'LOOK & FEEL'

Isn't it difficult to explain the feeling of going to a hill station in childhood.

Wasn't it certainly much more than just the weather?
But why only a hill station. Equally, it was difficult to explain the feeling of driving into Jaisalmer. Because it was much more than that rational something.

Now even photographs flounder in their inability to describe the 'jannat' (which again begs more descriptors) that is Kashmir, or the monument that is Taj, or in fact the soaring reality of the Khajuraho temples that mocks the pretentious photograps of the same.

Now in pictures, Kashmir looks ordinary, the Taj, overated, and Khajuraho, puny - indeed the exact opposite of what they are.

And Language?

Well that too is belaboured. It struggles and strains under its weighty attempt to describe Persons, Places and Things even though this is at the heart of its existence. And Grammar? Well grammer calls these three 'nouns' but that doesn't help and so it adds a category called 'adjectives' which try to ease the attempt at describing.

But now let's allow the argument to settle a bit.

So 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 plunge deeper...

Why does a disproportionate part of the holiday experience in a remote wilderness, constitute the phase involved in getting there?

And 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. Now who hasn't observed the forbidding, threatening glint in the wife's eye, as a De Beers diamond pops out in media. Isn't it is known to cause blindness in alert husbands. Then you have coffee ads and frothy fragrance, which are so intertwined that they seem to have merged into one.

Some brands however, miss out on this very soft part, given their penchant for arranging strategy in linear boxes of cause and effect.

Thus when you see a Subhiksha, it appears to be apologising for its presence. Yet a Domino's confidently surveys the world with its bold masculine fascia. Brands are afterall like people...

That's why a SubWay looks cool and green. And Coke bottles look sprightly and bubbly. While 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 on the real seeking of the teeth and the tongue. That's why one stops and enters the parlour ever so frequently.
And a few slurps into real fruit gets the brand loyalty galloping.

But if you thought it is only about soft products, then think of Dove and you virtually experience cream. And with Liril, despite all the angrezi, the uninhinderd feeling of Nimbu Paani rushes forth and the waterfall, despite advertising claims, is quite incidental. But when you Karen Lunel under a waterfall you pepper the imagination of escapist abandon in the women who watch the ad and the feeling of wanting to be there in the men who watch the ad! With that the ad takes us into fantasy land just as the product also fulfills this vicarious need. Afterall deep immersion is always a private seeking and never a public clamed rationale. That's why research makes an ass of itself ever so often when it imagines it can decode real feelings.
So 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! Now think of some of those research presentations. Aren't they arranged in sequential boxes of cause and effect! We must be machines if we behaved like that. Even sunsigns say there are 12 types of people! But at least that doesn't not pretend to not come from an esoteric place.

And then to call all this sweepingly mere "Look and Feel" is like calling everything below Madhya Pradesh - Madraasi and everything above - Punjabi.
have you noticed how in organisations sometimes Marketing is seen to be about 'Look and Feel'. Of course it is, but then 'Look and Feel' is more than just about look and feel!

Ta ta till the next round of catharsis!