Alokananda Chakraborty: Can selfies stay in focus?

If used without discretion, they can backfire on brands that use them

When Barack Obama, David Cameron and Helle Thorning posed in front of the Danish prime minister's iPhone at Nelson Mandela's memorial last year, the world looked on in shock and disbelief. The Guardian described it as "selfishness of the most superficial kind''. A New York Post article said the episode "symbolises the greater global calamity of Western decline". It went on to say "the 'look at me' moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time".

It seems now that selfies - defined as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website" - are the hottest marketing tool of 2014.

Take Dove and its Oprah-fied message of female empowerment. The Unilever brand launched the hashtag #BeautyIs (globally) and #DoveSelfie (in India) on International Women's Day. This included a seven-minute short film called "Selfie" featuring teenagers and their mothers who were asked to take self-images that highlighted their flaws and insecurities about the way they look. The participants learnt that what they thought were their most disliked attributes were, in fact, their most beautiful features. The video reportedly clocked a total of 900,000 views. Then there was a contest that invited women to click a selfie of their best hairstyles and post it on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to win interesting prizes.

Dove was among the first brands to cotton on to the trend; now there is Vodafone, Max Bupa Health Insurance, McDowell's Signature, VIP Skybags all throwing their hats into the ring. Plus, you have a retinue of fashion brands that have been urging internet users to take selfies and post them on their blogs and Pinterest pages, and jewellery companies calling on users to submit their best images in their designs.

Marketers and advertisers have been glomming onto youth culture ever since they figured this segment had the ability and willingness to pay for their products. Thanks largely to the fact that today's smartphones are smaller, dirt cheap and good enough for a Lars von Trier to shoot features on, it seems the selfie craze isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Since selfies do not always meet the standards of a perfect picture, you may wonder how they have gained such popularity. Simply because they are real-time and real. So everywhere you go, you see young people, arms stretched out in front and fingers hooked round their phones, pouting when they feel particularly adventurous or flashing the victory sign when they can't think of anything better. In an endorsement of sorts, the word "selfie" was added to the Oxford Dictionaries online last year (big deal, so was "twerk"). And earlier this year, we saw the first big internet meme of 2014 with the #SelfieOlympics, which saw teens and adults fall over each other to enter selfies that range from the bizarre to the plain silly and everything in between.

Yes, we have been in love with catching and preserving moments in time since the first person said, "cheese!", but what is the exact potential of selfies in India? At an event in Delhi last week, Vineet Taneja, country head, Samsung India, presented a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: "There are 90 million people in India who possess mobile phones and 75 per cent of these use smartphones; only 60 per cent of them have a front camera, so the number of selfies that can be generated is 4 crores [40 million]." Only 40 million, but it is a generation that "does not need to be reached" because "they share, generate conversation themselves".

Granted, leveraging selfies is a fun and creative way to move the focus of your marketing from simply trying to sell products to building engagement and celebrating a fun corporate culture, but overdoing the selfie thing can really backfire. This is an incident from another country but it has some valuable lessons for brands in India looking to go down the path. Earlier this month, after winning the 2013 World Series, American professional baseball player David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox snapped a selfie with US President Barack Obama when the champions visited the White House. What was supposed to be a fun moment turned into an embarrassment for the team when mobile provider Samsung promoted the picture on Twitter and pointed out that the photo was clicked with a Samsung smartphone.

There was a huge backlash online and many lamented how a pop culture thing can easily degenerate into another way of selling a smartphone.

So there are risks but make sure you use them while they are trending. And remember to take them out of your marketing plan as soon as they start looking jaded or when negative vibes around them start to overtake the feel-good factor surrounding them.

And, of course, try not to encourage "look at me moments" at funerals.