advertising in kerala. prt-1

Did you know that? Kerala is considered to be best product test market in India. That is the reason why many products are launched here before the high decibel nationwide commercial launch. The legend goes that if the product clears in the litmus test in the kerala market, it will succeed any where in india. The critical ‘force’ of Keralites is not entirely useless!.

But finally when commercials are made for a nationwide launch, kerala is not considered an important market worthy of a tv commericial with its regional sensiblities. So they dub the north Indian sensiblity into Malayalam often ends up being not understood in the most literate state.

I am told if there is enough budget, then a single commercial is made of the consolidated southern states mostly taking into consideration the tamil/ telugu/ kannada cultural backdrop. They know that kerala is a totally different cultural consciousness, but it is not considered a worthy enough market to spend precious tv commercial budget on!! We should not be fighting about cultural endangerment posed by globalization when ‘Hindisation’ of Malayalam is happening through advertising and films. I shall talk about fear of the ‘inevitable’ globalization in another post.

The Mumbai advertisers fears are not entirely baseless. When greeted with a commercial the ‘who are you trying to fool’ sense is triggered in the mallu brains.
Since the ad filmmaking community is virtually non-existent in kerala the blame of nuking 2 generation of malayalees trust on advertising falls on the print campaigns. The agencies in kerala have being bombarding the mallu brains with functional advertising with false promises and claims. Image advertising/ branding is non-existent.

Kerala is a word of mouth market. The Malayalam film industry will vouch that claim.

To be continued….