INVITED SPEAKERS

Media Modalities, Multilingual Contexts, and Marketing: Advertising in Rural India

Tej K. Bhatia

Syracuse University

Unchanged for centuries, rural populations constitute the heart of India. According to the 2001 census, most of India (about 75-78 percent of the total population) lives in more than half a million (total 627,000) villages and speaks in numerous languages and varieties. The two-fold dispersion phenomenon—geographical and linguistic-- poses a formidable challenge for advertisers and mass communicators wishing to reach this rural audience. Thanks to the economic forces of globalization, rural markets are no longer viewed as the basket case of international markets. The emergent trend for seeking out new hot markets (called B2-4B—business to 4-billion, see Prahalad 2005), represents a new reality in international business.

The lecture will focus on the following key-issues:

  • How do media planners, advertisers and marketers reach the unreachable with the most suitable media to ensure maximal spatial and audience reach?
  • How can they be reached linguistically and effectively ?
  • How does Indian Advertising resolve the globalization vs. localization paradox (Bhatia 2000, 2002)?

These questions and other aspects of Indian advertising, such as creativity, will be addressed. The lecture will particularly explore the importance of language and modality choice in the marketing of identities, products, services and ideas. The range of socio-psychological considerations which determine language choice either consciously or tacitly will be accounted for. The lecture will draw from both conventional (print, TV, the Internet etc.) and non-conventional (wall, outdoor, video van) advertising. Issues pertaining to targeting different identities through language and visual cues will be analyzed with special reference to the structural domains of an ad. Implications for applied linguistics will be presented.  

 

References

Bhatia, Tej K. 2000. Advertising in Rural India: Language, Marketing Communication, and Consumerism. Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo Press.

 

Bhatia, Tej K. 2002. Globalization, Localization or Glocalization? In Globalization and the Margins. Richard Grant and John Short (eds.), pp. 53-71. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Prahlad, C. K. (2005). The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. NJ: Person Education, Inc. Publishing as Wharton School Publishing.