Saturday, October 30, 2004
The Search for Love: A Marketer’s Perspective (Part 1 of II)
As a marketer, I’m always fascinated by the promotional aspect of things. My search for love and the perfect partner gets me thinking about the anthropological implications of self-promotion, marketing, and truth in advertising. It also allows me to search through my own cultural biases, and explore how being Indian—a core part of my identity—has affected my perceptions. In thinking through these themes, I’ve realized that some of the hardest marketing in the world happens at that individual level—when emotions are heightended to the point where brand perception—in this case, of you—literally depends on every action. Finally, I relate all this back to brand marketing—and how corporations can benefit from the lessons that Internet dating within an ecosystem has taught me.
How it all started
My mother is obsessed about me getting married.
Every other week, she uses my father to email me another picture and contact details of another girl that she thinks might strike a chord with me. If this sounds vaguely familiar, let me throw in a twist: if it wasn’t evident by my name, I’m Indian. No, not that kind. I’m of the red-dot variety. And having spent the first few years of my life in India, and having traditional Hindu parents means only one thing for a single male who juat entered his thirties: you can’t call home without being bombarded with how worried they are about your future, and who will take care of you, and how important it is to have a partner, and that before they die, just once, they’d like to see you settled.
It apparently doesn’t matter that I have spent the last 10 years fending for myself, and that I have turned into a relatively decent cook, or that I keep a neat and beautiful home. It doesn’t matter that I subscribe to a dozen catalogs, pay my bills, and throw dinner parties. I am, according to my creators, incomplete. Of course, were I to date someone who wasn’t Indian, they tend to ignore me at first, and then finally give in. Now that I’m single again, the “Indian please” situation has reared its head, and I’ve been considering it.
See, we’re an interesting sub-culture in the US, us Indians. Take anyone of Indian origin in their late twenties to early thirties, and chances are, if you put us in a room together, we’ll end up talking about how similar our parents are. There’s a connection that immediately comes to play that’s intangible—we, of Western up-bringing, liberal thoughts, and modern-day restraint immediately launch into a level of intimacy that would be very uncomfortable in any other situation. We trade stories about growing up, talk about marriage, meet parents, discuss past relationships and potential lives together in the time it would take an American couple to attend their first concert together. Well, there’s mild hyperbole in that statement, but the pace at which Indian-to-Indian relationships progress would stop a wild boar in its tracks.
What’s this have to do with Marketing?
Since I tend to see marketing in everything, I decided recently to explore this whole sub-culture, and some applications that have now become part of my daily life, as a result of it. Before we do this, though, I have some definitions for you.
- Desi: Someone of Indian origin.
- ABCD: Acronym used to describe a second-generation Desi. Someone whose parents migrated to the US, but was born and brought up completely in North America. This is not a very popular label since it originally expanded into American Born Confused Desi, but people like my friend Navdeep Kathuria are trying to change that, publishing magazines such as ABCD Lady.
- FOB: Term used to describe a young Desi who was born and brought up in India, but came to the US recently to attend college, university, or for a job. Term expands to Fresh off the Boat. Typically, FOBs are enamored by ABCDs, but ABCDs seldom want anything to do with FOBs, unless the FOBs grew up in a very cosmpolitan setting like Bombay or Bangalore.
- Hybrind: Term used to describe someone who spent the first part of their life in India, but primarily grew up in the US. Typically multi-lingual, and though Americanized, still have strong Indian roots. (Full disclosure: I’m one of these.)
Any good marketing case study starts with relevant background information. See, up until about a year ago, I had not even considered dating someone specifically Indian. Arriving in the US in the very early 90s, I was enamored by the possibility of living out my only links to teenage American culture: Archie comics, and John Hughes movies from the 80s. What this meant was that I was convinced that the only life worth living was one where the girls looked like Molly Ringwald, guys found it OK to date multiple girls (preferably with competing hair colors), and that high school was the well from which all relationships sprung. I had effectively, as a result of growing up looking at what I considered greener pastures, given little though to my core identity—the characteristics that made me who I am, and defined how I’d react to certain stimuli. There is an interesting parallel to this in corporate business—one where companies that are truly remarkable are ones that have found that core identity, and more importantly, comfort in the focus that it provides. More on that later.
