This is a recipe for eggnog, the ‘traditional’ holiday drink, at any rate in the English-speaking world. Downing a glass induces the kind of warm torpor so suited to reflection, which, with celebration, is part of the deep design of all festivals, especially those that mark a new year. A good place to start is the quote marks on ‘traditional’.

Festival traditions are in a permanent state of slow flux, subject to the processes of evolution, cross-breeding, mergers and a myriad of social and economic currents. So Christmas has several origins, as does Diwali, often referred to as India’s equivalent of Christmas. No single myth governs them. Diwali is a convergence of practice among different faiths, not a consensus of meaning.

This suggests that most festivals that are part of religious traditions, are also connected to older folk traditions. Thus Christmas is eventually Christian, but its traditions and origins were several before they became singular. Christmas lore is an amalgam of the traditions of several countries; even Yule (Yuletide, remember?) is a Germanic, pre-christian festival, and the long-bearded appearance of Father Christmas/Santa Claus/Sinterklaas may wind back to the Norse Odin (or later derivations thereof). And so on and on.

Festivals are co-opted into newer religions as a part of an embrace-and-extend strategy adopted by religious leaders since religions also collaborate with power. (Though differences in degree may distinguish Semitic religions from, say, the Hindu faith).

The point is that since these festivals are neither non-religious nor explicitly liturgical, they are much freer to evolve or invent themselves than religious rituals. The co-opting of festivals by larger, powerful religious movements, or by different communities may lead to a certain uniformity of performance.

In modernity, though, commerce and media are likely the most powerful forces that both stimulate re-invention and crystallise festival tradition. India is not a stranger to these newly synthesised ‘traditions’. The Santoshi Mata cult appeared spontaneously in the 1960s, spread by lore and word of mouth. But an iconography (appearance, dress, texts) are products of print capitalism (posters) and, to coin a phrase, entertainment capitalism, with the 1975 blockbuster film Jai Santoshi Ma.

In modernity, though, commerce and media are likely the most powerful forces that both stimulate re-invention and crystallise festival tradition.

And so it is with eggnog (the recipe above is Jamie Oliver’s, one of the 13.5 million pages answering to ‘eggnog recipes’ on Google). The recent, often commercial origins of many Christmas rituals is common knowledge. The figure of Santa (as a fat man) is said to be a Coca Cola creation, and the current uniform, the ‘Santa Suit’ dates to Henry Nast’s work for Harper’s magazine. A newspaper illustration of Queen Victoria with a Christmas tree is said to have ignited the popularity of the craze, with artificial trees (1930) being introduced by a toothbrush manufacturer putting a spare machine to profitable use. Christmas cards date to Sir Henry Cole who had the first set printed with a common message, and so on and on to every detail.

Consumer media culture has created an exact, and universally agreed set of symbols with which we celebrate, and especially, consume the festival. Design, through media’s power of multiplication facilitates the creation of these symbols. They are born from other, older imagery, by repeating, and re-using them and fixing their shape in specific ways.

Consumer media culture has created an exact, and universally agreed set of symbols with which we celebrate, and especially, consume the festival.

The examples above, (to which add flying reindeer sled, gifts, holly and mistletoe, all drawn from various traditions) are the work of a legion of illustrators, advertisers, songwriters and tunesmiths who have fashioned a commercialised, consistent and largely transnational festival. A red, green and white palette in certain proportions instantly spells Christmas, if it is a certain time of the year. Gradually, less and less figurative detail is needed.

The deity Ganesha similarly is an all-weather icon, made compact, portable and viral. Ganesha transcends affiliations. Even minimally religious people collect Ganesha figurines as showpieces, or they might jostle for space on the pooja rack: no theological specificity applies. A painter down on his luck can survive by churning out a few. Again, his popularity allows the elimination of detail and extravagant simplification of form. Fittingly, communist China supplies both Ganeshas and Christmas decorations. One village, says BBC, has 600 factories that account for 60% of the world’s supply of the latter.

