"Look and Feel"

It's difficult to explain the feeling of going to a hill station in childhood. It was certainly more than just the weather. Just as, later it was difficult to explain the feeling of driving into Jaisalmer. It was more than that rational something.
Equally, even photographs flounder in their inability to describe the 'jannat' (which again begs more descriptors) Kashmir, or the monument Taj, or the soaring reality of the Khajuraho temples. In pictures, Kashmir looks ordinary, the Taj, overated, and Khajuraho, puny - the exact opposite of what they are.
Language too, struggles in vain in its laboured attempt to describe Persons, Places and Things. Grammar calls these three 'nouns' and adds a category called 'adjectives' in its strenuous attempt to describe them.
Now what did Nehru see in Coorg? Or why did Indira Gandhi travel two days into a Kashmiri autumn? Merely to see the chinar leaves changing colours? No, it can't be so simple.
Let's go deeper. Why does a disproportionate part of the holiday experience in a remote wilderness, constitute the phase involved in getting there?
Now if Kashmir was only about a few defined contributors to its heady experience, then all we need to do is put a mound of grassy mud into an air-conditioned room, surround with water, give it a false ceiling of the azure of a Kashmiri sky (technology can perfect this) with a few more condiments added to this synthetic recipe. And bingo, we should get Kashmir! But don't we know better.
Which brings us all the way back to the sprightly subject of ambiance. Now ambiance is what retail formats thrive on. And because they struggle to add ingredients a la a synthetically created Kashmir, they fail to achieve the purpose.
In a mall in Dubai, they ski down on artificial powder snow, delighted to dole up their desert dreams. But a nature lover winces with the experience. Few people return to ski there.
The moral of the story - the mere assemblage of hard material in a retail format, does not a brand make. The 'living' experience is vital. Brands have to live and moreover, the powerful ones are those that titillate one of the five senses.
A Seagram scotch ad story line, set in a cold and misty Scotland, brings forth the fragrance of great scotch. It's like hot pakoras in the pouring monsoons of Mahabaleshwar. Or notice how the car ads convert full grown men to boys, as they watch shiny eyed, bright red cars careening, spinning and whizzing past wet roads. Or see the forbidding, threatening glint in your wife's eye, as a De Beers diamond pops out in media. It is known to cause blindness in alert husbands. Coffee ads and frothy fragrance, now who hasn't been through it.
Some brands however, miss out on this very soft part, given their penchant for placing strategy in linear boxes of cause and effect. So when you see a Subhiksha, it appears to be apologising for its presence. But a Domino's confidently surveys the world with its bold masculine fascia. And a SubWay looks cool and green. Coke bottles look sprightly and bubbly. Big ice cream brands struggle to out do each other in showing dollops of ice cream, but Natural Ice Cream of good ol' Bombay shows the fruit instead, scoring a march. So one stops and enters the parlour. A few slurps into real fruit, and brand loyalty starts galloping.
If you thought it is only about soft products, then think of Dove and you virtually experience cream. With Liril, despite the angrezi, Nimbu Paani in summers achieves that fabled fresh feeling. Just add a Karen Lunel under a waterfall and you pepper the freshness with escapist abandon, a private seeking of all, regardless of demographic and psychographic typecasting. Will only SEC A and B want to escape the straight jacketed world! That's like saying that only men with white hair want to be younger!
And then to call all this sweepingly mere "Look and Feel" is like calling everything below Madhya Pradesh - Madraasi and everything above - Punjabi