Holy smoke and yoga, IT professionals and Bollywood are a few pieces of the giant collage
Uday Sahay
The writer is director, Directorate of Information and Publicity, Delhi Govt
While coining the expression - soft power – Harvard University’s Joseph Nye would never have imagined the kind of impact it would have on a country like India with an unbroken cultural continuity and ability to assimilate influences from outside. India has risen to the need of consciously branding itself through exports like yoga, cinema, ayurveda. Of late, the Indian State has been lobbying to open cultural centres in major capitals and has been organising courses abroad that teach appreciation of Indian culture. These products are offering alternatives to Disney and McDonald of the US and to Confucius and Chinese rock bands in the new world order. Destination branding for asserting soft power has created a buzz in the Indian diplomatic circle. Every who’s who is curious to learn its whys and hows. Appreciating the issue gets easier if some fundamentals of branding in the Indian context are put on the drawing board.
Branding is primarily a game of crafting a distinct and positive picture of a person, destination or an object in a person’s mind. In an over-communicated society, such as urban India, it is indeed a complex task to position one picture in minds cluttered with innumerable number of them.
The foreigners’ image of India is not the result of any conscious branding effort. It is only recently that we see some successful branding attempts made by the government and the industry to draw global attention to Brand India. Till not too long back, India’s image abroad was as a country of serpents and rope tricks, of sadhus and chillums and of gods and goddesses. It was the mystique aura that drew foreigners to India. This attraction was akin to a pickle in a meal which adds to the flavour but does not substitute the main course. Foreigners had an ambivalent image of India. But this ambivalence was for the Indian society, not its polity.
For the Indian polity, the picture was different. The maharajas mirrored it. The White Sahibs found such maharajas interesting to spend evenings with or to go hunting. But they were never keen to learn any art of administration or politics from them. Foreigners’ attraction to the Taj Mahal was actually an extension of the same psyche.
The third picture of India emerged during first few decades of independence through Satyajit Ray’s film like “Pather Pachali”. International acclaim that this film drew inspired many towards the image-rush. Pictures of hunger, unemployment and disease gushed out of such films. It appeared for a while as if India could be represented realistically only through such images.
Liberalisation in the 90s generated a fresh stock of pictures – of English speaking IT professionals. The whole world thought that anyone coming from India was a brainy IT professional. And their thought was not unfounded. In the top four IT companies of the US, more than ten per cent employees are of Indian origin.By 2000, few more gripping pictures of India emerged through yoga, ayurveda, cricket and Bollywood. Many of our yogis and sadhus travelled far and wide and received huge fan following in the wellness industry, whereas Bollywood and cricket rode the media boom. These were natural by-products of social and economic forces.
Now, let us see those branding attempts in India that were results of the efforts of the State. Liberalisation taught many developing nations to create its distinct brand identity through advertising campaigns. At the state-level, Kerala tourism department was the first one to start its destination branding attempt by launching a campaign titled ‘God’s Own Country’. The campaign, replete with images of oil massage, boat race, house boat and Kathakali caught the imagination of high-end tourists. The Kerala experiment was replicated at the pan-India level. But capturing the cultural and geographical diversity of India was a difficult task. Meanwhile, Malaysia was already singing ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia’ whereas Singapore was repeating ‘Live Upto Singapore’ phrase. Thailand coined ‘Amazing Thailand’ to position itself and New Zealand thrived on ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ branding. Passing through a labyrinth route of discussions, ‘Incredible India’ campaign was finally launched in 2002. Starting with Rs 50.71 crore in 2002-2003, its budget allocation reached Rs 110 crore in 2008-09. In October 2007, when this campaign reached New York as ‘Incredible India@60’, Americans were spellbound.
In 2006, CII, with support from the ministry of commerce, launched ‘India Everywhere’ at Davos to position India’s economic brand. Now that India is poised to host the best-ever Commonwealth Games in Delhi, its branding as an organiser of world-class games is shortly about to be etched in the cluttered mind of the world.
