Consumer Voice :: Workshop for teachers

Consumer VOICE
‘Consumer Clubs:How to run them–Orientation Workshop for teachers’

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September 01, 2005
09:30 AM - 04:00 PM

“Tweens are a new type of audience. An increasingly powerful and smart consumer group, they spent US $1,88 trillion across the globe each year. And they know current brand images better than any advertising expert.”

This was the message that was being given to Indian advertising gurus in far-away Mumbai on September 1 2005 by Martin Lindstrom, known in the advertising circles as the world’s leading branding expert. The high-profile seminar, where the who’s who of corporate India descended on a plush 5-star hotel, taught advertisers to learn about kids’ relationship with brands, and how ‘touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound’ can be used to woo young consumers.

A thousand kilometres away in Delhi, another workshop was taking place focusing on school children as consumers. Teachers from 50 schools of Delhi, huddled together in Conference Room no III of the India International Centre were brainstorming on how to stem the market’s tide, running over schools in the country.

The contrast could not have been more stark – at the Mumbai seminar, the delegate fee for each participant was Rs 9,500. At the Delhi schools workshop, the total budget for the event was just twice the amount that one advertising executive paid to listen to Martin Lindstrom. While the former seminar was a carefully orchestrated exercise planned months in advance, the other was the initiation of a fledgling movement, where seemingly ordinary school teachers congregated to start a brave fight – 50 of them against an entire industry.

Under the aegis of the VOICE Consumer Education Programme, schools in and around the capital of India have resolved to take on the collective might of the advertisers and marketers. Spearheaded by the Education Unit of VOICE, the idea is to establish consumer clubs in schools, and ‘plant a bomb’ in the minds of India’s youth – empower them enough to see the behind-the-scenes reality of advertisements, sales promotion, and marketing strategies.

A little information goes a long way!

	‘It is only now that I have started to look at the labelling on food products. I took packaging of two brands of ice-creams to my consumer club class and showed students how one brand did not mention the word ‘ice-cream’ on the label at all. All this while we thought we were having milk in our favourite brand of ice-cream. Now we find that it is actually just vegetable oil, flavour and colour!”
Shalini Madan, a teacher at Ved Vyas DAV school in West Delhi sparked a debate on ice-creams and frozen desserts among her students during a consumer club session with them. This just goes to show that a little information can go a long way towards piquing student curiosity. Once the ball is set rolling, the young minds ferret out the truth for themselves.
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