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Universal Advertising

So, which shall it be for the Indian market ---- universally watchable or culture-specific ads?

First, the extremes. Proponents of universal advertising are dedicated to a simple proposition: people are people, everywhere on Earth, and it makes economic sense to target them as such. Believers of market-specific advertising, however, have something else to say: if it's common sense to speak to a person in a language he or she understands, it's also common sense to advertise in a manner that's best understood.

As globalization gets going (or Americanization or Coca-Colonization or whatever else you want to call it), expect to hear lots of growling and grunting over the divide.

A pragmatic approach, perhaps, would be to treat the first argument, the universal one, as the idealized goal. After all, that's the very idea of a global brand, an entity atop a hill --- for all to see --- representing a consistent set of values that appeals to everybody in the world. Saying different things to different people is to 'colour them', and that's not a nice thing for a good global brand with a universally-defined target audience to be doing.

The way the world is, however, makes all that sound rather too lofty to help the business bottomline. So even if the brand is consistent in its theoretical formulation (its values, mainly), it finds the need to vary its expression as per actual requirements from market to market --- and this could mean a lot more than a mere translation of the literal message. A brand, let's not forget, must do what it takes to establish its relationship with the consumer, and that could mean reaching out in a manner the brand has never done before.

In actual operating terms, that means granting freedom to the local business unit (and advertising agency) to play the game 'locally'.

As it turns out, localization works. In fact, in markets with a strong sense of exceptionalism (as India is), it works wonders. The conclusion is inescapable: if the objective is to maximize sales, local advertising is the way to go.

So that settles it, then, doesn't it?

Not exactly. While localization is all very good, the local unit of a global brand cannot afford to lose sight of the vision of eventual convergence (this goes both ways, by the way, so America should end up equally 'Coca-Colonized', from a global perspective).

In any case, the important thing is to ensure that whatever is being conveyed in the local idiom is truly universal in spirit, as multicultural observers with sufficiently deep sensors can testify. India, no need to say, has much in its domestic culture that could reasonably meet the test. To many, that's self-evident. For that reason alone, Indian advertising --- the rare kind that's good --- should be of global interest. If all eyes are on Coca-Cola's agency, McCann Erickson, don't be surprised.

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