The inquisitive mind of a 3-year old

I’m a not a big fan of marketing & advertising books. I have read only a handful of them and among them my favourite is John Steel’s Truth, Lies & Advertising. In that book, John writes about American astronauts discovering that they could not take notes with their ball pens in space. Result: the astronaut pen, made after millions were spent in research. The Russians too faced the same problem and they too came up with a solution: use a pencil. Sometimes, asking all the right questions makes the difference in perspective. Steve Jobs asked his engineers why a smart phone’s keypad should be visible when it’s not in use. In advertising, we often forget to ask the right questions. We tend to follow the ‘this is how it has been done’ routine – big categories have their own advertising truths or formats. Sometimes, an innocent view of things is all it takes.

OK – all this build up was just to crow about my 3-year old daughter’s worldview and oh-so-cute chatter. My mom was watching some devotional channel where they were showing abhisheka (no, not the actor) being performed on some temple idol. When daughter was told this they were ‘giving a bath to God’ with a conch shell, out came the question: ‘Mug ilva‘? (Don’t they have a mug?). Now that a doting father has shared this with the world, we can move on.