But the graphic plane is not the sole site of simplification. Festivals themselves are radically simplified into a precise choreography of symbols and rituals, driven by commerce, not by community. This objectifies it in two senses. A symbolic code with a set of visual, physical (even edible!) objects; and in the sense of making it objective—tick these boxes (wear the Santa Cap, stuff a stocking) to satisfy the conditions of performance.

In this setting it’s hard to achieve an authentic connection with the festival without escaping into the arms of the Mass or the mandir. A Diwali tied to crackers or a Christmas marked by a sad mall Santa sweating under his cotton beard, picture the world that the communications industry—and designers, too—have helped fabricate.

It’s something to consider when we sit down to design. Our profession fits in the framework of creating value for our clients. Our output, though, becomes a part of the pool of images and artefacts, that we call culture, and therefore can and should be seen outside that frame. Every now and then, we are criticised for our part in creating an ugly world, just as those who see Gurgaon’s commercial district as monstrosities must surely pass some of the blame to architects. But with these images and artefacts, we facilitate changes in practice and traditions. Perhaps we’ll take some of the blame for creating a shinier, prettier, easier world, and in so doing, a trivialised and arguably impoverished experience of this thing called the festival.

Our output, though, becomes a part of the pool of images and artefacts, that we call culture, and therefore can and should be seen outside that frame.

The symbols increasingly substitute the thing, inserting the gaudy, trivial and universally-unrejected in place of the personal, fulfilling but effortful. A bit like an eggnog powder (just add water).

Season’s greetings anyway.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘A brand new Christmas’ in Business Standard, 23 December, in Deep Design, a monthly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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The uber-construct in the modern liking business is personality, or the attribution of human psycho-social traits to non-human things. It’s the most-used framework to understand and structure liking. But it was not always so.

Modernity

Tools for thinking about liking are understandably limited to ancient, if evolving, canons of proportion and form. These tend to treat humans as alike: indeed, for much of time, people were differentiated mainly through social roles: home, family, and occupation.

So the appreciation of individual differences in a high-resolution way, and their becoming a subject of analysis may well be a feature of modernity itself, wrought by manufacturing, marketing, and organised work on the one hand, and the evolution of psychology on the other. Starting about 1950, according to one widely used periodisation, marketing introduced the concept of a customer’s lifetime value, and thus the need to build a relationship, opening the door to a subjective understanding of the consumer.

Just like a man

Personality’s uber status comes from its popularity. It is instinctively understood by the lay person, partly because imbuing things with human form and psychology is innate: we do it to gods, aliens and cars. Yet it can be dissected by the expert with pedantic detail.

The key to its usage is that it can be applied to abstractions such as products, communications or brands as well as describe the person using or consuming them. In most versions of the technique, the thing’s personality traits (like bold, tenacious and witty) can be matched to similar profiles, presuming an attraction of likes. This is the first theory of marketing that is also a theory of liking.

Personality has its deniers who insist it’s a fiction, or at best an artefact of popularity and function. Yet it does have an empirical existence, even for the most rational. In an experiment by Kapferer, doctors were willing to describe the personalities of medicines with multiple traits. Analysis of trait data showed that drugs with higher scores for some traits (like dynamism or, interestingly, creativity) were more often prescribed than low scorers on the same traits. Conversely, those that rated high on ‘cold’ and ‘hard’ were prescribed less.

But predicting the traits to match correctly is not an easy task, as the example above shows. People may not be attracted to likes; they may instead be looking to fill gaps in their lives, just as a confused person seeks clarity and security rather than more options. It’s one thing to say that we can match personalities, but our audience may be very disparate and their behaviour driven by context and circumstance.

Do this

So a more durable way to look at this is to use personality not for pure attraction by matched traits, but to render the ideal ‘sender’ of the message as a credible source of the benefit being pursued.

use personality not for pure attraction by matched traits, but to render the ideal ‘sender’ of the message as a credible source of the benefit being pursued.

