Even at the ripe old age of 75 amongst the many things I don’t understand is the idea of brands. Until the 1960s a brand simply meant the maker of the product. Atlas Cycles. Sunlight Soap. Usha Sewing Machine. And so on. These were just names of products, nothing more. Then in the 1970s a new significance was attributed to the term brand. Indeed, from that sprang a new verb, branding. This was the era when what’s called marketing, as distinct from selling, became all the rage. You weren’t just a selling agent. You became a marketing executive. Marketing basically meant creating an aura around a product by ‘branding’ it. Shoes and soaps were no longer merely sold. They were marketed via advertisements that tried to convince you about non- existent virtues of the product.
With my background in economics, I can see why brands and branding are an important form of communication about the quality of a product in highly competitive markets where product differentiation is absolutely minimal. Even a useless product can be sold as the one magical thing that you need in life. But what I don’t understand is why it is necessary to brand everything under the sun. Take gutka and luggage. Why do the makers of these things spend so much money on marketing them? Gutka and cigarettes are known to be harmful, yet their makers insist on marketing campaigns that emphasise lifestyles. But how damaging yourself can be consistent with a superior lifestyle is beyond me. It’s like saying it’s cooler to shoot yourself with a top-class gun than with a country pistol.
Or take luggage. For heaven’s sake, who cares about the make of your suitcase? After all, on a train it goes under the seat. In a car it goes into the boot. On a plane it goes into the hold. So why all the fuss over branded luggage? Yet people pay ten times as much for a branded suitcase as they would have to for an unbranded one, known derisively as ‘local maal’.
Likewise in the case of alcohol. Nothing annoys me more than all that hype about scotch whiskey. There’s way too much hype about peatiness, smokiness, aging, casks and so on. It’s all a lot of nonsense about added flavour. As someone pointed out in a video, you pay for the bottle and label, not the alcohol. Back in the late 1960s, when I was in the first year of college, there was a science student who one day brought a beaker of pure ethyl alcohol. We mixed it with 12 bottles of Coca Cola in a bucket and left it on the corridor for free consumption. It tasted like any ‘good’ scotch today. I once served an Indian whiskey in a scotch bottle. No one could tell the difference, especially if mixed with soda.
Talking of which, why brand soda? As the Sikh shopkeeper in Amritsar told me once, “Unnee-bee da fark bhi nahin honda, paaji”. When I asked an old friend who had headed a large consumer products firm about this, he asked a counter question: how will you know its quality? How will I know that if it’s branded, I asked? I told him how an unbranded pair of shoes had turned out to be better than a branded one, that too a foreign brand. He refused to believe me. We argued for a while and then as old friends do, ended the discussion by calling each other names, incontinent men branding each other as ignorant fools. The English have a saying for people like us: there’s no fool like an old fool.
Exactly right.