Uday Sahay
The writer is director, Directorate of Information and Publicity, Delhi Govt
While coining the expression - soft power – Harvard University’s Joseph Nye would never have imagined the kind of impact it would have on a country like India with an unbroken cultural continuity and ability to assimilate influences from outside. India has risen to the need of consciously branding itself through exports like yoga, cinema, ayurveda. Of late, the Indian State has been lobbying to open cultural centres in major capitals and has been organising courses abroad that teach appreciation of Indian culture. These products are offering alternatives to Disney and McDonald of the US and to Confucius and Chinese rock bands in the new world order. Destination branding for asserting soft power has created a buzz in the Indian diplomatic circle. Every who’s who is curious to learn its whys and hows. Appreciating the issue gets easier if some fundamentals of branding in the Indian context are put on the drawing board.
Branding is primarily a game of crafting a distinct and positive picture of a person, destination or an object in a person’s mind. In an over-communicated society, such as urban India, it is indeed a complex task to position one picture in minds cluttered with innumerable number of them.
The foreigners’ image of India is not the result of any conscious branding effort. It is only recently that we see some successful branding attempts made by the government and the industry to draw global attention to Brand India. Till not too long back, India’s image abroad was as a country of serpents and rope tricks, of sadhus and chillums and of gods and goddesses. It was the mystique aura that drew foreigners to India. This attraction was akin to a pickle in a meal which adds to the flavour but does not substitute the main course. Foreigners had an ambivalent image of India. But this ambivalence was for the Indian society, not its polity.
For the Indian polity, the picture was different. The maharajas mirrored it. The White Sahibs found such maharajas interesting to spend evenings with or to go hunting. But they were never keen to learn any art of administration or politics from them. Foreigners’ attraction to the Taj Mahal was actually an extension of the same psyche.
The third picture of India emerged during first few decades of independence through Satyajit Ray’s film like “Pather Pachali”. International acclaim that this film drew inspired many towards the image-rush. Pictures of hunger, unemployment and disease gushed out of such films. It appeared for a while as if India could be represented realistically only through such images.
Liberalisation in the 90s generated a fresh stock of pictures – of English speaking IT professionals. The whole world thought that anyone coming from India was a brainy IT professional. And their thought was not unfounded. In the top four IT companies of the US, more than ten per cent employees are of Indian origin.By 2000, few more gripping pictures of India emerged through yoga, ayurveda, cricket and Bollywood. Many of our yogis and sadhus travelled far and wide and received huge fan following in the wellness industry, whereas Bollywood and cricket rode the media boom. These were natural by-products of social and economic forces.
Now, let us see those branding attempts in India that were results of the efforts of the State. Liberalisation taught many developing nations to create its distinct brand identity through advertising campaigns. At the state-level, Kerala tourism department was the first one to start its destination branding attempt by launching a campaign titled ‘God’s Own Country’. The campaign, replete with images of oil massage, boat race, house boat and Kathakali caught the imagination of high-end tourists. The Kerala experiment was replicated at the pan-India level. But capturing the cultural and geographical diversity of India was a difficult task. Meanwhile, Malaysia was already singing ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia’ whereas Singapore was repeating ‘Live Upto Singapore’ phrase. Thailand coined ‘Amazing Thailand’ to position itself and New Zealand thrived on ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ branding. Passing through a labyrinth route of discussions, ‘Incredible India’ campaign was finally launched in 2002. Starting with Rs 50.71 crore in 2002-2003, its budget allocation reached Rs 110 crore in 2008-09. In October 2007, when this campaign reached New York as ‘Incredible India@60’, Americans were spellbound.
In 2006, CII, with support from the ministry of commerce, launched ‘India Everywhere’ at Davos to position India’s economic brand. Now that India is poised to host the best-ever Commonwealth Games in Delhi, its branding as an organiser of world-class games is shortly about to be etched in the cluttered mind of the world.
Read these article :-
Delhi/ NCR B- Schools get better
IIPM fights meltdown
IIPM
1 LAKH COPY SOLD in less than ten days of Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri's new book Discover The Diamond In You
No comments:
Post a Comment