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Mudra officially launches DDB SignBank in India
This tool aggregates small signs of social change to predict cultural and behavioural shifts while assessing both the global and local impact of these societal swings
Mudra has launched DDB SignBank, a new social mapping and forecasting tool in India. This initiative will be headed by Ashish Mishra, vice-president, strategic planning, Mudra, Mumbai.
Madhukar Kamath, CEO and managing director, Mudra, says, “We initiated this programme about a year and a half ago, but we didn’t go public with it. There is a huge stock of signs that we have gathered for our database over this period of time. One must also realise that SignBank is not a ‘plug and play’ tool. It requires a great deal of homework and time.”
SignBank was rolled out globally in 2003 under the leadership of Eva Steensing in Copenhagen. Today, globally, DDB Signbank operates out of 52 offices. The tool collects and analyses numerous signs within a sociological framework to determine why a change is occurring and where it is heading.
Mishra elucidates, “This tool focuses on what people do and not on what they say or want to do. It also monitors people’s daily actions as opposed to only when they are acting as consumers. This is mainly because consumption or buying behaviour takes only 3 per cent of the average person’s day.”
As an introductory process, DDB SignBank will roll out from eight branches of Mudra. Since the tool has been functioning silently for the last one and a half years in India, it has gathered some interesting trends. These are mainly about the Indian masses and the trends include signs such as the marriages and relationships of tomorrow, the mad rush to groom kids to be the dream adults that their parents couldn’t be, the bright career girls who throw it all away to become homemakers, retreat living with professional breaks becoming the new lifestyle, floating companies becoming popular as like-minded individuals form small teams to achieve entrepreneurial goals, single women rearing families, etc.
Mishra signs off, “This tool has definitely helped us craft communications for many of our clients. The most recent such communication was the MTDC television commercial traversing around the theme, ‘Slow Down’. However, SignBank is just a treasury of knowledge which we will use as a reference point. Also, it is not that every commercial will be created out of SignBank ideas. The usage will vary from project to project.”
© 2006 agencyfaqs!