The Small Town Soul and timelessness of Brand ideas

Often there is quite a song and dance about the impact of differentiated brand communication. Even though it is more than clear that a lot of advertising suffers from sameness in its laboured desire to look different.
A close observation will reveal that the appearance of advertising is like the appearance of people really. All young men studying in colleges in the metro cities tend to go to beauty parlours, which for them are called by male names. The word ‘unisex’ had to be invented to rationalise this societal code and to place all men and women within the same rental of real estate. And out they come, (the men) with ‘different’ hairstyles called ‘hairdos’ (a new name had to be invented for this). But closer scrutiny reveals that each of them emerges from the same saloon and parlour looking much the same! But that’s not true of old timers who look different than the youngsters. But then they look like each other.
Advertising is no different. A bunch of ads look quite the same, though different from another bunch of ads, which among themselves look the same! And like changing hairstyles they change with time. Who says advertising is immune to fashion? But then, when set within the same period they look the same, in their demanding desire to look delightfully different.
If a creative director of an advertising agency has a set of beliefs set in a time context, loosely referred to as ‘fashion’, then so does the client. So when thoughts are vastly different, the client prevails. But when the beliefs are common, they agree on an advertising idea, which suffers from the similarity, since another client and his / her agency must have agreed on the same one. We tend to agree on the safe ones that ride today’s trend.
Now that sounds confusing. Simply because it is!
So let’s easen the load on our mind with the help of examples:
In today’s day and age, we find the television replete with a full bunch of ads purporting enlightened differentiation, while being set in the same setting of a hospital ward for example, with a father nearly screaming “It’s a girl!” I haven’t seen a father do that though. We may want him to but he doesn’t, at least not in the manner of Columbus discovering America.
Now that ubiquitous cute dog has become such an acceptable idea, that it is almost spawned of as a full creative route. Notice how you may well have a neighbour who tearfully adopts what was earlier called a ‘street dog’ or ‘pariah’ with much fanfare, and feed it on the road with no responsibility for it vaccination or any concern for its training. So the dog now feeds ads and ads feed dogs, while people develop new phraseology to exclaim every other day about every other dog - “Choooo Chweeet!” Not that there is a problem in being a dog lover, but it’s the recency of the fashion that is noteworthy.
Now it is a formula - when in doubt, put a dog in the film. If not, then show a child. To pep up matters further show a child with a dog. Still not happy, tell the agency to play some music and show some fading romanticism. The brief here is simple - “Give us something different”. The result is the same!
Print advertising suffers the same malady.
Why must all Swiss watch ads show only the watch or a celebrity and nothing else?
Why must all airline ads show a plane in flight, when the experience of the flight is actually inside and when the plane looks the same from outside?
And when set inside, why must they only show food? Especially since their food is almost always stale (another reason why we prefer the liquor!)
But then there are brands that try to root themselves in a thought that germinates from a need to seek timeless appeal - like the Absolut Vodka ads where the space is filled by only the bottle in a world of liquor where every other brand tries hard to show a celebration or premiumness.
Sure McDonalds shows children, but from the viewpoint of a child and not from the viewpoint of an adult or adult’s notion of cute children and / or childhood.
Take the Jaguar advertising which actually goes so far as to feed the product and vice versa. How else would one explain, how every boy lusts for a Jaguar as it passes by, and not for any other car. As for its advertising, it plays to the boy in every man.
Remember how when we go to a mall and watch someone whacking the ball into the cricket nets, a private smile ceases the moment and makes us inform whosoever is near us - ‘I used be quite good at this’ or some such thing. Whatever the man may be today, there is timeless appeal in his boyhood.
Lets look within ourselves now. And we will discover when we shed our metro make-up that suddenly we are not in a hurry. That we love to talk, the moment we reach home after a long day in a ‘metro’ office. Now let’s trace it back further. Why do we love to talk? Or better still who loves to talk? Well, the person who lives in a small town. Conversations without an agenda, not driven by the motivation to profit at the end of it are some elements of the small town conversation. Its the small things that one talks about. It has an element of banter; it is a version of aimlessness. It is accompanied by a smile. It is needlessly long. It evokes and delivers open laughter, that is not of the practiced kind. Nothing is rehearsed. It is real and authentic, not metallic, hurried or synthetic. Its like cotton, not terricot; wood, not glass; matte, not gloss; soap, not perfume.
Its not like a male beauty parlour called by another name. It is timeless, because it is set outside the influence of fashion. It resonates with our origins, not our projected selves, but our real selves. After all, wherever we may now be and wherever we may choose to head, we all hail from some small town or the other. So even through our mascara eyes, or through our Versace ‘shades’, when we see a sight that reminds us of home, we trust it because it come from home.
That’s because, between origin and destination, while it is fashionable for advertising to choose the latter, but that need not be the case.
So anyone for haircut and champi over the weekend?