Indian faces adorn foreign spaces

Our celebrities are increasingly being featured by foreign brands in their advertisements

• More foreign brands like Swatch are using Indian faces for their campaigns
• Indian celebrities are also becoming brand ambassadors for foreign brands
• Indian models are gracing the international circuit for fashion houses

Indians living in New York excitedly chatter about what Aishwarya Rai is doing smiling down on them from Times Square billboards. And the French contemplate where Swatch model Lakshmi is really from! While foreign companies try to woo the Indian consumer by using local celebrities in ads, brands are now taking local faces to global spaces, with Indian celebrities getting tube time as well as outdoor space for major worldwide brands.

Welcome to ‘Exoticism in advertising’ in which the flavour of the world is clearly Asia and within that India.

Taking faces global

Historically, international brands have used Indian celebrities to help them get a foothold in the Indian sub-continental market. National Panasonic used actor Mithun Chakraborty way back in the 80’s, while today almost every sector from banks, like Deutsch Bank and Sania Mirza, to IT with Lenovo and Saif Ali Khan, is using Indian celebrities.

Parag Tembulkar, group creative director, Publicis USA, explains that now this phenomenon has moved across borders due to the evangelism of the Indian film industry, a plethora of books written by and on India and the new money due to call centers, software developers etc: all this has given India the ‘coolness’ factor

“India is now the next happening thing. There is talk about economic power shifting to the subcontinent, thus brands want to ride on this hype and associate themselves with the ‘icons of this cool’,” says Tembulkar. While earlier beauty pageant winners may have graced magazine covers, now Kareena Kapoor poses for Citizen as King Khan flexes his muscles for Tag Heuer alongside Aishwarya’s L’Oreal billboards.

Actor Abhishek Bachchan’s relationship with Omega is one point to note. Raynald Aeschlimann, vice president sales Omega believes in choosing Bachchan they found the perfect iconic synergy with their brand’s style and performance for India, as well as for an international audience. Bachchan will soon be flying to Switzerland in the coming weeks to do a joint promotion for Omega along with global brand ambassador actress Nicole Kidman. While Bachchan is an icon in India, he is also a global phenomenon, being popular amongst the Indian and other communities in the UK and the US, both very vital markets.

NRI vs global market

Photographer Farrukh Chothia, who has shot many international campaigns with Indian faces like Longines and Swatch explains that there are two markets abroad for Indian faces. “A truly global look is when you pitch the brand across cultures and styles, whereas now there are also campaigns which only target the Indian diaspora living abroad.” This is a lucrative market: according to a 2003 Merrill Lynch Market Study, one in every nine Indians in the US is a millionaire, and Indians are the second largest Asian group, only behind the Chinese. Close to 25 million Indians make up the non-resident Indian and persons-of-Indian-origin community abroad, of which 2.5 million live in USA while over 1 million Indians live in the UK and Canada.

The NRI is now a force to reckon with: K.V. Sridhar, national creative director, Leo Burnett explains that Indians are now making as much money as anyone living abroad and brands want to capture that business. “Indian businessmen are becoming global heroes, and with this comes more respect for Indians, and thus, more brands are taking on Indian brand ambassadors for their international products and campaigns,” says Shridhar. As Indian icons like Lakshmi Mittal, Shashi Tharoor, Ratan Tata and Vijay Amritraj dominate the international arena they are becoming a symbol of brand India which companies want to capitalize on. Tebulkar adds, “International brands and people who earlier dismissed India as just another fancy and mystical place are now seriously waking up to its economic potential.”

Call of the mysterious East

Apart from just economic success, the ultimate lure of the mysterious east, its exotic women, is also a favorite for international campaigns, with brands using their unique look as well as local/global fame to their benefit. Chothia, who shot Dipannita Sharma for Breguet, Lakhsmi for Swatch, and Aishwarya Rai for Longines, explains that for all his campaigns there was no trying to bring an innate ethnic ‘Indianness’ into it. “The idea for the first two was to use a beautiful woman but nobody knows who she is or where she’s from. In the case of Aishwarya, Longines was pitching her as a beautiful woman from India while also buying in to her fame and popularity, both in India and abroad.” While Swatch and Breguet used the exotic mystery factor to draw spectators into their ads with Lakshmi and Dipannita, Aishwarya becomes the elegant and classic Indian beauty for Longines.

The depiction of India by using local faces in international markets is about the acceptance of the country’s success on the global stage in every way, political, economic and social. “Indian representation on a global, celebrity level makes the average Indian feel that he or she has ‘arrived’,” states Tembulkar. Also, he states that since Indian celebrities are restricted to fancy expensive brands, not day to day mass brands, it adds to the ‘high-end’ and ‘cool’ factor associated with India and Indian people. Adding to this, Sridhar explains campaigns will only grow to feature more Indians since, as Mr. Bachchan once said, every sixth human in the world is an Indian, and every Indian knows him-this is what brands will learn to capitalize on for their future.