Anyway, as a teenager let loose in America whose current Americanization was academic and fantastic at best, I quickly lost my accent, went through a plethora of girlfriends, and immersed myself in popular culture that defined the moment. Which was a blessing in disguise, because it is that fascination with trends that turned me into a marketer. But it also exposed, in retrospect, an interesting value that we all share as individuals, and one that marketers use to their benefit: we’re all trying to belong to something at every point in our lives. Loyalty and retention marketing have exploited this for ages—all the way from fight clubs in the early centuries, to motorcycle rallies, to cheerleaders, to chess clubs, to Internet-enabled forums like Yahoo! Groups. Ironically, the rejection of such gathering and assimilation is in itself, an indication and example of such behavior. Marketing segmentation and targeting, therefore, aren’t new concepts. We’ve been doing it as individuals and as society for centuries.
The role of Cultural Dynamics
Anyway, as an FOB on his way to becoming a Hybrind, I found the dynamics between my Indian counterparts and I to be interesting. We always noticed each other, and if we fell into the relatively same age group, there was an instant categorization that happened in parallel minds: the continuum was Americanization, and the general pecking order was FOB to the West, and ABCD to the East. Go East Young Man, was the order of the day. Social acceptance among young Indians is a complex and interesting phenomenon—the more you were perceived to be westerly on the continuum, the less likely you were to be talked to by anyone in eastern coordinates. The graduation of a young Indian was determined by his or her gradual steps towards blending in with ABCDs.
Like in all anthropoligical ecosystems, it is important to note that there are colonies formed that have nothing to do with moving along this continuum, or having to do with social acceptance. There are groups of individuals who are fine with their Indianness, who get togther with other like people, fraternize, and create subsystems that thrive and grow roots, almost creating time capsules. They preserve culture they way they know it—V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness talks about this specific behavior in painstaking and excellent detail. As marketers, this is where the context of frameworks like Equitec’s Consumer Dynamics comes in. Where people look alike demographically and psychographically, and may even belong to the same PRIZM clusters, but have very different attitudes, motivations, and propensities.
Do you have to make dating so academic?
Yes I do. Know why? Because I’m no hunk. There are some products that look better than others. There are restaurants that look great, but have terrible food. As a marketer, I have to use what I know in order to find my perfect mate. I’m that little hole in the wall place that your friend keeps asking you to try, but you never do, and one day, when you’re walking by, tired and defeated after a bad day at work you decide to step into and can’t believe you haven’t stopped here all along. What I needed was some good marketing. I needed insight into the way mates were sought, and I needed to present a compelling value proposition to satisfy the progenitors of that insight.
Besides, if you haven’t noticed by now, everything can be a marketing experiment to me.
This is when I decided that the best thing I could do, and make supremely measurable, was market myself on various dating sites online geared towards people of Indian descent. You’d be surprised at how many there are—Indian Dating, Mera Pyar, Indian Matrimonial Network, and the incredibly successful Shaadi.com.
Research: Know your target
I knew enough about the Indian woman to make casual conversation and go on a few dates. But given my sense of displacement from a few years ago, and given the varying cultural ecosystem that we inhabited, I needed to really understand what made them tick; and so, I gathered some of my female Indian acquaintances together for a catered, paid focus group. I went through four long-form interviews where I had them browse several of these sites, and moderated an eight-person panel, trying to get insight into what interested them about Indian men. Eventually, I had my panel turn their attention on me, the person. I had them critique my look, give me feedback on speaking style, and refer back to past dates or experiences they had with me. Armed with all of this data, I was now ready to move onto the next stage of my research.
Research: Know your competition
One woman on Shaadi.com that has a profile with a picture gets an average of 20 contact requests a day. One woman with an exceptionally good photograph on shaadi.com gets an average of 100 contacts a day, if she has not set any ‘contact filters’—checks which only allow men with certail profile characteristics to contact her. With 100 contacts a day, and no sense of what these guys actually said , wrote or did, I was faced with a dilemma. The laws of positioning say that your product’s place in someone’s mind is always in relation to something else—another product, an ideology, even a concept. But with no data on my competitor’s behavior in a crowded market, I had no sense of where to begin my positioning exercise.
And so, I decided to become a woman.
With the permission of a very beautiful, married friend of mine, I created a new profile for a woman that mirrored everything that I was looking for, and filled the gallery with pictures of my friend. I wrote a description for her that I would be attracted to, gave her all the selection criteria that I would want my partner to have, and even named her—Pooja.
My goal in this exercise was to understand how other men approached Pooja. What they said, what seemed like a turn off, and what the real level of noise was going to be.
In Part 2, I’ll detail the results of my research, and what I did with the insights that came from them.