With Mother’s Day round the corner, it seemed the right time to do a quick review of contemporary advertising that celebrates motherhood. For fun, a comparison with some recent ads that were hits in social media in the UK and the US, also on motherhood, revealed some interesting differences from India.
Mother’s Day, of course, is a marketing creation — a way to create economic value out of sentiment. Right now, brands don’t seem to be making ads or doing activations to grow the Mother’s Day market. But that is a subject for another analysis of the business opportunity and potential economic value. I was more interested in exploring questions around what is new. Are ads tapping into emergent cultural codes? If TV ads are a means to create new cultural elements out of the shared emotive-symbolic space through new representations, are brands and ad agencies actually doing anything here? Or are they just content with mining the existing cultural values and sentiments?
All for beta and bahu
Motherhood in the Indian cultural imagination is summed up in one simple cry — Ma/Amma. In its depiction there are certain core themes/values and codes which seem indestructible. In the Indian collective imagination (perhaps universal, if one looks at ads celebrating mothers and motherhood from other countries as well), Mother = unconditional love, sacrifice, support, unbreakable bond, knows what is best for her child, always has the child’s best interest at heart. Mother = nurturing, primarily through food and drink.
The most celebrated bond is that between mother and son. The greatest sin a mother can commit is leave her child hungry. And the fundamental requirement is selfless care of the child (especially the son), so that the son, in turn, takes care of her in her old age. Given the centuries of conditioning around daughters being given away in marriage and such, the mother-daughter relationship is nowhere in the collective imagination when compared with the mother-son relationship.
Most Indian TV commercials (TVCs) and advertising, even today, faithfully reproduce these archetypes and myths. The latent misogyny and role conditioning is mirrored in the advertising. Only ‘betas’ are sent to study engineering in hostels and miss their mother’s cooking (ghar ka khana/maa ka khana) – Fortune Cooking Oil’s Mother-Exchange idea and long-duration TVC for YouTube. This programme is merely an activation of the TVC in which the mother cooks her naval officer son’s favourite foods and takes it to him when his ship comes to berth.
Many viewer comments on this campaign, posted on FB/YouTube, from ‘progressive’ women were: Where are the girls? Don’t girls these days stay in hostels and study outside their home towns? Why not teach your boys how to cook? Aren’t you a better mother when you teach your boys to cook and learn to fend for themselves?
And when the beta returns home with self-chosen bahu, the modern mother learns the language of the bahu so as to welcome her into the family, as if she is a daughter, not a daughter-in-law (Canara Bank TVC). Or when the grown-up son gets a job abroad, he does not leave his widowed mother behind, but takes her with him (Raymond).
When mothers take their nurturing capabilities beyond food to ambition and success, they focus mainly on their sons — to make champions out of them (most advertising of health and energy drinks). Ads that show the anticipatory joy of motherhood (J&J) showcase an idealised dream, rarely the actual reality of the experience of motherhood, with its highs and lows.
Thus, in following the narrative flow from childhood to adulthood, in the mother-son relationship, we see a rendition of the age-old cultural value system and its codes. The mother cooks and feeds her son, she nurtures a champion, she, now, makes the effort to welcome the girl of his choice into the family and relies on him to take care of her in her old age. The bond between mother and son is the most hallowed relationship of all and the purest and most unconditional. The daughter who takes on all of these traditional roles of the son receives the highest praise, ‘tum beti nahin, mere beta ho.’
Beti wields ointment
There is not one progressive idea, thought or emergent code to be found in the depiction of the mother-son relationship. Consumers asked questions such as, why not teach sons to cook? I had questions such as: How about showing older boys taking care of their younger sisters? Teaching them, protecting them, playing with them? How about showing girls taking the lead over boys at home? How about showing boys who are more egalitarian in sharing and doing household chores, e.g. doing laundry, not just dirtying their clothes while playing? How about showing the frustrations of mothering/parenting too?
The mother-daughter relationship is new territory and its cultural values and codes are a part of a ‘progressive’ value set. Some of the well-worn tropes of the mother-daughter relationship are in hair care, though – mothers nurturing the daughter’s beauty. Daughters are more sensitive, understanding of and responsive to mothers’ needs and desires — whether it be aches and pains (Moov — old TVC), unfulfilled ambitions (IDEA-IIN) or second marriages (Tanishq).
There is a clear contrast in showing mothers relating to their sons and daughters. When there is a TVC featuring mother and a six-seven-year-old son, she is either feeding him with his favourite food or turning him into a champion. When there is a TVC featuring mother and seven-year-old daughter, the daughter is applying pain-relieving ointment or helping her achieve her unfulfilled dreams ... gender stereotyping and role reinforcement visible at its fullest.
Glimmer of hope
The new TVC from Maggi (Rajkumari) offers a glimmer of hope by showcasing progressive values — the mother considers her daughter to be a princess and is preparing her favourite food, Maggi. The relationship between sulky and angry daughter and loving mother is also portrayed realistically rather than idealistically … the mother starts eating first while the daughter is sulking and thus persuades her daughter to overcome her anger and eat. This TVC is probably a first for Indian advertising with a progressive point of view. One needs more evidence and examples, however, to gauge whether this point of view is an emergent cultural code or not.
An interesting evolution can be seen in the mother-daughter relationship, when the daughter is now an adult and wants independence … where she wants to say I can cook for myself (Maggi), I can manage on my own in a hostel (Mom’s Magic biscuits) and when adult daughter and mother can go away together on a trip (Titan watches).
When compared with American, British and Latin American advertising, there are significant differences. English culture is based on humour and they are most comfortable highlighting the travails of motherhood and leaving the viewer to conclude it is still a rewarding experience. So also Latam ads, though their humour is less sharp-edged and shows more balanced parenting between dad and mom.
The most successful multimedia campaign celebrating motherhood in recent times is P&G’s Thank You Mom, which presented P&G as the proud sponsor of moms — for its sponsorship of the 2012 Olympics and the 2014 Sochi Games for Paralympics. Between the two campaigns, the 2012 Olympics TVCs mined familiar territory, although they were gender-neutral, showing both boys and girls as champions. The Sochi campaign leveraged a much more powerful insight around “tough love” — that these children rose above their disabilities because their mothers were able to practise tough love, not mollycoddling them but treating them on par with regular children and continuing to believe in their potential.
My message to Indian ad makers on this Mother’s Day — take a progressive stance, break some codes and stereotypes, create new mythologies, take a few risks; your consumers may be far more progressive in their imagination than you give them credit for. Do your part in writing the codes and clarifying the values of the nascent mother-daughter relationship. The women of India deserve no less.
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