust the product instantly. 

Note to future business-magnet self : Never, never, ever (as Arnab Goswami puts it) confuse the consumer. Do not give them things they have no clue about. And if one new identity is confusing, don't double confuse the consumer with two new things - a new product and a new physical format. And of course, if you are small company with limited marketing budget relying entirely on word of mouth, this could be your death knell. Like seriously !!

Now for the second question :

B) How to make a product aesthetically and psychologically more enticing and informative with the product design of logos and images ?

Yoodley comes in very rich, and un-enticing colours, which are not even associated with imageries of food from any angle. Would you, for example, think of eating anything that is coloured purple ? A food product should be coloured such that it automatically triggers enticement to the brain as an edible product and Yoodley's colour scheme totally failed on this count. The crazy doodles on it are more appropriate for selling children's stationary products and not a food product. This explains why even children and young adults, the more susceptible target group for products such as this, failed to show much excitement in trying out this product. 

And then, there was the fundamental flaw that nearly nothing on the design indicated it was a food product. There were no images of the core fruit flavours on the design - no guava for the Go Goa Guava, no Aam fro Aware Aam Panna. and such. 

Paper Boat on the other hand is a clear winner - the design is clean, on a white background, and provides for cheerful imageries of the core fruit ingredient. Even if a consumer would know nothing about Paper Boat, can still guess it was a mango drink or a jamun drink. 

Note to future marketing stud self:  Pay designers for clear informative designs of product. And don't have doodlers do the professional task. Finally, food products should look like food products, and not stationary sets. As Ogilvy said it long back, providing information through advertising is best way to sell a product.