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  Everywhere in the world, cooks lay out the spices they use most often within reach of the stove, in the same way casual eaters position the foods and drinks they prefer front and center in their refrigerators. A week into my visit to Mumbai, I started making it a point to ask the Indian mothers-in-law if they would mind showing me the spices inside their spice boxes. The first time one agreed, the spices were positioned in a sequence with no apparent order. Another home, another kitchen, another spice box, and again, the exact same half-a-dozen spices positioned in precisely the same order. The ones nearest the stove and oven were the most colorful ones in the tins—sooty-yellow cardamom, fire-red chili powder—while the more drably colored seeds sat farther away from the stove. Why? One afternoon, as I raced from one home to the next, it hit me.

  The powders nearest the stove mimicked the same colors of the clothing worn by most if not all Indian mothers-in-law. Not only that, but they were the same colors highlighted in framed photographs around the house, depicting family ceremonial occasions such as weddings and births. That’s when I realized that the spices were trying to tell me something. Contradicting what almost every single daughter-in-law had told my assistant, in fact it was the mothers-in-law who did most of the cooking in Indian households, and the colors of the spices confirmed it.

  Still, a single piece of small data is never enough to create a working hypothesis, or a foundation for a business strategy as critical as the overall look and feel of packaging. Around this same time, I asked both the daughters-in-law and the mothers-in-law if I could possibly take a look inside their bedrooms. In most of the daughters-in-law’s bedrooms, which they shared with their husbands and more often than not their children, the walls were pale, cream or sand-colored. This wasn’t the case with the bedrooms of the mothers-in-law. Their bedroom walls were as colorful as the attire they wore, and the spices with which they cooked. Then I noticed something that would have a strong effect on the colors we eventually placed on our cereal packaging.

  In general, we hang things—paintings, posters, mirrors—at the height where we best appreciate them. A painting is always slightly higher than the direct approach. We hang mirrors in such a way that we take in our faces, hair, neck and shoulders. Now and again we position something depending on how it looks from the perspective of a bed, or a couch, or from a place where we’re in the habit of sitting. But as I made my way through one bedroom after another, I saw the artwork on the walls was positioned at almost the exact eye level of its owners. Not higher. Not lower. Level. Straight ahead. I filed this fact away in my notebook.

  Before going any further, here is an experiment for the natives of the Western world. Imagine that you have just removed a load of warm, clean laundry from the dryer. As you transfer the clothes to a basket, a light floral fragrance or the aroma of fresh oranges or lemons envelops you. You may be washing and drying your clothes in the middle of winter, but once you take them out of the dryer, they impart the essence of fruit, and flowers, and spring. Most Americans and Europeans aren’t aware of the degree to which advertisers and scent specialists have trained them to believe that the concept of fresh is linked to seasonal flowers, or to citric fragrances, especially in the United States, where fragrance additives tend to be heavy, resonant and unsubtle, with a faint chemical tang.

  It’s a different story in eastern Europe and in most developing nations. Years ago, when I helped create a laundry detergent brand with a floral scent in Russia, I discovered that what people perceive as “fresh” varies dramatically around the world. As a concept, fresh often bears no relationship to whether a product is actually “fresh” or not. Fresh, I knew from my global studies, had nothing to do with a product’s expiration date. In France, for example, “fresh” is routinely used to describe foods or drinks with a limited life span, to impress on consumers the need to cook and eat them quickly. Thanks to the popularity of Picard, the frozen food emporium in France, “frozen” is often seen by consumers as “fresh,” as is a screw-top with an unbreakable seal. Conversely, products with a longer shelf life are generally perceived to be “less fresh.” Across the world, I often ask consumers to empty the contents of their fridges and then replace every product based on what they perceive to be its freshness. The freshest go on top, while the least fresh items go on the lower shelves. In the United States, I’m often very surprised to find that among the products most consumers consider even fresher than a just-tossed salad are Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Hellman’s Mayonnaise.

  In the process of figuring out why the new laundry detergent was initially doing so poorly, I learned that Russian consumers there perceived “fresh” differently than Westerners do. In Russia, after it’s been washed, clothing is generally hung outdoors on backyard lines. So how do babushkas assess whether or not their clothing has passed the “fresh” test? They hold the piece of clothing close to their noses and inhale a mixture of fabric, wind, soil, damp and the stiffening that comes from textures hanging outdoors in minus-degree temperatures. This aroma is by far the most popular fragrance among the Russian consumers I interviewed, and it explained the slow sales of a flowery-smelling laundry detergent. Floral scents not only had no emotional relevance to Russians, they made Russian men feel self-conscious. Ultimately, I convinced the laundry detergent manufacturer to get rid of the smell entirely. We then rebuilt the fragrance to duplicate the scent of cold air, soil and the outdoors, and the detergent began selling again.

