Arvind Mohan: "Logic is a planner’s biggest enemy"

A free-wheeling chat with Arvind Mohan on brands, their languages and planning as a function

Arvind Mohan, has recently been appointed to the Global Planning Board of the Young & Rubicam (Y&R) network – a new setup that will harness the expertise of 12 leaders (including him) and act as a think tank for all Y&R companies in various markets. Besides he has also been elevated at group chief strategy officer, Rediffussion – Y&R, India. For a lot of creative guys out there, that may sound a bit boring. But Mohan, who was “fascinated” with the strategic planning bit of advertising while he was pursuing a management course at IMT Ghaziabad, conveys the excitement as he passionately shares nuggets of insights into the world of branding and planning – and their amazing interplay.

Excerpts from a free-wheeling chat:

On what planning means to him:

Planning is about taking things and giving them meaning. We do not produce ads or write scripts or make layouts. Just by thinking about things without physically altering them, we are expected to change things, re-frame, recast and alter people’s perception. It’s a way to study and harness the forces of the world and how things exist. Whatever we do – be it brand building, planning, marketing – the effort we put in is minimum compared to the larger energies that exist in the world. Unless you leverage those forces, you can never usher in change. It is petty arrogance to think that I’ll ask a bunch of people to wear condoms and they will start wearing them!

On brand personality:

Today if a brand doesn’t have a powerful point of view, an idea, if it doesn’t make the world a little more beautiful or elevate a person from his simple existence, then it doesn’t get noticed. Planning is now giving brands their ideologies. Look at some of the most interesting brands in the last 20 years: you will find common traits like ‘belief’, ‘strong personal agenda’…and you find individuals who had belief in these brands. We talk about environmental pollution...to me the biggest form of pollution is bad advertising.

On understanding the language of brands:

If you take the system of various iconic agencies of the world you will find that there is a BBH way of advertising or an Ogilvy way of advertising. Why should brands be built in some way one advertising legend thought of them to be? Fundamentally, every brand should have its own voice and natural language. For example, a Nike or a Coca-Cola speaks in one way, one language, one style of words. That means the God cannot be creativity, or the consumer or whatever is in fashion. The God should be the brand. For this, there needs to be a fair amount of time devoted to the brand. Consider the language of advertising in soft drinks. Fanta is orange – which is flat, bright, child-like; colas are dark, virile, phallic, masculine, full of throbbing energy, adolescent energy. Each drink reflects a life stage. Childish nature of the orange, adolescence of the cola and then you become mature and clear and lime steps in. The power of lime is that it can break structure and cut through things. The clear lime category is therefore about busting all fantasies, trusting your instincts, dikhawe pe mat jao…it’s a bullshit-buster, reality check, a sense of self – that is its natural language.

On the source of brand power:

Every brand sells its own truth as a natural truth. Take Dettol, for example. Most understand it as a way of fighting germs. Modern scientific language like 99.99% germ-free won’t qualify for an understanding of the brand. One has to understand the semiotics of fire. Dettol is a purifying fire coupled with the burn and the bite and the sting. To the Indian consumer, Dettol is like a purifier. The most powerful brands are anchored in a ‘source’. They draw their energy, their mythology, their origin from that source. Like Airtel draws it from voice. It is a powerful brand in India because our country is an oral or a speaking society. We think back to the village gatherings under the banyan tree, where people got together to talk. (The premise goes that) Sight divides and sound unites. ¬¬Sound is alive: it connects and makes you reach out. Vodafone (on the contrary) doesn’t have that voice element in its advertising. When the printed word was invented the oral culture was lost. But technology is now bringing back that orality as a secondary orality. All the blogs and the mobile networks and the internet are reconnecting us back to very primary face-to-face interactions. To understand Airtel, one has to understand all these things. This is where planning has to push itself much harder. Today, it has become defined and limited as some kind of a consumer insight or some kind of a reductionist analysis. It is not harnessing the forces or vitality of things.

On how planning has changed as a function:

For planning to be at the centre of the company there have to be some yardsticks. Too much of planning is built on knowledge management. The trick to be a good planner lies in two things. You have to be very eclectic in your reading and resources. A typical project can involve in-depth work, reading and consumer research to building on your own experiences and collaborating with a couple of experts. One has to mix and match different point of views and theories and harness them in a meaningful way. Right from doing formal interviews, having your own online presence through youth forums, to doing fairly academic work, ethnographic work, research work, theoretical work, working with academics…one has to consider various sources of information, because each of them has a different entrance into the same reality. Boring, sterile people cannot think radically. People who have genuine interest in life tend to be good planners rather than those who see it as a technical job and look for analysis and answers. However, the flip side is planners getting more inclined to the business side and becoming business planners rather than creative planners. They are too much into efficacy, results and numbers, whereas there is a hell of a lot of romance in this function and thinking in general. Planning is becoming left-brained. Logic is the biggest enemy for a planner. They are becoming sense-making machines.