Advertising, marketing, communication, brand building…there was a time when these words were enough for me to live on. And live rather well, I must gratefully add. Of late, though, I’ve been having second thoughts on my staples as they have not been enough to nourish me or my clients.
Without going into the reasons for the marginalization and the irrelevance of my, and perhaps my industry’s approach, I was keenly aware that some fundamental rethinking was required if I had to make any impact at all on the brands and businesses that I was asked to work on from time to time.
I must confess that the alternatives were not clear in my head, except an urgent need for one.
As we sometimes do, Suresh Ramadurai (former managing director of TNS India) and I were parsing thought and time over rasam and rice while we gently found ourselves in the unfamiliar but strangely compelling world of behavioral sciences.
A quick look through wiki convinced us of the validity of our thinking, and suddenly the pennies started dropping like an epileptic one armed bandit.
Was it possible to look at all that we have been doing, all that was asked of us, and all that we wanted to do through the behavioural prism? Has the field developed enough for us to apply the theories and templates to the kind of situations we are confronted with, to come up with interesting solutions?
Perhaps some people have known these things all along but for both of us, it was a bit of a eureka moment when we realized it could.
Can we really try and build a robust ‘behavioral solutions’ company that is not just an advertising agency repackaged but one that is able to bring a method to the madness? One that can deconstruct business and brand aspects from a behavioral standpoint, and come up with more insightful and interesting solutions?
Do join in the conversation.
