Climate approach and advertizing,

# 4058

Climate and tea.

I came across in Amatov Ghosh’s book _Smoke and Ashes_, an account of how the taste and use for tea was driven by advertising. Tea was turned into a National drink by intense advertising. What if we started a campaign to advertise various non grenwashinging aspects of the global climate crisis? To start we need a few adventuring companies and some good images and, published with donations. Small to start and then with the results of attractive pages, go on to vigorously soliciting funds for more copy and more publishing. This uses a core competency of our culture (see the work of Edward Bernays major influence on American advertising )

[[https://www.bing.com/search?q=edward%20bernays&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=30126]]

Here from Ghosh’s book a few illuminating passages.

“Yet, the reality is that chai drinking in India has a rather short history, rooted not in the soil of the subcontinent but, rather, in Britain’s relationship with China. Indians were introduced to tea drinking almost as an afterthought, and that too at the cost of much effort.

Before the twentieth century most Indians tended to regard tea with dislike, even suspicion. It took several ingeniouscampaigns, launched by branches of the tea industry, to change people’s minds. However, it was not till the 1940s that tea gained popularity in the subcontinent, and even that was the result of what is probably the most brilliant advertising campaign in the history of modern India, involving some of the foremost artists and designers of the period, including Satyajit Ray, the great film director, and Annada Munshi, a pioneer of commercial design in India (see insert image 1).18”

Here is the footnote

18 “See Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea in India: Chai, capitalism, culture’, Thesis 18Eleven, Vol. 113, no. 1 (2012): 13–21; and Gautam Bhadra, From an Imperial Product to a National Drink: Culture of Tea Consumption in Modern India (Kolkata:Tea Board, Department of Commerce, 2005): https://archive.org/details/”

It is a short but informative book, 52 paged. It should be fairly easy to get the participation of some famous people across the spectrum of film, sports, literature (we already have Margaret Atwood and Ghosh himself. Even a few from business.

I at 87 don’t quite have the energy for this. But it might be easier to enlist and create copy around a dozen people that would lead such an effort than to change the mindset of a small community.

Doug@dougcarmichael.com