2018: Think beyond categories and consumption

In the past marketers have focused too narrowly on a category or customer group, it is time to go wide

Pay attention is a peremptory childhood admonishment heard from irate teachers, despairing parents and expensive tutors. It is meant to save young minds from the wasteland of wool-gathering and root them in the fertility of attentiveness. Success, it is implied, comes from a hard, unyielding concentration on a task. This is not new in India—Arjuna impressed Dronacharya by a single point focus on the eye of the bird. We carry this concept—that attention needs to be tunnel-like—through life, and into our beliefs about marketing. It is reinforced by business school professors, work-place mentors and thought-leaders. Advertising pedestalizes reductionism by insisting