Selling Breakfast Cereal to Two Generations of Warring Women
For a long time I’ve been struck by how every country in the world “skims” other cultures, appropriating the best of what foreign cultures offer, and leaving behind the rest. Across France, for example, you can find any number of “American diners” that serve cheeseburgers, hot dogs and French fries to a musical soundtrack of rock and rockabilly from the late 1950s and 1960s. In the United Kingdom, natives visit nightclubs with names like Malibu, and the Planet Hollywood chain stretches from the United States to France. Japanese consumers can visit a Japanese-owned chain known as the Andersen Bakery, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, which, ironically, only recently opened its first bakery in Andersen’s birthplace, Denmark. Across the world, diners can eat at a Chinese, Mexican or Italian restaurant, or at an Outback Steakhouse, the Australian-themed restaurant that has literally nothing to do with Australia (it was created in 1988 by four Florida businessmen). But perhaps the all-time clearest example of skimming from the top of a culture is yoga as it’s practiced in the West.
To a melodious soundtrack of low-pitched ragas, students perform anywhere from two to three dozen asanas, most of which are introduced in Sanskrit. Some studios jack up the temperature to over 100 degrees, the goal being to replicate the weather conditions in which Indian men practiced in caves 6,000 years ago. From its beginnings as a meditative, spiritual and philosophical practice, yoga has evolved, at least across the West, into a controlled sport saved from its very strenuousness by an emphasis on breathing and awareness. With yoga, you can appropriate the best of Hindu and Buddhist traditions without ever paying a visit to India.
All these thoughts filled my mind when I traveled to Mumbai and New Delhi on behalf of a global cereal manufacturer. Along with most other forms of packaging, cereal boxes sold in Indian mom-and-pop stores had long been distinguished by eye-catching colors strategically designed to arrest the attention of new mothers. The packaging had worked well for decades, but in 2013, the company couldn’t figure out why its most popular breakfast cereal had been steadily losing market share among younger female buyers. Could I help them hatch some ideas about new packaging that would appeal to the brand’s demographic?
I wrongly assumed it would be a simple assignment. I had no idea I would soon be running up against an issue that crosses all castes and classes across India: the combustible relationship between Indian mothers-in-law and their daughters-in-law.
The BRICS nations—a widely used acronym referring to the developing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—are often treated as indistinguishable, but nothing could be further from reality. Having run workshops in both China and India, in my experience, China places an emphasis on structure and operations, and creativity is all but nonexistent. India, by comparison, is all about creativity and chaos, with almost no attention paid to structure and operations. (If the two countries merged, they would become a serious threat to Western business.) With a population of 1.3 billion, India is a country of dramatic and sometimes shocking contrasts. The poverty is real and immediate, beggars are everywhere, and the pollution is among the worst in the world. Indian children are more likely to be malnourished than children from Zimbabwe, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s three poorest countries,1 and in Delhi, nearly 5 million school-aged children have irreversible lung damage from that city’s air quality, which is twice as bad as Beijing’s.2 The sanitation is poor—one New York Times estimate reports that more than 620 million people in India defecate outdoors, with Hindu devotees regularly bathing in the Ganges River, the end-destination of any number of sewage pipes.3 The infrastructure in even the most modern Indian cities is inadequate for the millions of people who live there, and electrical blackouts take place several times a day.
Yet alongside the literally breathtaking levels of pollution, and the whiskey-brown dust that enshrouds everything from cars to buildings to sidewalks, and the everyday presence of stray mutts, monkeys and cattle, as well as the fumes from nearby trash fires, a visitor can also catch vestiges of tea-caddy British colonialism, as well as dreamlike glimpses of hallucinogenic beauty.
Traveling in India, I was reminded again and again of its extreme contrasts: rich and poor, clean and unclean, modern and traditional. Exit your hotel into the steamy afternoon air, and you’ll find that traffic has come to a halt to permit a slow-moving cow to cross the road. (I once led a workshop attended by more than a hundred CEOs on behalf of a large Indian conglomerate. After spending two hours addressing every conceivable local political issue, I made the mistake of saying, “I think it’s fair to say that there are no sacred cows left—we’ve killed them all,” when my host sternly reminded me of the expression’s very origins.) Some streets, in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, can’t even be called streets as the word is traditionally defined. They are more like very large pathways, made up of mud and puddles, and lined by markets selling fruit and vegetables, or meat or fish that has been left hanging too long, or that is squirming with insects, or that has fallen into a puddle, only to be briskly swept off by the store owner and rehung.
