If you ever travelled on the Tatanagar-Rourkela route on Eastern and North-Eastern Railways, you must have come across tea vendors selling their tea with an interesting refrain, kharaab se kharaab chai (bad tea). Their tea is actually very good. Then why do they shout kharaab chai ?
It’s an intelligent marketing gimmick, and recently an MBA student from the Army Institute of Management, Kolkata did a PhD thesis on this marketing strategy, that works on reverse psychology or Ostensible Negative Marketing. Though this seems to be a novel gimmick of selling product/s by marketing it negatively and even derogatorily, this strategy is not new.
I was once in a restaurant in Turkey where a board announced ‘ Burzaan Gisf ’ (literally, ‘Bad Food’). Curious, I ordered a food item at random: nuzlik (mushroom) curry with bread. It turned out to be the best mushroom curry I ever had. The restaurant was crammed with patrons. It was obvious that the food served there was just opposite to what was ‘claimed’ by the owner.
This is known as the ‘charm of negativity’. S. Jankiprasad of The Patriot wrote in a travelogue in 1970 of how he once visited a small eatery in Punjab, at Malerkotla. The name of the eatery was ‘Sade Ande’ (addled eggs). But its egg curry, especially Afghan masala egg curry, was divine. So were all other preparations of egg. I tried to locate that restaurant on my visit to Malerkotla in 2014 but the owner had shut shop in 2013 after successfully brandishing the trade name Sade Ande for close to 50 years.
Drawn to the negative
Psychologically, people tend to get drawn to things that have a seemingly negative ring to them. This human tendency was exploited by many greats in the past. Picasso declared he was painting his worst creation a year before Guernica adored the walls of the world’s finest art galleries and lo, it became his masterpiece! Picasso knew human psychology, and that negative publicity would attract even more connoisseurs.
This marketing policy is intelligently employed by many (Indian) filmmakers nowadays. They deliberately get their movies embroiled in negative publicity and controversies. People tend to become curious and even otherwise humdrum movies run to packed theatres.
‘Call it bad and enjoy its fruits’ is an oxymoronic saying in Italian. Anything negative has an overwhelming effect on our senses and the masses latch on to them. Popular imagination is often based upon mediocrity and that’s why Asadullah Khan Ghalib ruefully wrote in Persian, Choon asha’ar mizdaan waastif shudam/Nifak behatareen uzma’ain khidam (My worst couplets were liked by people and they rejected my best couplets).
That is the way the cookie crumbles and (negatively) the popular mind works, nay succeeds.
sumitmaclean@hotmail.com
