Will Sach-in prevail? The trust issue.

Trust is unidimensional. In this case, dimension should be interpreted as a characteristic most relevant to the trustor for trust to be conferred on a trustee. For a doctor this may be the ability to provide a good diagnosis, for a pilot it may be her flying skills and for an artist, his flair with the brush. Uni implies that the trustor will usually place trust for one or a few closely related aspects in a familiar range. For example, while you may trust your boss to give you career guidance, you may not trust him to cook you a good dinner. In related aspects, that the trustor has grown to know or can infer, trust builds automatically – for instance, you may trust the same boss to give a good speech at the local club due to his inferred ability. The unidimensional aspect puts limits on how far you can push trust – and if the relevance seems too out-of-context, unidimensionality would be violated, resulting in trust erosion. 

Sachin endorsing 'Sach' and
Bipasha endorsing 'Real activ'

The subtlety of the unidimensional aspect gets elaborated in this incident. A cricket-loving friend and I were at a grocery store and she reacted strongly on seeing a new juice brand promoted by Sachin Tendulkar (the world’s leading cricketer) called ‘Sach’ (meaning Truth). It was surprising to me at first since Sachin is an overachiever in his game, completely non-controversial and universally loved. Like many other celebrities, Sachin has a host of endorsements - Pepsi, Visa, Philips to name a few. In fact, he even put his signature on a limited edition car.

As long as Sachin was only endorsing brands, there was no problem. But Sachin had moved from endorser to 'owner' status. He had ‘allowed’ the juice carton to carry his name, and my friend’s reaction conveyed betrayal. Sachin’s endorsement had stretched relevance a little too far and violated the principle of unidimensionality.  In fact when I later got to know that he even has a 10% stake in the company that promoted the juice brand - Sachin's trust loss seemed completely justified as well.

Keep unidimensionality in trust intact, and you'll always gain. Stretch it too far and it can turn counter-productive. 

(some parts of this blog have been extracted from my book, Decoding Communication)

Background score of communication

(extract from the forthcoming book Decoding Communication)

No background music

If the force of attraction of a brand is a natural phenomena, why does it need to be embellished? Why can’t its natural attractiveness get results?

To answer that, I must share an anecdote about a friend from the world of movie-making who showed me the deep-rooted relevance of communications.

An animated raconteur (he was often invited to give story presentations to producers), he not only was involved with the film industry for a living but he also seemed to watch movies for sustenance - seeing two or even three a day. His personal life had been tragic – a victim of a broken family, drug-addiction and a difficult recovery, and failed attempts to prop the family business of renting movie equipment. His cousins were prominent actors in the fan-crazy Hindi film industry, which did not make his life any easier. Now a volunteer-speaker at Narcotics Anonymous, he devoted all his non-movie time in convincing addicts why they should quit, using his life as an example. He is funny, selfless, and a complete stoic.

One evening he invited a few friends to watch a movie - a regular family-drama, on the larger-than-life screen in his house. The movie was an over-the-top Bollywood masala  and we watched the movie like friends do - opining on every aspect of the movie using our half-baked knowledge of the movie-world, taking jabs at the director, actors and everyone else. Throughout the movie, my friend stayed glued to the screen, never even once partaking in our digressions. And, he was crying unabashedly. Copious tears flowed even at the smallest emotional scene. We joked about it among ourselves, but he almost did not seem to notice us. The movie over, he washed his face, and was transformed back to the friend we knew, back to his former self - funny, and yet without much sign of emotion.

Much later, his father, who he loved dearly, passed away. My friend did not show any pain or emotion, though everyone knew how much he felt the loss. When I met him a few weeks later over coffee and compared the two situations, the movie and his father’s demise, and asked him why he did not cry or express any emotion in the latter, while the movie had made him cry uncontrollably. He answered spontaneously, “It is because life does not have background music.” He also admitted that he was himself only when he watched movies - it transported him but also allowed him to be himself.

I thought much about what my friend had said, and realized one thing. The embellishments of communications are necessary to transport the audience to an experience of the Brand. Our relationships with different people and things force us to behave in different ways, so much so that we often mask our real selves. And it takes the background score of communication to make us 'see' our true selves better. Good communication from any source actually helps one communicate with oneself better and is like communion with oneself.