Turn another corner, and underneath the glowing emblems of marketing and industry—Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Vodafone—you may catch sight of a proud, exquisitely costumed Indian family on the third day of a four-day wedding ceremony. Or a couple riding a vintage motorbike, a twist of black tailpipe smoke filling the air behind them. The young man wears the classic business outfit—white shirt and black pants—and holding his waist tightly as they race over ruts and potholes is his girlfriend, garbed in a bright cyan-blue dress, both legs swung over to one side of the bike and gingerly suspended only inches from the wheel. The scooter shudders over puddles, splashing other pedestrians, as dogs bark and chickens chatter and cars honk and pedestrians converse in multiple dialects amid the odors of shit, sweat, animals, smoke and mud.
With a population density ten times higher than in the United States, there is nowhere in India anyone can be truly alone, no sidewalk where you are the only pedestrian, no vistas that do not encompass other human bodies. Up, down, sideways: no matter where you look, men, women and children of all ages are hanging from windows, shouting and gesticulating, and on a nearby rooftop you will suddenly catch sight of two naked people in full carnal embrace.
Literally and metaphorically, India has always been a nation blazing with colors, which is why my first night in Mumbai, the question I kept asking myself was, What do colors mean generally—and specifically, in India? I would find out the complex answer when I carried out Subtext Research inside the homes of Indian consumers, only to come face-to-face with the voluble intragenerational waltz that has long existed between Indian mothers and the women, some as young as 15 years old, who have married their sons.
As anyone who’s been to the movies or watched television knows, the mother-in-law is the classic butt of any number of stale jokes. She criticizes. She dominates. She butts in. She believes she knows best. In the United States, with families more and more geographically isolated, and the concept of multiple generations living together under one roof a relic of the past, the humor around mothers-in-law feels increasingly dated, like watching a comedy show from the early 1960s.
This isn’t true in India, where families are interconnected in ways most Westerners might find hard to fathom. Every year, around 8 million mostly teenaged Indian brides marry young men chosen by their parents. Many don’t have the privilege of meeting their new husbands until their wedding day. The New York Times reports that if these young women balk at the arranged marriage, “Refusals can be met with violence and, sometimes, murder,” adding that in one case in 2014, “a 21-year-old New Delhi college student was strangled by her parents for marrying against their wishes.”4 Once the marriage has taken place, the bride and groom move in with the latter’s family, where they remain until their own sons and daughters come of age, at which time the situation repeats itself.
Having moved in with strangers, a new daughter-in-law is expected to cook, clean and, naturally, provide grandchildren, all under the oversight of her mother-in-law. An Indian mother-in-law sheriffs the household, exerting quality-control regulations over every aspect of domestic life. She knows what foods to buy, and the best recipes and cooking techniques. She knows the right way to hold newborn infants and to coax them to sleep. In some extreme cases, a new bride is forbidden to touch, or even speak in front of, their older relatives. The concept of dowry—where a bride’s family hands over money or jewelry or other assets to the groom’s family as a precondition of marriage—may be formally against the law, but it’s still common in more rural areas of the country.
The relationship between Indian daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law, or mummyji, the Hindi word for “honored mother,” is neither exaggerated nor anecdotal. It is such an issue across India that it has given rise to approximately 50 Hindi-language soap operas known as saas-bahu, which can be translated roughly as “mother-in-law, daughter-in-law.” The immense popularity of these television shows across Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh indicates that saas-bahu isn’t a problem restricted to India. Quoted in one newspaper article, Delhi-based journalist Veena Venugopal, author of a 2014 book, The Mother-in-Law, says that saas-bahu “is the one relationship that has gone contrary to the rest of India; it has regressed.”5 Among the most frequent conflicts are how the younger woman dresses (provocative attire is unwelcome), whether or not she works (ideally, she doesn’t), her looks (the bride’s beauty reflects on the mother-in-law, as well as on her son), and whether or not she observes the rules and religious rites of the household (mandatory). Venugopal asserts that saas-bahu disputes have actually worsened over the past two decades. She blames the relationship for social problems ranging from increased domestic violence to the attrition rate of women in the workplace. Saas-bahu can even lead to violence. In 2013, the Economist reported that “of the 12,000 prisoners at Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail, a portion of female inmates are kept in a dedicated, barracks-like ‘mother-in-law wing.’”6 Most are mummyji, who assaulted their daughters-in-law “in a fit of anger.”7
Some speculate that the mummyji’s oversized power across India is simply a reenactment of the older women carrying out what was done to them when they were young brides, as well as a stark example of what little power females have in Indian culture. Whatever the case, I had no idea that when I flew into Mumbai, I was walking into a war zone.
