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The purpose of this paper is to attempt to trace the origins and early history of the development of the market research practice in India. It covers the period 1955-1975.

A search of key terms in databases such as Google Scholar and ABI-INFORM indicated there was limited data in the public domain on the subject and that the information gleaned was not adequate to trace the birth of the market research practice in India. As there was very little recorded history, the researchers decided to initiate a recording of the history using the available literature, on the reminiscences of the authors and, to a limited extent, contemporaries of the pioneers in the field.

The origins of market research in India can be traced to its supporting role in gauging the efficacy of advertising. Examination of the history of advertising leads to the conclusion that marketing research arrived in India in the decade of the 1950s, initiated by Burmah-Shell’s needs for market research. S. H. Benson (London) Ltd was selected to undertake the pioneering market research that led to the birth of Indian Market Research Service, headed by Krishnaier Parameswaran. Marketing research in India presented numerous challenges (that were overcome) because the operating environment was very different than in advanced countries.

Because of the paucity of information in the literature, this investigation as per the authors’ knowledge represents the first attempt to record the birth and early history of marketing research in India. The recording of history is limited by the fact that many of the early pioneers and collaborators are no longer alive and because of the difficulty in retrieving archival mostly proprietary information.

In determining the future of a practice, it is important to know the history of the practice. It helps determine whether history proceeds in a random manner or whether it proceeds following some discernable patterns. In an area that has been ahistorical, this research identifies the origins of the practice. It is hoped that other researchers build upon this construction of the early history of marketing research in India based on their experiences and knowledge of the pioneering companies and practitioners and using sound historiographical tenets.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an advertising history of Tata Steel from its inception in 1907 to 2007 when it completed 100 years of operation. The authors use postcolonial theory to highlight the intertwining of advertising with the broader project of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial nation-building.

The authors used a visual analysis of a compilation of advertisements published by Tata Steel to commemorate 100 years of its existence, spanning the years from 1907 to 2007. They also used ads and posters available on the website of the Tata Steel Archives. Published work on Tata Steel such as books and papers provided contextualization.

Advertising creatives, through selective deployment of anticolonial discourses, manage the contradictory pulls of emergent nationalism on the one hand and the pragmatic need to work with the colonial administration on the other. However, such a negotiation leads to moments of slippage, where advertising reinforces colonial tropes. At a broader level, the authors suggest that despite attempts to draw on subversive discourses of resistance used by nationalists, Tata Steel’s advertising is inescapably intertwined with the larger matrix of colonial and capitalist power.

This study contributes to a non-Western perspective on advertising history. Further, it provides understanding of the marketing activities of a large corporation, which straddles the colonial and postcolonial era of India, an important economy.

Leraning outcomes are as follows: demonstrating how companies in the Indian market are using competitive advertising; giving participants an overview of the regulatory framework for advertising in India; highlighting the complexities arising out of the multiplicity of advertising regulations and institutions in India; appreciating the legal and ethical perspectives of advertisements and self-regulation; and evaluating the stance taken by both the parties in this particular case to develop multi-stakeholder perspective.

A recent advertisement by international conglomerate Hindustan Unilever Limited was severely criticized for insulting Indian values by Baba Ramdev, promoter of India's largest Ayurvedic Company selling Indian indigenous and natural alternate medicinal products. It was in a complete reversal of the scenario between 2015 and 2018 when other Indian consumer goods companies complained against advertisements released by Patanjali. Indian fast moving consumer goods sector is witnessing a trend of competitive advertising in which companies are downplaying and criticizing the competitors. Though quite old, this trend caught momentum when Patanjali Ayurved Limited, a new player in the market, started advertising aggressively in 2015–2016. It resulted in many complaints by the aggrieved parties in the industry bodies and different courts of law in India. A part of the confusion comes from the diversity of advertising regulations across different Indian platforms and the absence of a clearly defined institutional framework for resolving such disputes. Consequently, most such disputes land up in the court of law in India. The case study builds an understanding of the legal framework within which companies are governed for brand promotions and creates a contextual ethical dilemma to drive the discourse on advertising through self-regulation in India.

