Identity and Nation in Coca Cola’s Thanda Narratives in India: A Semiotic Study

Rakesh Tripathi

doi:10.59045/nalans.2024.43

Authors

Rakesh Tripathi Sri Sri University Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2024.43

Keywords:

Advertisement, Competition, Semiotic, Narrative, Indian

Abstract

When Coca-Cola re-entered the Indian market in the era of government-initiated liberalization, privatization, and globalization in the 1990s, one of the major challenges it faced was to again penetrate the Indian soft drinks market and acquire a considerable market share over a period of time in view of the fact that it was a foreign brand which had pulled out of Indian market owing to unfavorable legislations in 1977. Given this scenario, Coca-Cola, despite being a global brand with a high recall value, faced tough competition from popular Indian brands like Thums Up, Limca, and Gold Spot, which enjoyed a larger market share during the early 1990s. To meet this challenge, Coca-Cola launched a series of television commercials in Hindi, the national language of the country, featuring its brand ambassador, Aamir Khan, a popular Indian actor. Considered to be one of the most creative and popular advertisement campaigns of its times, the commercials specifically aimed to create a favorable narrative for Coca-Cola in the minds of Indian consumers. All the different versions of the commercial had a common but powerful punch line, which played a major role in positioning the brand at par with the long-standing Indian brands in the market. This research article undertakes a semiotic analysis of the commercials, particularly with the aim of establishing the narrative(s) they offered and how that narrative was instrumental in giving Coca-Cola the makeover it needed to compete with the Indian brands.

References

Allen, F. (1994). Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World. Harper Collins.

Alexander, M., Burt, M., & Collinson, A. (1995). Big talk, small talk: BT's strategic use of semiotics in planning its current advertising. Journal of the Market Research Society, 37(2), 91–102.

Alozie, E. C. (2010). Advertising and culture: semiotic analysis of dominant symbols found in Nigerian mass media advertising. Journal of Creative Communications, 5(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/097325861100500101

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Baisya, R. K. (2008). Changing face of processed food industry in India. Ane Books.

Barthes, R., (Auth.), Heath, S. (Trans.). (1977). Image-music-text. Fontana.

Beasley, R., & Danesi, M. (2002). Persuasive signs: the semiotics of advertising. Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110888003.175

Belk, R. W. (Ed.). (2007). Handbook of qualitative research methods in marketing. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Berger, A. A. (2010). The objects of affection: semiotics and consumer culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

Berger, A. A. (2019). Brands and cultural analysis. Springer International Publishing.

Briandana, R. (2019). Representation of Political Ideology in Advertising: Semiotics Analysis in Indonesia Television. International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS) Vol-4, Issue-3, May - Jun, 2019. https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.4.3.31 ISSN: 2456-7620

Carducci, V. (2006). Culture Jamming: A Sociological Perspective. Journal of Consumer Culture. 6 (1): 116–138.

Chan, K. (2016). Social issues of advertising. City University of Hong Kong Press.

Chandler, D. (2007). Semiotics: the basics. Taylor & Francis.

Ciafone, A. (2019). Counter-cola: a multinational history of the global corporation. University of California Press.

De Mooij, M. (2010). Global marketing and advertising: understanding cultural paradoxes. SAGE Publications.

Dyer, G. (1982). Advertising as communication. London: Routledge.

Egan, J. (2022). Marketing communications. SAGE Publications.

Foster, Robert J. 2008. Coca-globalization: Following soft drinks from New York to New Guinea. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ghosh, B. (2010). Looking Through Coca-Cola: Global Icons and the Popular. Public Culture. 22 (2): 333–368.

Gokulsing K. Moti, Dissanayake Wimal, (Eds.). (2009). Popular culture in a globalised India. Taylor & Francis.

Goldman, R. L., Papson, S. (1996). Sign wars: the cluttered landscape of advertising. Guilford Publications.

Halliday, M.A.K., (1978). Language as a social semiotic: social interpretation of language and meaning. Hodder Arnold.

Holt, D. B. (2002). Why do brands cause trouble: a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding. Journal of Consumer Research. 29: 70-91.

Johnson, J. K. (2009). American advertising in Poland: a study of cultural interactions since 1990. McFarland.

Johnson, J. K. (2014). American advertising in Poland: a study of cultural interactions since 1990. McFarland.

Kadri, M. (2007). Glocal-cola: visual communications of coca-cola in India as a site of mediation between global and local factors. South Asia Journal for Culture. I: n.p

Kaye, J. (2004). Coca-Cola India. Tuck School of Business, http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pdf/2004-1-0085.pdf/.

Kooijman, J. (2008). Fabricating the absolute fake: America in contemporary popular culture. Amsterdam University Press.

Karttunen Klaus, Tenhunen Sirpa, (Eds.). (2014). Contentious connections: social imagination in globalizing south asia. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Kim, J.-E., Lloyd, S., Adebeshin, K. and Kang, J.-Y.M. (2019). Decoding fashion advertising symbolism in masstige and luxury brands, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 277-295. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-04-2018-0047

Klein, N. (2000). No logo. Vintage Canada.