The shantytowns of Mumbai have been written about at length, but as we will see later, they differ from Brazilian favelas. Corruption in Brazilian favelas is mostly unchecked, with drugs and drug dealers controlling sections of the neighborhoods, and regular police raids replete with machine-gun fire, after which life returns to normal. In contrast to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, Indian slums are not gunfire zones, nor do they inhabit prime urban real estate. They are crooked, disjointed, improvised settlements, typically slapped together from a mix of plywood, plastic, corrugated strips of metal and cardboard. The walls are thin, the roofs tin, and with some shantytowns boasting a population of a million people per square mile, it can seem as if the homes serve as rooms in one huge, chaotic, snakelike house. The social connection among neighbors is strong, as is the ubiquity of Hinduism, which is less a religion—there is no word in Sanskrit for “religion”—than it is a way of life. It goes without saying that there are no street numbers, which is why having a local Indian guide is a necessity, though even veteran guides occasionally have to rely on a penciled map drawn by a neighbor.
The daughter-in-law is invariably the person who opens the door and greets a visitor. Her mother-in-law waits inside, as she is, literally and symbolically, the proprietor and ruler of the home.
Across India, the mummyji I met shared a similar, even classic appearance. Most were physically small, in their 50s and 60s, though they looked much older. Almost all of them wore oversized, not entirely clean eyeglasses with thick lenses. Still it wasn’t the women’s size I first noticed, it was their colorful clothing: dark blues, pale ambers, powdery greens, ocean-blues. From previous work I had done in India, I knew that the concepts of “luxury,” “rich” and “aspirational” are linked to the widespread use of colors, largely because most of India’s milestones, ceremonies and rituals—from births to weddings to deaths—are defined and even dominated by colorful cloths. Color matters in India, and it begins early on in life.
A case in point is the soap brand Lifebuoy, which came to market in England at the turn of the nineteenth century. No longer available in the United States or England, Lifebuoy is still the most popular brand of antibacterial soap in India. The bars themselves are larger than most hand soaps—they are as big as an adult human hand—but far more compelling than its size is Lifebuoy’s signature dark-red color. It’s safe to say that every single Indian child is born and raised with a bright-red bar of Lifebuoy soap, a habit, and a color preference, that is passed along to the next generation. Lifebuoy’s red color contrasts deeply with nature—nothing about the soap could be said to look or feel remotely “natural”—yet one of the strongest national symbols of health in India is that of Switzerland, and the Red Cross, an image used in any number of Indian pharmacies and medical clinics, which may help explain Lifebuoy’s popularity across India. Unilever, which owns Lifebuoy, has tried to release the soap in neighboring markets without even a fraction of the popularity the soap enjoys in India, largely because of India’s singular relationship with color. Lifebuoy’s success soon spread to the packaged goods world. Manufacturers rolled out a rainbow of colors on every pack, the better to attract an entirely new generation of consumers.
It may be hard to believe, but our color preferences often form based on the colors of our bedroom walls as children. A few years ago, a European multinational asked me to help them align the nearly half-a-dozen companies in its portfolio under a single color. It wasn’t simply a question of deciding on red, or yellow, or orange, or green. Every man and woman in the business meeting had their own ideas, or preferences, meaning that I not only had to find the right color but also bring together a dozen senior executives, all of whom believed their color choice was the correct one.
The first thing I did was convince them that our choices, preferences and tastes have their origins in childhood. Over the next week, I asked each board member to write down the colors of the walls of their childhood bedrooms. If they could bring in a photograph, even better. A week later, when we met again, I tacked the colors and photographs onto a PowerPoint presentation. For the next hour, we flipped through the childhood bedrooms belonging to the members of the executive team. In the end, there was a roughly 80 percent correlation between the color each person had chosen to represent the “family” of companies, and the color on the walls of his or her childhood bedroom. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be color that helped me understand why cereal sales were flagging in India.
Once a visitor is inside an Indian home, a few things become immediately apparent. The daughter-in-law may have been the one to greet you at the door, but once you take a seat, she sits there quietly, saying nothing, unless she is called upon to speak, at which point she shyly volunteers a few words. (Even in homes where the saas-bahu relationship was apparently serene, I’d say almost all could best be described as “love-hate.”)
The larger point is that conversation starts and stops with the mother-in-law. Early on I understood that unless I was able to establish a rapport with her, the chances were good that I would never hear the truth about anything. Which is why I came into the house armed with two fail-safe conversation points: tea and Bollywood movies.
Tea, of course, is a given. A host always offers a cup of tea to a visitor who, in turn, is expected to compliment its taste or flavor, though figuring out what Indians mean when they shake their heads—the motions range from up and down, side to side, quick and vigorous, tilted to the right, tilted to the left, one nod, two nods—can be a science by itself. In some cases, praising the tea I was offered brought me nowhere—the mothers-in-law, stingy with their smiles, nodded at the compliment. That’s when I rolled out my second strategy, this one inspired by my work in North Carolina for Lowes, where I’d borrowed a character from the Back to the Future movie franchise.
