Volume 16, Number 1 Article by Anjali Gera Roy , Avinish Jain , Darshpreet Mann and Sanju Nair March, 2004
Marketing 'Difference' :
Difference is the indisputable logic behind the time-tested marketing formula of the Unique Selling Proposition. Brand marketing depends largely on the exploitation of difference, real or perceived, in the creation of a unique brand identity.
Avinish Jain, Darshpreet Mann and Sanju Nair, students of the Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur, attempt to track the modes of sonic commerce that aim at packaging the familiar 'differently', during their six month project in SAREGAMA HMV. Anjali Gera Roy, Associate Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, comments on the trends. The popular music industry thrives on originality, novelty and innovativeness. But once the experimentation within a certain genre reaches saturation point, breakthroughs can be achieved only through the evolution of new genres or the rediscovery of old ones. The keyword in every success story in musical history is the incorporation of a significant difference, which can be turned into a music's unique selling proposition.
In the 1990s, non-film Hindi music became popular, coinciding with the revival of Bhangra music in the UK. As Bhangra abroad and Punjabi folk music in India, Punjabi difference, linguistic and ethnocultural, was capitalised upon and translated into commercial value. To satisfy the Indian customer's latent longing for 'entertaining devotional music', Hindi devotional music's traditional image was completely revamped when 'filmi' tunes were applied to devotional themes to see the emergence of the new Mass Devotional category and to create a huge market chunk. 'World Music' saw the introduction of non-Western genres of music in the Western market, cashing in on the need in Western consumers for cultural offerings from other parts of the world - its effectiveness here depending on making difference exotic but not too different.
While the appropriation of ethnic, linguistic or generic difference in the marketing of music has definitely given these musics a global visibility and raised their stock, concerns have been raised about their decontextualisation and deterritorialisation. However, the price a traditional musical tradition must be willing to pay to gain a national or global reach is to give its consent to the laws of sonic commerce.
Reprint No 04106
