Over the last few years, there has been a tremendous clamor to own and utilize Black Friday in India. Considering most Indians don’t even know what Black Friday is, or why it has been anointed as a shopping extravaganza, it is mighty amusing to see brands of all kinds, shapes, and sizes go to town with a full-blown advertising blitzkrieg to make use of ‘Black Friday’ as a marketing-appropriated shopping occasion.
However, considering it does help the severely beleaguered vendors and brands battered by the pandemic over the last two years, I assume some good may also come off it.
But the hype around Black Friday made me think in a different direction: which Indian festival has the marketing world successfully appropriated for itself? To a large extent, ‘festival’ season in India refers to the year-end Navratri time and Diwali/Deepavali time. Many marketers and brands plan their annual budgets around two major ‘seasons’ – summer holiday/school closure season and year-end festive season that extends from Navratri, all through Diwali till Christmas and New Year.
And much of the marketing spends are around building these periods as opportunities where people could spend their money on assorted things – either products or experiences (holidays and vacations during the summer holiday season, for instance).
Much of Black Friday’s success or even China’s famous Single’s Day successes are touted using metrics around total sales done on those days, year after year, in dollar value.
So, is there a way we can combine these assorted things, but in a meaningful and purposeful way – a very-Indian day + a marketing-appropriated idea to rally people around on that day + that idea being meaningful and purposeful and not just a generic spend-all expenditure that ties the marketing-led activity back to the roots of the day?
Here is a potential marketing idea around Saraswati Pooja.
In India, Saraswati Pooja is not celebrated once a year – it is celebrated twice every year!
The first Saraswati Pooja of the year is usually in January or February, called Vasant Panchami, a festival that marks the preparation for the arrival of spring in many states up North. The second Saraswati Pooja is in the year-end festive period, on Ayudha Pooja day during Navaratri period and this is more prevalent in the Southern states.
On both occasions, the crux of the festival, owing to Goddess Saraswati being invoked, is around knowledge, and more specific activities around education, books, and so on. In our home, we celebrate the 2nd Saraswati Pooja by placing the school books of the kids (and a couple of my marketing and communications-related books!) in the pooja room and reading from them the next day.
So, while those traditional celebrations and rituals could continue as they are, I believe there is an opportunity for marketing and brands to utilize the day innovatively with a meaningful purpose. That purpose could be around books.
But, to make it an activity that people participate in large numbers enthusiastically there needs to be a call-to-action that a lot of people can rally around. That call-to-action could be ‘gift a book’.
Why not simply ‘buy a book’, instead? Because buying includes just one person and her/his own mindset around books. Framing it as ‘gift a book’ brings two or more people into the activity, and the thought one person puts into picking something appropriate for another person/a couple of other people.
Here are some of the mechanics of the activity:
1. Books as gifts
Even though books have always been given as gifts, the current terminology around ‘gifts’ tends to bring imagery of expensive gadgets, devices, or jewelry. Even flowers can be gifts but we do not see it that way. Reframing books as gifts could be useful in more than one way – to make books fashionable as ‘gifts’ means a potential to increase the reading habit. I say potential because merely owning or gifting books doesn’t mean an increase in readership too.
2. What books?
It could be physical books or even ebooks or audiobooks.
For physical books, the methods of gifting are easier than ever. Unlike the earlier days when you had to walk into a book store, select, buy a book, get it gift-wrapped, and then send it to someone via courier, it’s so easy to gift books these days! Simply head to any of the online book stores (also known as Amazon!), pick a book, add the address of the recipient, mark the purchase as a ‘gift’ and simply pay for it.
The online vendors would need to enable easy gifting of ebooks and audiobooks, though. They are primarily available for a self-reading purpose now. To be able to gift an audiobook or an ebook, they need to make that option available where we pay for the title and a code is generated that the recipient can enter to access that title either as an ebook or as an audiobook.
3. Who can participate?
One reason why Black Friday has been adopted in India so enthusiastically is because of the kind and number of participating vendors. Every brand in any and every category, and every mall and shopping complex is going after the opportunity to induce sales. But to turn Saraswati Pooja as also a ‘gift a book’ occasion, that too twice every year, very few vendors may be willing to participate contextually.
As such, book stores (offline) are a vanishing segment. But any mall or shopping complex that does have a book store is a good potential participant.
Most book publishers are obvious candidates to promote the idea.
More importantly, most media houses with a print operation (either a newspaper or a magazine) are perfect candidates as well. They could even offer gifting of subscriptions of their newspaper or magazines as part of ‘gift a book’! Many media houses also have a book publishing wing, like The Hindu, for instance.
The Government could be a big adopter of this idea. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has suggested repeatedly that books should be given/gifted during political visits and meetings instead of flowers.
When state Government put their weight behind the idea, it could spur the potential of buying and gifting regional language books in a big way beyond just English books.
The social sector could adopt the idea too towards making gifting available for school books (say, for one academic year) for underprivileged children.
Beyond the coordinated push, the best organic approval of the idea would be people sharing the gifts they received on social media proudly and finding newer topics and themes to read about and enlighten themselves. In fact, you, as an individual, don’t even need to wait till such an idea becomes widespread! You can start small at your own level and start the effort of gifting books on Saraswati Pooja day in 2022, whichever you celebrate – the one on February 5, 2022, or the one on October 4, 2022.
Imagine the success of Saraswati Pooja in India being depicted via the number of books sold on that day, twice every year!