Before arriving in India, I’d watched anywhere from between 70 to 80 Bollywood movies. The term Bollywood refers to the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry and the films under its umbrella, which are shot using an assortment of dialects from mixed Hindi to Urdu. Some Bollywood films are mythical and romantic—Mughal-e-Azam, for example, chronicles the love between a prince and a courtesan—while others, like Lagaan, which chronicles the efforts of a small Indian village banding together against colonialist rule to play cricket, are fiercely nationalistic. Speaking generally, most Bollywood films are lighthearted and tend to illustrate a serious cultural theme in a lightly comedic fashion.
India is a film-obsessed country, and Bollywood films serve as crucial reference points for the population. And not just a small or even a majority demographic, either, but literally 100 percent of all Indians. The work I do depends on establishing trust as soon as possible, and I knew that if I could come up with a well-known fragment of dialogue from a Bollywood movie that a mother-in-law was bound to have seen when she was a teenager, I stood a better chance of creating cordiality.
I was relieved to find that, thanks to the Bollywood films, the mothers-in-law gradually softened to my presence in their homes. It was now time to ask permission—because I’d been informed that a visitor must always ask formal permission—to engage with the daughter-in-law. It was only when I managed to physically separate the two women that the truths underlying their relationship became clear.
As the mother-in-law took me into the kitchen, telling me what techniques she used to make her tea taste as flavorful as it did, my assistant remained in the sitting area with the daughter-in-law. As I continued conversing with the older woman, my assistant began politely interrogating the younger woman. I was now free to ask the mother-in-law what her true feelings were about her daughter-in-law, while in the next room my assistant did the same, but in reverse. By interviewing the two women, 20 years apart in age, I was able to engage in an intimate investigation of the world as two generations of Indian women perceived it.
I eventually steered the subject to food, and food preparation. Who does the cooking in your household? was the question that I asked most often. It wasn’t a trivial question, either, considering that the answers I received would determine whether the breakfast cereal should target the mothers-in-law or the daughters-in-law.
Unfortunately, this proved to be a contentious issue. Both the daughters-in-law and the mothers-in-law claimed that they were in charge of the kitchen.
Even for someone who tries to make his living from his powers of observation, there are some obvious things I fail to pick up when I visit consumers’ homes. Remember I usually find myself in an unfamiliar country, where I’m forced to take stock of new faces, new climates, new rulerships, new complexions, new ways of dressing, new customs of behavior. In the Russian Far East, after all, it had taken me a few visits to even notice the refrigerator magnets and the role they played in consumers’ lives. In India, I found myself bypassing a piece of small data so commonplace in Indian kitchens it was easy to overlook.
In close proximity to the stove inside every Indian kitchen I visited sat a spice box. In most cases, it was an enclosed, airtight round metal container, similar to a Western cookie tin. It opened to reveal half-a-dozen smaller containers of the most common Indian seeds and powders used for flavoring both sweet and savory dishes. The seeds include cumin, black mustard and fenugreek, while the powders are coriander, turmeric, red chili pepper and garam masala, which is a blend of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and pepper. The colors are so vivid and otherworldly, the yellows so dramatically yellow, the greens so profoundly verdant, that they can’t help but capture a visitor’s attention.
It was a small data, but at the time it made little sense to me. The mothers-in-law seemed proprietary about the stove and the oven. Many described the signature dishes they liked to make—the same dishes, it turned out, they had cooked for their own children when they were young. Ten or twenty feet away in the living room, my assistant was getting another story entirely. To hear Indian daughters-in-law tell it, they were the ones in charge of all the household cooking, as well as the ones who went shopping, and decided what to buy for their infants.
Everywhere in the world, cooks lay out the spices they use most often within reach of the stove, in the same way casual eaters position the foods and drinks they prefer front and center in their refrigerators. A week into my visit to Mumbai, I started making it a point to ask the Indian mothers-in-law if they would mind showing me the spices inside their spice boxes. The first time one agreed, the spices were positioned in a sequence with no apparent order. Another home, another kitchen, another spice box, and again, the exact same half-a-dozen spices positioned in precisely the same order. The ones nearest the stove and oven were the most colorful ones in the tins—sooty-yellow cardamom, fire-red chili powder—while the more drably colored seeds sat farther away from the stove. Why? One afternoon, as I raced from one home to the next, it hit me.
The powders nearest the stove mimicked the same colors of the clothing worn by most if not all Indian mothers-in-law. Not only that, but they were the same colors highlighted in framed photographs around the house, depicting family ceremonial occasions such as weddings and births. That’s when I realized that the spices were trying to tell me something. Contradicting what almost every single daughter-in-law had told my assistant, in fact it was the mothers-in-law who did most of the cooking in Indian households, and the colors of the spices confirmed it.
