The History of Early Brands and Advertising Is the History of India

Ramya Ramamurthy has made a very brave attempt to document the varied history of branding in India with her book Branded in History. It is copiously researched. In fact, I found that I was constantly making new discoveries about the history of branding in India – and that included brands that I thought I knew well, some of which I personally handled through my 42-year career in advertising.

For example, did you know that Ardeshir Godrej, after returning from Zanzibar (how exotic to be in Zanzibar in 1915), borrowed money from a Bombay merchant called Merwanji Cama, who waived the repayment of the loan on the condition that the name of his nephew Boyce would be added to the name of the company? For some reason, while handling Godrej & Boyce from my days at the erstwhile J Walter Thompson, I had assumed that in its history there must have been a Boyce associated with the company. But I never knew this important detail.

In many ways I also found that the history of brands was inextricably linked with the history of the country itself, and its passion to create products of national importance from soaps to banks to steel. Here, the national fervour for ‘swadeshi’, which was driven by the likes of M.K. Gandhi, Annie Besant and Rabindranath Tagore, must be adequately acknowledged. It far exceeds the passion that is going behind ‘atmanirbhar’ today, for example.

Also, from Ramamurthy’s writing I got a sense of the commitment and pride in producing something Indian which was being pursued by all the Indian entrepreneurs of the day. And the key word here was ‘pride’. I feel that if we were as proud a nation today as we were before independence, we might have been less corrupt for example. For a proud person would hardly accept a bribe from anyone; it would hurt his pride immensely.

Ramamurthy starts the book with the history of FMCG goods, as it is often referred to in India, although I personally prefer to call it packaged goods. Naturally, our first wave of production seems to have gone into soaps, oils, biscuits, snacks and similar products, before we moved on to banking, cement and steel. This is but natural. If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the bottom segment of the famous Maslow triangle has always centred around physiological needs.  Which means the need to remain physically clean and healthy is a primary one.

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The author does touch upon the fact that soap was perhaps considered a luxury product in that day. Lux was probably one of the first soaps in the country, with an endorsement from Leela Chitnis. Another interesting piece of trivia. Ramamurthy says that Cinthol was launched in 1952 and it was coined by combining the word synthetic with phenol. And no doubt they preferred Cinthol to Synthol. The origin of brands can often be very interesting.

Another interesting tidbit. Wagh Bakri chai was started by Narendas Desai and was borne out of his experience of racism in South Africa. To spread the belief of equality, they designed a logo with a wagh or tiger, drinking tea from the same cup as a bakri or goat. Today it is the third largest tea company in the country. One can only wish our brands of today could be as noble as some of these old brands and uphold the principle of equality enshrined in our Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human rights by the UN.

Throughout the book, the author makes reference to the spirit of swadeshi and talks about an ad for Indian soaps that I found most interesting.

Ramamurthy also covers the biscuits category and how the colonial high tea converted itself in India into “chai and biskoot”. It was a surprise to me that Britannia is even older than Parle and was established in 1892 in Calcutta.  However, it is Parle which has the cheapest biscuit in Parle G which has about 450 calories.

But perhaps the real leap in self-sufficiency for India came from the core sector, including automobiles. And this is where the top industrial houses like Tata, Birla, Godrej and Mahindra aligned themselves to the nation’s interests. Tata Steel, for example, became one of Asia’s first steel plants by establishing itself in Jamshedupur in 1907. Tata’s effort, it seems, had a lot of support both from M.K. Gandhi and freedom fighters like Subash Chandra Bose. Gandhi was one of the biggest supporters of self-sufficiency in heavy industries. The development of the steel industry began to propel other industries like construction, shipping and transport.

The author also covers the banking industry in detail. The reader suddenly realises that banks like Punjab National Bank are really old institutions that were established at the beginning of the last century, along with other banks like Bank of India and Central Bank of India. PNB, Ramamurthy says, was the first Indian bank to have been started solely with Indian capital and its founders included several leaders of the swadeshi movement. She mentions how banks didn’t think of advertising as being very relevant to them to build brands, and I think this trend persists till today. A number of banks still don’t advertise much.

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After covering the categories of soaps, beauty products, snack and biscuits, Ramamurthy moves on to tonics and pharmaceuticals, tobacco and matchboxes and banks, textiles and heavy industries. I thought that using advertising on matchboxes was quite unique and with the death of the matchbox, we have no doubt lost an important medium for advertising.

Branded in History is a book about advertising and branding that I think would be useful to the practitioner, teacher, student and also laypersons.

Cicero apparently said, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” This book, through the medium of brands, tells us about our history.

Prabhakar Mundkur is an ad veteran with over 40 years in advertising in India, Africa and Asia.