Festivals and Branding Mantra!

Jo tumko ho pasand wohi baat karenge… Tum din ko agar raat kaho, raat kahenge!

Today was Akshaya Tritiya, also known as Akha Teej - the third lunar day of Shukla paksha of Vaishakha month. The birth of Lord Parshuram the sixth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, is also celebrated on this day, it is also the day when Veda Vyas began to write the Mahabharata.

But that is the puranic significance. There is more to it than that for most. The cluttered newspapers with advertisements and the clogged roads in the main junctions tell a different story!

Over the past two decades there has been a fleeting change in the celebrations of Hindu festivals. Not without a reason, there is a concerted effort to rebrand the way festivals are celebrated.

Celebration – is the key word, not observation, and a celebration that is only getting extravagant and we have too many occasions to celebrate.

I remember the time when a Rakshabandhan meant besan ka laddu or motichur ka laddu from the ubiquitous Balaji or Bajrang Sweet House. It wasn’t long before Chocolates, yes branded for the occasion, made itself synonymous with the celebration of brother-sister relationship. Cadbury’s did revolutionize the branding and packing of the simple occasion.

During my days in college, we didn’t have the Shoppers’ Stop or Lifestyle or their kind of Valentine’s Day. The revolutionising of ‘expression of love’ only began after the greeting cards’ majors Archie’s and Hallmark started making it quite a wonderful reason to up their sales. They soon added more days to the Calendar. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Woman’s Day and Friendship Day cards were just taking up as much space as the Birthdays and Wedding Day cards or more.

While cards could only confine themselves to the ‘greeting’ part of the occasions, the ‘celebration’ part of the business was left for the branding gurus to think over creatively. Yes, they did quite a fabulous job in re-branding the entire gamut of greeting into celebrations. Around the time the Indian Economy started looking up in the mid 1990s, the purchase power too increased multi-fold. “Extravagance” crept in.

While the western concept ‘special days’ started getting saturated, westernization of traditional Indian occasions and festivals became the norm, initially with Rakshabandhan. Soon Diwali, Dasara, and even Karwa Chauth got branded with special packages.

So, coming back to today – Akshaya Tritiya, an auspicious day for new beginnings, also regarded as a Sarve Siddha Muhurat. The Sun and Moon are believed to be at their extreme brightness on this day, so also the planet Venus, at its exaltation this month. This auspicious occasion has been quite phenomenally milked by the Gold sellers associations over the past decade and half.

Things changed drastically with the gullible Indian masses falling for what began as “buy at least a gram of gold today” to “invest in gold, jewellery, diamonds and more today”. Touted as a day that would bring lots of good augury for ‘owning new gold’ on this day, people flocked almost all the jewellery “malls”, yes that’s what they are these days. They put traffic sense to the winds and parked almost in the middle of the roads across the main junctions. The summer heat was no way a deterrent for the “good luck’ hunting folks.

What amused me most were the newspapers of the day – Front page jackets with leading jewelers advertising in full throttle. Endless advertisements with colourful offers all across the papers, and ironically a huge front page banner news item that said – Cash crunch hits common man hard – ATMs go dry – people quite literally starving, followed up by editorials and lead articles on how the government has made the citizens’ life woeful. They are unable to afford to buy basic necessities, but lined up well with their plastic money for the glittering yellow metal

It was a different story in the end – The marketers and the branding gurus ensured that the ‘auspicious occasion’ surely brought much cheer, good luck and loads of wealth to their "clients". The commercial peddlers of our traditional festivals are laughing all the way to the bank, while the mere mortals are clutching gold jewellery in one hand and Debit Cards in another, looking out for the elusive ATM that can dish out money.

Did I hear someone singing... Jo tumko ho pasand wohi baat karenge… Tum din ko agar raat kaho, raat kahenge!

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Pics: Internet