Still, a single piece of small data is never enough to create a working hypothesis, or a foundation for a business strategy as critical as the overall look and feel of packaging. Around this same time, I asked both the daughters-in-law and the mothers-in-law if I could possibly take a look inside their bedrooms. In most of the daughters-in-law’s bedrooms, which they shared with their husbands and more often than not their children, the walls were pale, cream or sand-colored. This wasn’t the case with the bedrooms of the mothers-in-law. Their bedroom walls were as colorful as the attire they wore, and the spices with which they cooked. Then I noticed something that would have a strong effect on the colors we eventually placed on our cereal packaging.
In general, we hang things—paintings, posters, mirrors—at the height where we best appreciate them. A painting is always slightly higher than the direct approach. We hang mirrors in such a way that we take in our faces, hair, neck and shoulders. Now and again we position something depending on how it looks from the perspective of a bed, or a couch, or from a place where we’re in the habit of sitting. But as I made my way through one bedroom after another, I saw the artwork on the walls was positioned at almost the exact eye level of its owners. Not higher. Not lower. Level. Straight ahead. I filed this fact away in my notebook.
Before going any further, here is an experiment for the natives of the Western world. Imagine that you have just removed a load of warm, clean laundry from the dryer. As you transfer the clothes to a basket, a light floral fragrance or the aroma of fresh oranges or lemons envelops you. You may be washing and drying your clothes in the middle of winter, but once you take them out of the dryer, they impart the essence of fruit, and flowers, and spring. Most Americans and Europeans aren’t aware of the degree to which advertisers and scent specialists have trained them to believe that the concept of fresh is linked to seasonal flowers, or to citric fragrances, especially in the United States, where fragrance additives tend to be heavy, resonant and unsubtle, with a faint chemical tang.
It’s a different story in eastern Europe and in most developing nations. Years ago, when I helped create a laundry detergent brand with a floral scent in Russia, I discovered that what people perceive as “fresh” varies dramatically around the world. As a concept, fresh often bears no relationship to whether a product is actually “fresh” or not. Fresh, I knew from my global studies, had nothing to do with a product’s expiration date. In France, for example, “fresh” is routinely used to describe foods or drinks with a limited life span, to impress on consumers the need to cook and eat them quickly. Thanks to the popularity of Picard, the frozen food emporium in France, “frozen” is often seen by consumers as “fresh,” as is a screw-top with an unbreakable seal. Conversely, products with a longer shelf life are generally perceived to be “less fresh.” Across the world, I often ask consumers to empty the contents of their fridges and then replace every product based on what they perceive to be its freshness. The freshest go on top, while the least fresh items go on the lower shelves. In the United States, I’m often very surprised to find that among the products most consumers consider even fresher than a just-tossed salad are Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Hellman’s Mayonnaise.
In the process of figuring out why the new laundry detergent was initially doing so poorly, I learned that Russian consumers there perceived “fresh” differently than Westerners do. In Russia, after it’s been washed, clothing is generally hung outdoors on backyard lines. So how do babushkas assess whether or not their clothing has passed the “fresh” test? They hold the piece of clothing close to their noses and inhale a mixture of fabric, wind, soil, damp and the stiffening that comes from textures hanging outdoors in minus-degree temperatures. This aroma is by far the most popular fragrance among the Russian consumers I interviewed, and it explained the slow sales of a flowery-smelling laundry detergent. Floral scents not only had no emotional relevance to Russians, they made Russian men feel self-conscious. Ultimately, I convinced the laundry detergent manufacturer to get rid of the smell entirely. We then rebuilt the fragrance to duplicate the scent of cold air, soil and the outdoors, and the detergent began selling again.
My experience in Russia came to mind once my Subtexting with mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law was done, and I began spending time with young Indian women at local universities, as well as in tea and coffee shops (in India, coffee is sweet and milk-based, and bears no resemblance to the coffee that Westerners drink). My mission was simple: I wanted to understand young Indian women before they officially became daughters-in-law. Spending time in their dorm rooms, and scouring their Facebook pages, it became clear to me the extent to which Western imagery dominated their lives. There were photos of Western pop stars, and they had “liked” any number of Western and Korean brands, from Apple to Samsung. Seeking the answer to the question of whether it was the mother-in-law or the daughter-in-law who ran most Indian households, I had become convinced that the daughters-in-law had virtually no place in the Indian kitchen. The colors of the spices had convinced me, and so did the bright colors on the mothers-in-law’s bedroom walls.
I had been ignoring something else entirely—something essential, and ultimately game-changing. It was a scent. It was light. It smelled like roses. In short, mixed in with the fragrances of Indian spices and powders was the faint vestige of a floral dishwashing detergent. It was an extremely Western fragrance, one I knew that Indian mothers-in-law, schooled as Russian babushkas were on the natural, outdoorsy concept of “fresh,” would never use. What, then, was this very Western scent of scattered daffodils and roses doing in a traditional Indian home?