Those seeming arch-rationalists, the computer and software industry were quick to see that interfaces with human-like objects were better understood and worked better. From birth, the Macintosh has sported a distinct folksily-human personality to support its ease-of-use promise. It too anthropomorphised the Mac giving it a face which continues today with a hat-tip to Picasso. At its unveiling, the Mac spoke, thanking Steve Jobs, “who’s been like a father to me.” Microsoft’s assistants like most early robots were humanoid.

Thousand words, but hazy picture

One of the attractions of personality as a framework is that the human character provides a catalogue of thousands of traits. Or at least, words for them: this is the so-called lexical hypothesis which proposes that traits important to us must have words for them. This problem of plenty is tackled with factor analysis, a statistical technique to reduce them to a handful of master traits, with several lesser traits supporting each.

Here the problems begin. A trait-word can be located under several master traits, as their meaning changes with context. Worse, some industries centre around favourite traits: Kapferer points out that computer brands, cluster around advanced or clever, and ice creams are sensuous. Neither are strictly personality terms, but are functional or physical traits. Next, cultural lenses can get in the way. A Millward Brown paper, which uses a trait inventory system based on ancient archetypes, found that the iPhone’s traits added up to it being a ‘seductress’ in the UK and a ‘dreamer’ in Japan. In India, Deep Design finds all brands want to be ‘friendly and approachable’.

Cultural lenses can get in the way. A Millward Brown paper, found that the iPhone’s traits added up to it being a ‘seductress’ in the UK and a ‘dreamer’ in Japan. In India, Deep Design finds all brands want to be ‘friendly and approachable’.

And it just keeps rolling along

Despite practical and theoretical problems (for example can the identity concept encompass identity, or must it be the other way around?) personality seems indestructible. Celebrity marketing seems eternal: we can see an intuitive fit with the brand, without needing to agree on the list words that attach to the personality and to the brand.

Maybe it will take a new idea like machine learning to make the old one of personality really hum. Digital marketing can deliver different versions of the same campaign to selected users; one test demonstrated 20% more ‘buy’ clicks with individual targeting based on user’s scores on the Big Five, currently the most validated personality model. What’s of note is that software can infer personality on the fly, typing the user in context as he surfs…

Scary? Relax, it’s me, the friendly, human social media machine.

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First published in a slightly modified form ‘Personality, the uber-construct in the modern ‘liking’ business’ in Business Standard, 19 August, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.

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Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make objects and symbols, for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined situations. So an invitation to ‘share a fresh perspective’ at a consumer summit, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Marketers and designers want to work together more closely, but they lack a common view of the humanscape. Wherever the marketer can speak for the consumer, he has the mike, so to speak.

Design, to use the current argot of the trade, is centred on users, or humans—a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a mother manoeuvring her toddler into a high chair. It addresses the unchanging human system: the body and its limbs; a sensory apparatus dominated by sight; a logical tendency, subject to a fickle attention and the twitches of the lizard brain; perhaps some rudimentary notions of pride.

Finally, design’s problem-solving orientation focuses on the user’s behaviour in the context of interacting with the designed solution, not an inner drive. We care about a score of things: from whether her task got done, to whether our work left society better in some way. But not whether this user was insecure about her future, socially constrained, or struggling with being modern: a user is a user.

Joy to the world, the consumer is born

Advertising created the consumer, or a person viewed purely by a propensity to buy, use up, and buy more of something, when industrial capitalism started to produce increasingly better but increasingly similar products. Human ingenuity responded by creating new needs, (like the ability to impress friends at a party) and fears, (like the failure to be a good mum). Not much design here; and while the human traits assumed here are fairly universal, it does introduce psychology into the mix.