Lawes, R. (2002). Demystifying semiotics: some key questions answered. International Journal of Market Research, 44(3), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/147078530204400302

Leeuwen, T. v., Kress, G. R. (1996). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. Routledge.

Leeuwen, T. Van (2005). Introducing social semiotics. Routledge.

Mazumdar, Ranjani. (2001). Figure of the “tapori”: language, gesture and cinematic city. Economic and Political Weekly, 36(52), 4872–4880. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4411542

Mazzarella. William. 2003a. 'Very Bombay': contending with the global in an Indian advertising agency. Cultural Anthropology. 18 (1): 33-

-. 2003b. Shoveling smoke: advertising and globalization in India. Duke University.

McQuarrie, Edward F. and Mick, David Glen, (1999). Visual rhetoric in advertising: text-interpretive, experimental, and reader-response analyses. Journal of Consumer Research 26 (June), pp. 37–54.

Mick, D., Burroughs, J., Hetzel, P. & Brannen, M. (2004). Pursuing the meaning of meaning in the commercial world: An international review of marketing and consumer research founded on semiotics. Semiotica, 2004(152-1-4), 1-74. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2004.2004.152-1-4.1

Muinz, A.M. and O'Guinn, T.C. (2001). Brand community. Journal of Consumer Research. 27: 412–432.

Noth, W. (1990). Handbook of semiotics. Indiana University Press

O'Shaughnessy, J. (2009). Interpretation in social life, social science, and marketing. Taylor & Francis.

Pendergast, M. (1993). For god, country and Coca-Cola: the unauthorized history of the great American soft drink and the company that makes it. Collier Books.

Pennock Speck, Barry, & Rubio, María Milagros del Saz (Eds.) (2013). The Multimodal Analysis of Television Commercials. Publicacions de la Universitat de València.

Pillai, P.R. Sreemahadevan. (2008). The saga of Plachimada. Vikas Adhyan Kendra.

Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, & R. Robertson (Eds.). Global Modernities. 25–44. Sage.

Roy, S. (2007). Beyond belief: India and the politics of postcolonial nationalism. Duke University Press.

Sagar, M., Singh, D. & Agrawal, D.P. (2009). Adaptation strategies for ethical brand positioning in cross-cultural environment: an Indian context. International Journal of Business and Globalization. 3 (4): 374–400.

Sebeok, T. & Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1990). The Semiotic Web 1989. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110874099

Seiter E. E. (1987). Semiotics and Television. In R. C. Allen (Ed.), Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (1st ed., pp. 17–41). University of North Carolina Press.

Sharma, S. (2006). Advertising adaptation: Need to Reach Mammoth Rural Hoi Pollo in India. Presentation at European Association for Comparative Economic Studies. Brighton, UK.

Solík, M. (2014). Semiotic approach to analysis of advertising. European Journal of Science and Theology, Vol.10, Suppl.1, 207-217.

Thatelo, Mopailo T. (2016). A social semiotic analysis of the verbal, nonverbal and visual rhetoric of the 2009 and 2014 African National Congress (ANC) political television advertisement: a comparative qualitative content analysis study, University of South Africa, Pretoria, http://hdl.handle.net/10500/25218

Umiker-Sebeok, J., (1992). “Meaning construction in a cultural gallery: a sociosemiotic study of consumption experiences in a museum”, in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 19, eds. John F. Sherry, Jr. and Brian Sternthal, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 46–55.

Umiker-Sebeok, J. (2010). The semiotic web. De Gruyter.

Umiker-Sebeok, J., Cossette, C., and Bachand, D. (1988). Selected bibliography on the semiotics of marketing. Semiotic Inquiry 8: 415-423.

Varman, R., & Russell W. Belk. (2009). Nationalism and ideology in an anticonsumption movement. Journal of Consumer Research. 36: 686–700.

Vedwan, N. (2007). Pesticides in Coca-Cola and Pepsi: consumerism, brand image, and public interest in a globalizing India. Cultural Anthropology. 22 (4): 659–684.

Voloshinov, V. N. (1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Harvard University Press.

Wolf, S. (2005). Thanda-hearted matlab: Coca-Cola in India. Dissertation. University of Wisconsin.

Zakia, R. D. (1986). Advertisement. Semiotica 59 (1/2): 1-11.

Coca-Cola Advertisements: Playlist for Ads featuring Aamir Khan http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL.20264CAA09A67D19.

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 52 (Dec. 29, 2001 - Jan. 4, 2002), pp. 4872-4880.

Webpages ICON, INDEX and SYMBOL https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~port/teach/103/sign.symbol.html

Journal of the Korea Convergence Society https://doi.org/10.15207/JKCS.2015.6.6.087

CSE Report Download https://www.cseindia.org/content/downloadreports/7546

Business Standard https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/coke-sales-fall-11-on-pesticide-controversy-103102901064_1.html

Economic Survey https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/economicsurvey/doc/stat/tab11.pdf

Outlook India https://www.outlookindia.com/business/coca-cola-registers-strong-growth-in-2022-in-the-indian-market-news-262292