Something was off. Something was wrong. How had floral scents made their way into India, a country where I knew that “natural” scents of rain and mud had much more emotional resonance to traditional generations? The answer, I realized, was that twenty-first-century Indian daughters-in-law increasingly saw themselves as “modern,” and “contemporary,” an identity that could be credited to the Internet and to the lower-cost smartphones, known as “feature phones,” most of them owned. All of a sudden, the floral scents I’d smelled during my visits to local Mumbai and Delhi colleges made sense. The young women were using floral fragrances because they were living away from home for the first time.
Along with China, as I mentioned earlier, India is one of the most polluted countries on earth. Most young mothers are rightfully concerned about the effects pollution will have on their young children’s growth and health. They are aware of India’s sanitation problems, and the country’s high levels of bacteria, and perhaps even that India is the host to half of the globe’s 20 most polluted cities.8 In contrast to the Western world, where people have arguments over natural versus organic, natural is a relatively new trend in India, especially as it relates to babies. What, then, from the perspective of young Indian mothers, was the color most associated with “natural”?
So I carried out an experiment. I asked the mothers-in-law and the daughters-in-law to rank a range of colors from the “freshest” to the “least fresh.” A week later, I tallied up the results and was baffled to find that the two groups had radically different, even opposing definitions of what constituted “fresh”—that they literally perceived the world using separate senses. To Indian mothers-in-law, “natural” referred to the colors of their cooking spices. The more florid and flamboyant the colors, the fresher they perceived those spices to be. Deep purples, limpid oranges, fluorescent yellows: these were the freshest colors an older generation could imagine, a preference that trickled down to the clothing they wore. Older Indian women would dress themselves using the same colors of the spices they used, in order to look, and feel, at their “freshest.” Younger Indian women, on the other hand, increasingly schooled on Western imagery and perceptions, unanimously preferred green.
It was a tie, just as it was frequently a “tie” between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law for dominance and control within Indian households. Ultimately, though, neither group was in complete control of the domestic front. Both, and neither, were in charge of the home. But generally speaking, Indian mothers-in-law were in charge of cooking, while their daughters-in-law were in charge of tidying up and dishwashing.
What to do? The conclusion I came to was both obvious and, from my perspective at least, a big challenge. The cereal manufacturer was dealing with two radically differently demographics that not only shared a home but also shared “emotional custody” of the family. Whatever new packaging we came up with had to satisfy two warring decision makers. Indian mothers-in-law were enticed by vivid, colorful packaging designs, made up of colors that daughters-in-law saw as unnatural, unorganic and artificial.
I had to figure out a packaging strategy to entice two generations simultaneously. To ensure I did it right, I had to perceive the world from the perspective of a much older person, a strategy I’d been using for many years, and one that began in the United Kingdom.
In 1981, a collection of elderly New England men disembarked from a van and made their way inside a former New Hampshire monastery that had been retrofitted for the experiment that was about to take place—what its creator, Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, called the “Counterclockwise Test.” All of them were males in their 70s and early 80s, with many suffering from the physical indignities endemic to that age. But once they passed through the doors, a radically different scene, and even year, greeted them. It was 1959 all over again. Nat King Cole and Perry Como serenaded them from a vintage radio. A black-and-white TV screened variety shows and even commercials from 1959. There were no mirrors. The men had been given explicit instructions: They were not only encouraged to exchange reminiscences about this era, but as much as possible, to become the same age they were nearly two decades earlier. They were urged to refer to events that took place in 1959 in the present tense.
A week later, a second group of males the same age were asked to duplicate this same experiment. This second group was asked only to think and speak nostalgically about the experience, as opposed to literally impersonating their younger selves. Before entering the monastery, both sample groups agreed to have their vital signs, including vision, hearing, memory and flexibility, assessed by a medical team.
This “psychological intervention,” as the New York Times called it,9 was conjured by Langer who, over the course of a brilliant academic career, believed that in order to improve their health, older people needed a jolt, or a trigger, that would fool their own minds and bodies into healing themselves.
Five days later, both groups of men had their vital signs retested. In every case, their posture and gaits showed signs of improvement. Their eyesight and hearing were both better. Physically, both groups were more agile and flexible. They even scored higher on IQ tests. But the men who had been asked to pretend they were the same age they’d been in 1959 showed markedly more improvement than the group who’d been asked to simply swap reminiscences. As Langer told the New York Times, the men had “‘put their mind in an earlier time,’ and their bodies went along for the ride.”10
Langer’s study was very much on my mind when I began working in England in the early 2000s on a project for Saga, the English equivalent of America’s AARP, an organization aimed at men and women over 50. Saga had asked me if I could help them identify and understand its elder demographic, with the goal of helping to design a cruise ship, the Saga Sapphire, that would make the passengers feel at home. Intuitively, I knew I wanted to fill the cabin suites with the same furniture, music, appliances, colors and games these men and women had grown up with in the 1950s and 1960s, the goal being to cement the strongest possible bond between passengers and the era in which they came of age.
