19th Nov 2013, The Financial Express - Brand Wagon
As you drive around any metro or even a small town in India,
you see mushrooming buildings of steel and
glass framing an emerging
skyline. These buildings are modern, cookie cutter boxes, with tons of
glass and steel and are clones of any such edifices in the world—be it
Dubai, London, Singapore or
New York.
Anyone who knows India knows of the dust and dirt on the streets.
In that scenario, glass? The cleaning systems are rudimentary—and
square feet after square feet of glass is difficult to keep clean.
The
glass surfaces everywhere have begun to collect visible amounts of dust
and dirt—and each building spends enormous resources on fighting this
battle. And that is just the problem with some of the functional
aspects.
The inspirations for architecture in India could have been
many—from digging into the rich tapestry of architecture and design
history of India, to the understanding of local materials that are both
environment friendly and cost efficient, to an inquiry into Indian
public spaces and the collective expressions in those. The starting
points of inspiration are many.
India is a land of transposed design. Indeed, I believe this to
be a theory true for most developing nations.
Progress means picking up
designs from the developed nations of this world and super-imposing them
on the developing nations—with little thought or attention to local
contexts.
Why does this happen? Why has the power of design been
consistently overlooked by developing nations in everything—from
airports to large hydel dams, from consumer products to malls, from
clothing to automobiles? There are no more than a handful of local
insights or solutions.
In a country that is hot and humid— like India is, men’s collars
turn black and grimy every day, detergents sell proverbial tons thanks
to their ability to clean collars and yet in the shirt wearing history
of modern India, there is no record of any innovation on the collar. It
is not that this is a nation of people who lack the intellectual
capital. Far from it. Nor a nation that does not show an entrepreneurial
orientation to adopt
new ideas.
Again, far from it. Then why is design not part of the Indian consideration?
The answer lies in history. In 1657, an Elizabethan era of
scientific inquiry, when the western world was inventing the pendulum
clock and understanding the principles of probability—Aurangzeb, a
particularly ruthless and regressive Mughal emperor was ascending the
throne of India.
By 1757, when the spinning jenny was heralding the industrial
revolution, changing the way people lived and worked and giving the
first taste to capitalists of the profits to be enjoyed through
industrial design, the seeds of belief in the power of design were sown.
When the first cars and the Macadamization of roads were defining a new
way of life, India fought and lost its first battle of independence,
the Battle of Plassey, to the
East India Company, which quickly
established the latter’s rule. The ammunition and ships they brought
with them helped them establish a stronghold in the country. And the
systematic plunder of India’s natural resources and the decimation of
local enterprise began as even the most basic commodities such as salt
and sugar began to be imported. This was also an era when imported
fabrics from Manchester took over the local markets and local weavers
and craftsmen began losing their livelihoods. This then, is the
beginning of a super-imposition of external sensibilities and aesthetics
on the local population. Local enterprise shriveled and toeing an
imperialist line was mandatory for economic profit. The power of design
was completely absent.
In another 100 years, by 1857, the zipper, the safety pin, the
fax machine, fibre optics (yes, 1857!) and hydrogen fuel cells were all
invented, while India fought and lost the second battle of
independence—also called the Sepoy Mutiny depending on which side of the
Himalayas you come from. It was importing everything finished and
designed and was exporting everything raw and unprocessed. Every bit of
value addition was done outside the country—and there was never an
economic benefit of design that was demonstrated to the local
population. Everything indigenous was slowly lost.
A decade after India gained independence, in 1957, India was trying tocatch up with the world. And it transposed development into
India. The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad— was modeled after
Harvard Business School. The architect—Louis Kahn— designed what was
perhaps his finest work, but with no integration of the Indian societal
context in design. The management education in India needed to
understand the social context of sons inheriting family businesses and
needed to enable them rather than
create managers for multinationals
companies selling soaps and detergents and a well-segmented demographic.
The Indian Institute of Technology was modeled after MIT, medical
schools were set up and all indigenous forms of knowledge in medicine
and sciences, to say nothing of the arts and crafts, were fading. The
world had already tasted space travel, nuclear energy and computers and
India was in a hurry to stay abreast with the world.
The same was true in case of large infrastructure projects such
as hydel projects or big engineering projects. There was never a search
or a debate about local micro solutions that maintained the local
ecological balance and became a source of livelihood rather than
uprooting the local population.
In this historically challenged world of transposed development,
the Indian entrepreneur never learnt the fruits of design thinking and
manifestation. The economic power of a new idea, service or product that
met the local needs was generally not experienced. The luggage that
needed to become a seat at the crowded railway station never got made.
This dependence on transposed thought extends to the word of
branding as well. Not only is the product design cut and pasted outside
the context, so is the brand, its positioning and its packaging.
Local studies in semiotics and mining of deep cultural insights
to understand implications on design and brand creation is often not
practiced in category after category.
When
Amul decides to propagate the much vilified ghee, by saying
one spoon a day is good for you or Cadbury identifies a place for
chocolate as a mithai equivalent—the brands see a sudden explosion in
the market place. It is my belief that a deep cultural connection is
necessary for a successful
brand and product design to exploit the market potential to its fullest.
Alpana Parida is president of
DY Works (erstwhile DMA Branding). The views expressed here are her own.
A team of students from the Harvard Business School will be working closely with DY Works and Reliance Retail India in January to understand cultural trends and consumer triggers in the Indian context. The experience is part of a required first-year course at Harvard Business School called FIELD, which stands for Field Immersion Experience for Leadership Development. DY Works is one of 156 FIELD Global Partners spanning 13 countries around the world. Together they will host more than 930 students in all.
“We are looking forward to this engagement. As a company that bases its work on culture and semiotic enquiry, this experience falls seamlessly into our vision of research”, said Alpana Parida, President DY Works. “We are pleased to be working with Harvard Business School to provide students with a real-world learning experience in Mumbai, India. We feel certain that the students will gather insights here that they would never be able to glean from a classroom discussion alone.”