More sophisticated efforts from the time of Cheskin’s sensory marketing have co-opted design, realising that a product’s visual imprint can transcend its function. These marketers were not just after simple beauty, but saw form as whispering to a consumer psyche, per the psychological fashions of the day. So Bernays’ stunt of getting suffragettes to simultaneously light up cigarettes, during a march down a Manhattan avenue, was meant to convince women to overcome their unconscious (Freudian) fear of the cigarette’s ‘phallic’ shape. Post-war American cars were endlessly re-designed, to engineer their appearance to work with the consumer’s hidden mental apparatus, arguably to appeal to masculinity and power.

But consumer theory is a braid with two strands. One strand is empirical, quantitative and cognitive. It aims to tease out the best approach to (for example) segmenting markets, studying things like demographics, spending power, geography, and physical constraints to buying. Rather like applied economics, it deals with the consumer’s rational side, offering benefits like efficacy or economy that are universal. Complexity notwithstanding, a great deal can be made out by careful statistics and reason working hand in hand, to some degree of certainty.

I have a feeling

The other strand hypothesises the consumer as an emotional being who is an actor in a social, cultural and economic drama, to explain or identify her deep motivations and anxieties. It uses data, but interpretively, and also pays heed to trained impressions. Its findings are qualitative and uncertain. It seeks validity, postponing the need for certainty.

Of particular interest are the consumer’s values and culture. This is an attempt to extend our knowledge of the consumer including but beyond his observed behaviour in the context of our product or brand, but a deep orientation that influences his actions, at various if not all times. The idea is that a brand’s values can resonate with that of a group of consumers, and make them loyalists. (Go back to paragraph 3 and appreciate the contrast).

These groupings offer a kind of alternate market segmentation, cutting across income classes, social class lines (defined by entitlements like access and status) or communal ones (such as religious, ethnic or national). For example: the multitudes that see in a Trump or a Modi a corrective to a historical power grab by a mealy-mouthed elite. Or others who belatedly learn ritualism from a previous generation to compensate for the Indian-ness they see evaporating from their lives. Each grouping, united by attitude, offers multiple predictions, not for a single, narrow product or context, but with multiple economic, social, cultural and political possibilities, with lasting implications.

Design speaks up

It is in this second strand that designers can come into their own, not in their accustomed role as downstream providers of expression, who take their cues from marketers. Instead, as intelligent observers and interpreters of culture, especially the visual. They are uniquely placed because they pour products into the stream of culture, as well as fish in it for reference and inspiration.

Designers can observe how people express themselves visually: the fashions and codes their choices seem to converge on. How we decorate our homes (why is a comic book style print of Meena Kumari doing on that cushion cover?), and how the groom’s niece dances at a sangeet function, why not? And yes, how they buy. Then, they need to join the dots: what does this say about people and their responses the forces shaping their life? The anthropologist Grant McCracken, who studies culture and commerce, sees this as the source of design’s power in the boardroom.

Alessi is more

Or take the Italian household appliances maker Alessi, which commissions famous designers for its products, and has several iconic products among them. The business scholar Roberto Verganti, who has studied the methods of innovative Italian businesses, points out that these icons are not merely awards-circuit darlings but broad commercial successes. They command significant price premiums and disproportionate volumes, for years together. That last criterion implies deep attachment, not an acute social contagion with a brief, steep peak.

Alessi’s method relies on trusted interpreters, who identify large cultural swells (a fatigue with a joyless modernity, for example) and select a designer based on the likelihood that his temperament can speak to that mood. Their choices may be surprising: Alessi’s best known classic, a kettle, came out of a collaboration with the American architect Michael Graves.

The challenge for marketers with this type of thinking is to tolerate the uncertainty of a payoff, in exchange for its size and longevity. Innovative products or market strategies need more than a jaap of the Steve Jobs naam. Designers need to be able to not just observe and imagine, but to convincingly interpret and act. They can start by convincing themselves.

So, I accepted the invitation. Will you?

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