Keep off the Sridevi | Partha Sinha at SIMClairvoyance 2011

Partha Sinha, the Managing Partner of BBH – India began his session by humanizing the subject and emphasizing that consumers are people. He reiterated David Ogilvy’s mantra, “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.” With tales of two brands, Air India and Vaseline, where on one hand the Maharaja’s eyes remained closed, whereas the grease found its way all around. These stark differences demonstrate the nature of brands across ages where they went from being inward looking, unreal and arrogant earlier to getting human, connected and keen today. 

The underlying basis of Mr Partha Sinha’s engaging session was ‘Consumer attention is the most scarce resource today!’ He says that “Contrary to popular belief no one knows how many shampoo brands are getting launched, how the airflow system ion a fridge works or whether the neighbourhood mutual fund has a AAA rating or not.”

He enlisted the three main malaises of the advertising industry today in a satire of syndromes – the Wind Tunnel Syndrome, the Over-Simplification Syndrome and the Sridevi Syndrome. When explaining each of these prevalent patterns he had the entire audience in splits. He insisted that we need to get out of the wind tunnel that advertisers are trapped in to avoid the deadly forces of similarities, codes and clichés. He attacked over-simplification under the veneer of a Seinfeld video urging us to appreciate the intelligence of the audience. The humour element peaked while Mr. Partha spoke to us about the Sridevi Syndrome. Touching upon ad to content ratio and the increasing number of scroll bars on news channels he established that we’re driving consumers away from the content. He emphasized that the worst enemy for engagement is an animal called ‘innovation’ and in fact today, ‘Less is more!’

Completing the loop of consumer connect he advocated smart co-branding and seamless media integration.  He highlighted the importance of influencers and peer reviews in relation with brand connect and ended with a tweet that he’d once read and thought embodied the essence of what brands should remember - “I tell my friends about your brand not because I like your brand but because I like my friends.”

(inputs from Sneha Padmanabhan, MBA Batch 2013)