A bigger challenge was to ensure that Saga management understood the importance of perceiving the world through the senses of an elder demographic. Most Saga employees were in their 30s and 40s. I asked them to consider the design of the ship by pretending, for 24 hours, what it might feel like to be 75, 80 or even older. I asked them to imagine putting on an outfit similar to those worn by firefighters, to imagine adding aluminum weight to their shoes to detract from their agility, to imagine wearing glasses that blurred their distance vision, earplugs that compromised their hearing, and thick gloves so that when they pressed the elevator buttons, they would know what it felt like to have limited dexterity in their fingers. We proceeded to design the Saga Sapphire with these perceptions and experiences in mind. The Sapphire proved to be a big success, and it also taught me the importance of putting yourself, literally if possible, in another person’s shoes, which I was about to do in India.
The habit of noticing, like letter writing, is a vanishing art, in part because today our cell phones give us an automatic out whenever we are alone with ourselves, away from the usual distractions that keep us from focusing on our surroundings. Even if we weren’t seduced by the digital sirens in our hands, it’s fair to say that most of us aren’t in the habit of stringing together clues as evidentiary; moreover, what if a single clue causes all the others to unravel?
The truth is that sometimes you have to entertain a symphony of insights or observations that at first make no sense, and follow them to wherever they take you. You may in fact end up Small Mining a bunch of clues that lead nowhere. But you may also notice that a narrative has begun forming, that threads connect the figurine on the windowsill with the old, half-tied shoe with the mayonnaise inside the refrigerator—or in this case, that a thread links together the placement of kitchen spices with a generational color preference that’s ubiquitous across India.
Understand that even in huge, relatively modern cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad—and notwithstanding Walmart, which owns and operates twenty Best Price Modern Wholesale stores in eight Indian states—no organized retail really exists in India. Instead, Kirana, or local retail, made up of a congeries of mom-and-pop stores, is the dominant form of buying and selling. Inside these stores, almost every food is sold in a single-serve portion, an essential concept in India, Thailand and the Philippines, where natives lack the space, and the money, to do a single weekly shopping trip.
For the next few days, I stood on the sidewalk and observed the mummyji going in and out of stores. The temperature was close to 100 degrees, but I stayed where I was and tried to see what they saw through their own eyes. I even trailed some mummyji inside, maintaining a discreet distance behind them. Did they glance to their right, or to their left? Did they hesitate? What made them pause? When they reached out for an item, was it at eye level, or below or above eye level?
Similar to how I had asked Saga employees to see the world through the senses of an elder demographic, I was trying to put myself in the shoes of a 50-something Indian female. I went through store after store in an effort to perceive the world from her height. It didn’t take me long to notice colors and patterns that people in their 50s weren’t able to see. The aging eye is the same all over the world, and most people over the age of 40 are vulnerable to presbyopia, the medical term for the natural hardening of our eyes’ natural “zoom” lens. I went so far as to visit an Indian optometrist, who told me that the eyesight of a glasses-wearing population in their 50s and 60s is two or three times worse than the average eyesight of a 40-year-old man or woman. Once I could see for myself the differences between what Indian daughters-in-law perceived versus the mothers-in-law, I had, I believed, the beginning of a solution.
A day later, I had found glasses that duplicated the mothers-in-law’s weakening vision. I returned to the stores, this time walking around with my shoulders hunched. I never put on a wig, or makeup, but I came close. By the end of my experiment, I returned to my hotel surprised to learn how unfamiliar the universe was from the perspective of an older Indian female.
But I kept returning to the concept of vision. From an Indian mother-in-law’s perspective, almost everything had blurred edges and lines. The only thing she could really make out were colors. The problem was, those she was least able to discern were the same ones—“natural” browns and “fresh” greens—that the daughter-in-law preferred. There were other considerations, as well. From what altitude, or angle, or perspective was the mother-in-law gazing at the breakfast cereal on the store shelf? To understand this question, it’s important to grasp a physical phenomenon about supermarkets, and shelving, and the critical role that both darkness and light play.
In supermarket lingo, the “shadow line” refers to the darkness that falls over the top of a package when a supermarket shelf is too deep, or when the overhead light lands at a wrong angle. The mixture of light, and how it strikes a product, tends to leave a lot of products in darkness. This same shadow line had a marked effect on what an Indian mother-in-law saw when she gazed at cereal packaging. At the same time, from her height and perspective, what she saw was, in fact, ideal. There were colors she liked and appreciated the most, the vibrant, vivid, rich-hued ones that conveyed to her that the product in front of her was “fresh.”
