Festivals and traditions can be
looked upon as products/concepts which can be marketed. In fact this category
has seen rapid penetration and adoption across cultures and geographies. If we look at the Indian consumer alone, the
last few years have seen widespread adoption of a number of festivals/
traditions - those which originated outside India as well as those which
originated within India but remained confined to a particular region/religion
for a long time.
Let’s start with the simple ones
first. The celebration of various days
dedicated to different members of the family aka Fathers Day, Mothers Day,
Daughters Day and so on, were really took flight as a result of marketing
efforts initially spearheaded by greeting card companies to multiply
consumption occasions for their products. Gradually it expanded from merely
wishing your loved ones, to gifting them suitable tokens of your love and
affection, enthusiastically encouraged by a host of marketers offering their
products and services at a special discount for the special occasion.
Next, let’s look at the more
traditional festivals. Each region in India has their own traditions and
festivals and though all of us studied about these in school, we continued
observing our own region/ religion’s traditions and festivals in our homes. At
best one would wish a friend or neighbour on their festivals or partake the
sweets they sent across. However, today these lines between different traditions
are getting blurred, at least in the bigger cities. Non Christian households also setting up
Christmas trees at home, and the concept of Santa giving gifts to children is
very popular. Many children of non-Hindu families also enjoy Diwali by bursting
crackers. The pre-wedding sangeet ceremony of north India has found its way to
most households and is now a must have in the wedding functions list in all
parts of India including the more traditionally conservative south. The Navaratri
celebrations with Dandiya which were earlier confined to the Gujarati Diaspora are
now a reverberating social phenomenon all across India.
The festivals highlighted above
are those we were already familiar with and have grown up watching either in
our neighbourhoods or in Bollywood movies. But even traditions like Halloween
which were not much known in India till very recently, and in fact have very
little in common with our culture, have seen a rapid acceptance and marketers
have taken to Halloween themed events with a gusto!
If we analyze the adoption of
festivals, we will find a few common threads- most of these festivals have lent
themselves easily to commercialization, with simple homemade traditions being
replaced by glitzy packaged offerings which make the celebrations easier to
arrange with added fun and easy scalability. Almost all the festivals which
have seen rapid penetration or adoption have one or more elements of fun,
music, dance, party and gifting. These are occasions which give us a legitimate
reason to enjoy and indulge a little bit. Who doesn’t like to party with
friends, and who doesn’t like receiving gifts?
So as soon as the traditional Punjabi ladies
sangeet, where the women of the house sat and sang folk songs upgraded to its
new millennial version, where it is not
confined only to women and has little to do with traditional folk numbers, it
gained popularity because it offered the same fun as a dance party. In fact
today the sangeet function IS a big dance party, where you get to dress in your
traditional best, dance to the latest numbers with the blessings of the elders
and enjoy the added fun of parents, unclejis and auntyjis all joining in, in
gay abandon. As it evolved, marketing opportunities and expenses associated
with the sangeet ceremony, increased. So hiring a DJ, booking a dance floor,
themed decorations, choreographers for the family members are the minimum
everyone does and the more well to do page 3 varieties have the added element
of celebrity performance thrown in. While in itself the sangeet ceremony has
enough to make it popular, when aided by large scale attractive renditions by
Karan Johar and Sooraj Bharjatiya, it is quick to spread its mass appeal. Once
the spark is there many marketers of products and services like choreographers,
event planners, dress designers and the like, help fan the fire by adding layers
to the core product benefit making it an augmented experience.
So it is with Christmas- a chance
to party and dress up and open surprise gifts, and Dandiya- all night fun with social
sanction, and Halloween- another excuse to party with a novel theme and an
opportunity to indulge in a bit of fantasy and creativity. Nothing wrong with
these motives after all festivals are meant to be celebrated and provide a much
needed release from the pressures and worries of everyday life. As we say in
marketing theory, marketers don’t create the need but can create demand for a
particular product/service. The underlying need in this case belong mostly to
the category of social needs- the need for love and belonging in relation to
family and friends but as the layers add up these festivals also serve the
esteem needs of being admired and looked upto by others. But a key point to be noted here is that the
festivals which gain popularity and acceptance are the ones which are centred
around the Joie de Vivre. Their key benefits are spreading warmth and good
cheer and the joy of togetherness. Those festivals and traditions which are to
do with self control or abstinence still remain mostly confined to their
respective communities. Christmas is known to almost everyone and now
celebrated to some extent by many but awareness of Lent is very limited across
the diverse communities in India.
Since festivals are individual
and community events, who then markets these festivals? Festivals are not owned
by any company or organization. Even the religious affiliation in these cases,
have not played a role in their expanding popularity. The interesting thing
about the wider adoption is that the festivities and traditions are adopted without
their associated cultural or religious significance. So a celebration of
Christmas by non Christians, is merely a celebration of the Christmas spirit
and has nothing to do with belief in Jesus, and similarity the participation in
Dandiya events is a participation in the celebration without a uniform observance
of religious significance of Navaratri by all. Those who believe, link their
beliefs to the celebrations and those who don’t celebrate simply the spirit of
the festival. So we come back to the question of who then markets these
festivals, who promotes their penetration and adoption? The answer of course is
a multi pronged one. The festival itself is not marketed but products,
services, events and icons associated with the festivals are marketed. These in
turn add to the appeal and visibility of the festival itself and the festival
becomes more popular, the associated activities and scope for commercialization
increases and the cycle reinforces itself. There is no organized effort at promotion
of the festival per se. No marketing communication is done extolling people to
celebrate these festivals, but there is the marketing of related events,
shopping extravaganzas, special dresses and gifts, promotion of consumer goods
on the theme of the festival which
create and enhance a marketing eco system, enhancing visibility and
attractiveness of the festival and helping to increase its adoption across
wider consumer segments.
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