Bridging Gaps

In the last post, I had written about an India out there in the rural villages which sometimes knows about various products through an amazing things called mass media but then is unable to get them because of various reasons ranging from problems in distribution channels to the mentality of advertisers who often think that a product would be useful to one section of the society but not to the other. And then there are the ones who are absolutely unaware of various products that the urban India can't do without! 

We see a 'knowledge gap' here which can result in an increased gap between the people of the higher and lower socioeconomic status. The attempt to improve the lives of people with information via the mass media might not always work the way it is planned to be. 

People from all strata may learn new information as a result of a campaign by the mass media but there is a chance that those with higher levels of education are more likely to learn more than those with lower levels of education, and the informational gap between the two groups expands in the process.

Break open those doors to fill the gaps!

The best example I found when I visited Mahalunge was that of the hand sanitizer. I have seen girls becoming cranky if they couldn't find their precious bottle of hand sanitizer to make their hands germ-free to consume a plate of Bhel-puri from the roadside vendor! That's incredible, indeed. When one of our group members used a little bit to clean her hands, one of  the residents from there, a teenaged girl asked us what it was. 

In this case who could be the gatekeeper or in other words who was the one who decided which of a certain commodity – materials, goods and information – may enter the system? Was it the advertisers who thought that this village was just not worth selling hand-sanitizers or was it the basic thought which gets into the minds of people that villagers are a set of less developed people who barely have the desire to improve their living standards as they are busy trying to meet their ends meet. At such a point, who would have whims of things like these. Right? Not necessarily!

Agreed that the city is more polluted and hence full of germs (according to popular belief) but don't the villagers have a right to be healthy and safe too? Ofcourse promoting hand-sanitizers is not the ultimate option but the sheer ignorance of the existence of such a product startled me and that's when I realized the importance of particular types of communication in specific regions. As a student of Advertising, it gave me a plethora of knowledge about the ways in which the society functions. 

Advertisers and Marketers need to have a real knowledge about communication theories and models as that is the framework which can go a long way in guiding them to design and implement successful ad campaigns and ultimately selling their products.