This case is meant to benefit students pursuing a graduate or upper-level undergraduate degree in management or law/business law.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

As globalization becomes ever more prominent, the role of media and advertising is increasing. Ideally for large multinationals that have the resources to take advantage of globalization there exists a larger “market” to which products can be sold. To create and sustain their market, these multinationals companies use aggressive advertising strategies. Television is a aggressive advertising media for these companies. In India television advertising has been expanding throughout the 1990s. Close on the heels of multinationals, domestic companies are also using television as a media to reach the Indian masses. As a result, the number of television commercials is increasing. With this the frequency and time of advertising pods, in a program, are also increasing. This competition between the program content and advertising pods is known as “clutter”. This advertising clutter and has led to companies questioning the efficiency of the medium of communication, in terms of reducing the competitive rivalry and creating a brand impression. This paper aims at understanding this relationship between advertising clutter and multiple activities a viewer might be involved in i.e. polychronic use of time: as proposed by Kaufman and Lane (1994). The study concludes that Indian youth exhibit mental nomadship rather than channel or physical nomadship, at current levels of advertising. Furthermore, channel nomadship has a significant relationship with the person who has control over the remote and the time for which the television is being watched. Physical nomadship has a significant relationship with age, gender and education level. Finally, mental nomadship was related to gender and education level. The study also has important implications for managers.

With increasing use of explicit comparative advertisement to get share of consumers’ mind and influence their purchase decision in western context, the same is now used extensively in emerging markets like India. However, there has not been sufficient research to understand the effectiveness of explicit comparative advertisement in low and high-involvement product categories. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to attempt to understand the effectiveness of explicit comparative advertising on consumers’ attitude and purchase intention (PI) towards high and low-involvement products.

The study carried out experimental treatments with 2 × 2 factorial design among 200 Indian young consumers who were in the age group 18-25. The independent variables were product categories and type of advertising (comparative and non-comparative) and dependent variables were consumer attitude and PIs.

It was found that the comparative form of advertisement developed favourable response towards the advertisement, rather than towards the brand or PI.

The study found that comparative advertising is effective for high as well as low-involvement product category in changing the consumer’s attitude towards the advertisement. The research has used print media for conducting the experiment.

It can be inferred that comparisons should be supplemented with additional information in the form of the unique features and associated emotions and feeling of the product in order to develop favourable attitude towards the brand and PI.

Comparative advertising is a growing domain and there has been very little contribution by the researchers specially on high and low-involvement product categories.

The purpose of this study is to estimate the relative contributions of individual marketing mix variables to sales as well as short‐term and long‐term effects of advertising in India.

Time‐series data on sales and marketing mix variables have been collected for two brands. Two double‐log regression modes have been fitted on data to estimate the relative contribution of each effort as well as to isolate the amount of sales due to advertising only. In addition, a log‐linear partial‐adjustment model has been fitted on adjusted sales and advertising data to estimate both short‐term and long‐term effects of advertising.

Results reveal that all the marketing mix variables have significant relative contributions to sales in both the cases. It is also found that advertising does have significant short‐term and long‐term effects on adjusted sales for both the brands.

Findings provide a deep insight in dynamic perspective of advertising that make them eminently suitable in the process of allocation of budget to achieve both the short‐term and long‐term goals of advertising.

This research made a notable contribution to the literature due to lack of quantitative modeling works on marketing data reported in the field of advertising in India.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of nostalgic advertising in Indian television and its execution with reference to extent of information disclosure, level of involvement, type of products and stages in product life cycle (PLC).

This research uses a content analysis of 700 TV advertisements aired between January-December 2013 from top five Indian TV channels based on their rank according to Gross Viewership in Thousands.

Humour/happiness was the most commonly used emotional appeal and nostalgic ads constituted 12 per cent of the emotional ads in Indian television. “References to past family experiences” was the most commonly used nostalgic element. As hypothesised, nostalgic ads use low information disclosure strategy (vis-à-vis high/medium information disclosure strategy) and are more commonly used for low involvement products (vis-à-vis high involvement products), experience products (vis-à-vis search products), and non-durables (vis-à-vis durables). Also, nostalgic appeals are more commonly used at maturity stage of PLC (vis-à-vis introduction stage).

This is the first research to analyse the content and execution of nostalgic advertising in India. This study is also one of the first to provide a comprehensive framework on nostalgic advertising. The interrelationships among variables such as product category, process of emotional appeal, degree of information disclosure and stage in PLC has not been investigated earlier, in the context of nostalgic advertising. Moreover, this study is the first attempt to present a snapshot of TV ads in India.

