I had barely settled into my chair with my first drink when Vermajee looked at me and smiled. “You have seen Drishyam, haven’t you?”
I looked at him, mildly surprised. “What gave me away?”
“Nothing. I know you. You have that look you get when a film has given you something to write about. And if I am right, you have already pushed your review under what you call… Skip or Watch with Sanjeev Kotnala.”
He took a sip and added, almost casually, “Good you watched Drishyam, because advertising is all about Drishyam.”
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Advertising creates a reality zone for a brand by deciding which part of reality the consumer should notice, remember and eventually believe. Perception, after all, is reality adulterated with reality. And Drishyam makes us uncomfortable because it reminds us that what we see isn’t necessarily true.
The Hindi Drishyam has Ajay Devgn as Vijay Salgaonkar, while Mohanlal plays Georgekutty in the original Malayalam film. The famous 2 October alibi is built through repetition, detail and consistency. “Yaad hai na 2 October ko kya hua tha?” becomes more than a question. It becomes a constructed memory.
Vermajee interrupted my thought. “And that is where advertising gets interesting. Words create visuals. Visuals define the narrative. Narrative creates belief. And consistency makes belief stronger. We in advertising always knew that. Drishyam simply made it public.”
He paused. “We have spent years talking about the visual hammer. But perhaps Drishyam gives us another way of looking at it. If the visual hammer drives the message into memory, visual grammar and word associations decide what exactly gets hammered into the mind.”
He had a point. A visual is never merely a visual. Colour, composition, expression, setting, typography, gesture and even the objects surrounding a product create associations. Words can reinforce those associations or take the meaning somewhere else. Strong brand communication makes the visual and verbal worlds tell the same story, consistently.
“That’s perception management,” I said.
“Exactly.”
He laughed. “So you do remember the lesson about filters from Communication 1.0!”
I laughed too. Every message passes through filters of what we know, believe, expect and have experienced. The communicator may send one message; the receiver may receive something entirely different.
“Exactly,” Vermajee said. “And advertising works inside that space.”
Confirmation bias makes the process even more interesting. What we believe influences what we notice. And what we repeatedly see can influence what we believe. Give consumers a story that fits their mental frame, reinforce it with recognisable cues and repeat it consistently, and subsequent evidence gets interpreted through that frame.
That is why advertising does not necessarily invent reality. It selects, frames, dramatises and repeats a particular reality until it becomes the reality most easily retrieved when the category or the brand comes to mind.
A car may have hundreds of engineering attributes, but advertising can make us see safety. A detergent can make us see superior cleaning. A bank can occupy the perceptual space of trust. The objective is to create a perceptual ring of confidence and relevance around the brand.
“Then call it Drishyam?” Vermajee asked.
“What matters in the marketplace is often not the entire reality,” I said. “It is the reality the consumer is made to notice.”
Vermajee smiled. “And that is why the first battle for a brand is not preference. It is perception.”
A brand that is never noticed cannot enter the consideration set. A brand that enters with the wrong meaning has another battle to fight. But one that consistently makes consumers notice a relevant advantage, connect it with a believable narrative and recognise it over time has already created an important competitive asset.
It has created its Drishyam.
However, one critical difference exists between Vijay Salgaonkar’s world and advertising. A brand cannot allow its Drishyam to drift too far from reality. The greater the distance between promise and experience, the harder the eventual collision. When consumers discover that what they were made to see has little connection with what they actually experience, perception collapses.
Perhaps the lesson is not that perception is everything. It is that perception determines which part of reality gets noticed first.
And in a crowded consideration set, being seen the right way may be the first step towards being considered at all.
Vermajee raised his glass. “To advertising. To Drishyam.”
I raised mine. “To advertising. To Drishyam. To Advertising 1.0!”
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