SUPPLANTING CRITICAL DISCOURSE WITH MUTE NARRATOLOGY IN INDIAN COMMERCIALS: FRAMING NEW COMMUNICATIONS FOR EMERGING MARKETS

The objective of the research is to inquire into possible lucrative ways of developing the “political unconscious” (Jameson, 1981) of the bottom of the Capital Hierarchy Matrix for Emerging Markets (CHEMEM), a model postulated by the authors from the existing theories of Maslow’s needs hierarchy, Prahalad and Hart’s BoP model (2002) and Bourdieu’s “forms of capital” (1986). This model becomes the foundation of profiling the target audience of an emerging market like India for social messaging. The researchers employ CHEMEM to investigate the narratives of a dataset of six Indian television commercials aired in the temporal range of 2014-16, not through regular channels of inquiry, but through Marie-Laure Ryan’s “principle of minimal departure” (1980) from the genre of Fiction Theory which, for the first time is being used as a potent tool of research methodology to analyse advertisements in management discourse. Finally, the researchers propose “mute narratology” through the “principle of minimal departure” as a novel, lucrative alternative to the traditionally accepted canon of critical discourse in corporate social communications targetted at the base of CHEMEM.