Environmental claims in advertising (green ads) provide competitive advantage to firms. This study aims to understand what kinds of environmental claims advertisers make in a developing nation like India. Further, implications for policymakers and advertisers are discussed.

A content analysis of 279 green print advertisements was conducted using a comprehensive list of claim categories identified from the advertising literature. These categories included advertiser profile; ad promotions – type, sector, appeal; claim – nature, type, focus, validity, emphasis; executional elements – illustration setting, presenter, format/structure and environmental issue, identified from past studies and practitioner interviews.

The findings suggest that majority of the advertisers using green ads are manufacturers. Consumer durables, real estate and power sector together constitute one-third of the total green ads. Further, most of the green ads are aimed at influencing consumer behaviour. Though most of the ads contain strong emphasis on environmental attributes, they are ambiguous. A large proportion of claims are credence in nature and lack product identification through environmental certifications. This study also identifies areas of concern including interpretation of the term green, use of multiple certifications, greenwashing and advertisers showing environmental responsiveness through event-based green advertising. Policy recommendations are made based on green advertising regulations governing them across developed and other developing countries.

The content analysis of the green advertisements in this study was limited to newspaper advertisements within the print media. Future studies may use advertisements from different media types, such as the internet ads and television commercials, to examine the effect of media type on the nature of green advertisements. It would also be interesting to examine the role of regulations as a moderator, influencing the claims made in green advertisements.

The findings of this study provide a comprehensive overview of the nature of green advertisements in India. Marketers may use these insights to design effective green advertising strategies.

Most of the extant literature has examined environmental claims in the context of developed nations, where regulations are well established. Very few studies have examined this issue in the context of developing countries. In addition, most of the previous studies have focused on specific issues like greenwashing, appeals and execution elements. The present study contributes to green advertising by examining environmental claims in case of a developing nation like India using a comprehensive list of claim categories. This study also identifies areas of concern and suggests recommendations for policymakers and advertisers.

The purpose of this study is to examine likeable executional techniques in advertising across five Asian countries and their impact on purchase intentions.

A total of 1,000 urban young adults in five Asian countries (HK, China, Indonesia, Thailand and India) were telephone interviewed on their thoughts about the TV advertisement/s that they liked, product that was being advertised and purchase intention. Their responses were summarised into seven likeable executional techniques and product categories.

There is not a specific likeable executional technique that influences a purchase in four of the five countries. India is the only country where significant but weak overall model fit observed. These results demonstrate that, while there are differences among the countries, people in the same cohort broadly share the same values. For product categories, our findings demonstrate that product nature may moderate cultural influence on advertising effectiveness.

International advertisers who are vying for a share of the largely‐untapped Asian market can benefit by understanding the target country's cultural values and using it as a guideline for creating effective executional techniques in advertising.

This study extends the existing knowledge which demonstrates that, in Asia, persuasive executional techniques differ depending on the product category.

Extant research on comparative advertising has focused only on “market leader” comparisons (a brand targeting the market leader), whereas in the marketplace, “multi-brand” comparisons are more prevalent (Kalro et al., 2010). Moreover, most research focuses on direct comparisons only. Hence, this research aims to investigate the interplay between comparison ad strategy (“market leader”/“multi-brand” comparisons) and comparison ad format (direct/indirect comparisons) on the effectiveness of comparative advertising.

This paper uses four 2 × 2 fully crossed factorial designs (comparison ad format: direct vs indirect and comparison ad strategy: market leader vs multi brand) with established and new brands in two categories: powdered detergents and smart phones. All studies were conducted in metropolitan cities of India.

By and large, the experiments indicated that direct (indirect) comparisons lowered (heightened) perceived manipulative intent and enhanced (reduced) attitude-toward-the-ad for multi-brand (market leader) comparisons.

Findings suggest that when advertisers use comparative advertising, they may use direct ads when using multi-brand comparisons and use indirect ones when using market leader comparisons. It could also be argued that when advertisers use multi-brand comparisons because of fragmentation in the marketplace, they may directly compare against these multiple brands. When advertisers need to compare against a market leader, they may do so indirectly.

This research is among the first to investigate multi-brand comparisons that are widely used in the industry and that too in the context of both direct and indirect comparison formats.