It was time for me to switch roles and impersonate a straight-shouldered, younger, clear-eyed 20-something Indian daughter-in-law. From her perspective, the world was entirely different. She didn’t see the bottom of packages; her glance began at the top of the package and swept downward. Gazing at the cereal packages from a daughter-in-law’s perspective, I discovered that the cereal container, flush with bright spice-like colors favored by an older generation, looked no different than a candy box, packed with chemicals and about as far from “fresh” or “natural” as it could be. In contrast, thanks to the shadow line, the mothers-in-law would be able to make out the vivid colors on the bottom, but not the top two inches of the package.
I would have to use two separate—and completely uncomplementary—color codes, and a few weeks later, the cereal manufacturer approved my template for a new package design.
Historically, when a mother-in-law went out shopping with her daughter-in-law, the two of them would disagree, squabble and often leave the store with two different varieties or brands of cereal. From now on, if the two women shopped together, they would both be enticed by the colors of the same package. My solution was to appeal first to the mothers-in-law by decorating two-thirds of the package (the bottom) with rich, bright, spice-inspired colors. I would also add a tactile dimension to one side of the package, to appeal to an older generation’s desire to handle products. The top third of the package, which the taller daughter-in-law would see, would be adorned with “natural” browns and greens, as well as a description of the cereal’s natural ingredients.
But the package couldn’t simply be made up of competing colors; it also needed people on it! In Mexico I first became aware that the experience of bonding between mothers and children is made up of a handful of isolated flashes, or pivot points. Of course, our lives in general are nothing more than moments linked together, but this structure is especially true for first-time mothers and their newborns.
Despite humans’ fraught relationship with weight and calories, infants are generally given latitude about how much they eat. A new mother wants her newborn to gain weight. It means the child is healthy and a healthy baby, in turn, tells an inexperienced mother that she is doing something right. In short, a direct correlation exists between a baby’s appetite and a new mother’s peace of mind. If infants or babies finish their bottles, or clean their plates, mothers gain points, not just in their own eyes, but in the eyes of their husbands or partners, and the culture itself. All around the world, babies are fussy about what they eat and drink, but in Mexico, if a baby rejects a meal his mother has prepared, it is the mother, and not the baby, who receives the blame from her husband. In response, mothers serve their babies even more food. The babies put on weight. If they eventually develop baby chins, all the better. Mothers win, and more to the point, the Mexican culture looks on approvingly.
Each “moment” between infants and mothers lasts around 45 seconds. Among the most potent moments is the one when infants begin to doze in their mothers’ arms (and every respondent told me he or she somehow “feels” the baby is getting heavier), followed by the moment when a baby closes his or her eyes to sleep. Other moments include the baby splashing around in the bath, and new fathers engaging or interacting with the baby, though in general dads are rarely central characters, as mothers prefer to be seen as the parent in charge of an infant. In Brazil, and across the developing world, the most popular moment, I knew, was when new mothers realize that their babies are learning new things. Needless to say, these moments are highly emotional in nature, and when I asked Mexican mothers to tell me what they were feeling, they used words like “comfort,” “harmony,” “trust” and “bond.”
From a marketing standpoint, the question was clear: Was there a way to incorporate these moments between mothers and their newborn babies into a product or even a television commercial? Could the cereal manufacturer “own” a universal moment, in the same way that Kodak used to “own” taking photographs, and America Online “owned” You’ve Got Mail, and Apple today “owns” the left-to-right “Slide to Unlock” finger-swipe, and Volvo “owns” Safety, and Google “owns” Search, and Marlboro “owns” Cowboy? I hired a creative team to help the company understand the essence, and the weight, of every single moment between mothers and their babies. Pictorially speaking, could a photo somehow convey the “heaviness” of the instant that a baby’s eyes are beginning to close?
Most cereal packaging around the world depicts a child, but India has the strictest rules against advertising in the world, and prohibits any human representation on package designs. The Indian government doesn’t want to encourage young children and mothers to eat breakfast food that is unhealthy or perceived as unhealthy, and they also believe that if products show babies on the packaging, manufacturers might mislead consumers into believing they might someday become as beautiful as the models on the pack.
When we finally rolled out the new packaging design in India, the new graphics showed a baby-sized spoon holding a spoonful of cereal. It was, in short, a Moment. In a populous country, the package emphasized whiteness, sparseness and simplicity. If you look carefully, you will also see something else: two separate sets of colors. One is designed for women anywhere between the ages of 50 and 70, while the other appeals to younger women in their late teens and early 20s. It is the exact same breakfast cereal, the exact same packaging—but unless you were wearing glasses, you would never know the difference.