  My experience in Russia came to mind once my Subtexting with mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law was done, and I began spending time with young Indian women at local universities, as well as in tea and coffee shops (in India, coffee is sweet and milk-based, and bears no resemblance to the coffee that Westerners drink). My mission was simple: I wanted to understand young Indian women before they officially became daughters-in-law. Spending time in their dorm rooms, and scouring their Facebook pages, it became clear to me the extent to which Western imagery dominated their lives. There were photos of Western pop stars, and they had “liked” any number of Western and Korean brands, from Apple to Samsung. Seeking the answer to the question of whether it was the mother-in-law or the daughter-in-law who ran most Indian households, I had become convinced that the daughters-in-law had virtually no place in the Indian kitchen. The colors of the spices had convinced me, and so did the bright colors on the mothers-in-law’s bedroom walls.

  I had been ignoring something else entirely—something essential, and ultimately game-changing. It was a scent. It was light. It smelled like roses. In short, mixed in with the fragrances of Indian spices and powders was the faint vestige of a floral dishwashing detergent. It was an extremely Western fragrance, one I knew that Indian mothers-in-law, schooled as Russian babushkas were on the natural, outdoorsy concept of “fresh,” would never use. What, then, was this very Western scent of scattered daffodils and roses doing in a traditional Indian home?

  Something was off. Something was wrong. How had floral scents made their way into India, a country where I knew that “natural” scents of rain and mud had much more emotional resonance to traditional generations? The answer, I realized, was that twenty-first-century Indian daughters-in-law increasingly saw themselves as “modern,” and “contemporary,” an identity that could be credited to the Internet and to the lower-cost smartphones, known as “feature phones,” most of them owned. All of a sudden, the floral scents I’d smelled during my visits to local Mumbai and Delhi colleges made sense. The young women were using floral fragrances because they were living away from home for the first time.

  Along with China, as I mentioned earlier, India is one of the most polluted countries on earth. Most young mothers are rightfully concerned about the effects pollution will have on their young children’s growth and health. They are aware of India’s sanitation problems, and the country’s high levels of bacteria, and perhaps even that India is the host to half of the globe’s 20 most polluted cities.8 In contrast t
o the Western world, where people have arguments over natural versus organic, natural is a relatively new trend in India, especially as it relates to babies. What, then, from the perspective of young Indian mothers, was the color most associated with “natural”?

  So I carried out an experiment. I asked the mothers-in-law and the daughters-in-law to rank a range of colors from the “freshest” to the “least fresh.” A week later, I tallied up the results and was baffled to find that the two groups had radically different, even opposing definitions of what constituted “fresh”—that they literally perceived the world using separate senses. To Indian mothers-in-law, “natural” referred to the colors of their cooking spices. The more florid and flamboyant the colors, the fresher they perceived those spices to be. Deep purples, limpid oranges, fluorescent yellows: these were the freshest colors an older generation could imagine, a preference that trickled down to the clothing they wore. Older Indian women would dress themselves using the same colors of the spices they used, in order to look, and feel, at their “freshest.” Younger Indian women, on the other hand, increasingly schooled on Western imagery and perceptions, unanimously preferred green.

  It was a tie, just as it was frequently a “tie” between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law for dominance and control within Indian households. Ultimately, though, neither group was in complete control of the domestic front. Both, and neither, were in charge of the home. But generally speaking, Indian mothers-in-law were in charge of cooking, while their daughters-in-law were in charge of tidying up and dishwashing.

  What to do? The conclusion I came to was both obvious and, from my perspective at least, a big challenge. The cereal manufacturer was dealing with two radically differently demographics that not only shared a home but also shared “emotional custody” of the family. Whatever new packaging we came up with had to satisfy two warring decision makers. Indian mothers-in-law were enticed by vivid, colorful packaging designs, made up of colors that daughters-in-law saw as unnatural, unorganic and artificial.

  I had to figure out a packaging strategy to entice two generations simultaneously. To ensure I did it right, I had to perceive the world from the perspective of a much older person, a strategy I’d been using for many years, and one that began in the United Kingdom.

  In 1981, a collection of elderly New England men disembarked from a van and made their way inside a former New Hampshire monastery that had been retrofitted for the experiment that was about to take place—what its creator, Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer, called the “Counterclockwise Test.” All of them were males in their 70s and early 80s, with many suffering from the physical indignities endemic to that age. But once they passed through the doors, a radically different scene, and even year, greeted them. It was 1959 all over again. Nat King Cole and Perry Como serenaded them from a vintage radio. A black-and-white TV screened variety shows and even commercials from 1959. There were no mirrors. The men had been given explicit instructions: They were not only encouraged to exchange reminiscences about this era, but as much as possible, to become the same age they were nearly two decades earlier. They were urged to refer to events that took place in 1959 in the present tense.

  A week later, a second group of males the same age were asked to duplicate this same experiment. This second group was asked only to think and speak nostalgically about the experience, as opposed to literally impersonating their younger selves. Before entering the monastery, both sample groups agreed to have their vital signs, including vision, hearing, memory and flexibility, assessed by a medical team.

  This “psychological intervention,” as the New York Times called it,9 was conjured by Langer who, over the course of a brilliant academic career, believed that in order to improve their health, older people needed a jolt, or a trigger, that would fool their own minds and bodies into healing themselves.

  Five days later, both groups of men had their vital signs retested. In every case, their posture and gaits showed signs of improvement. Their eyesight and hearing were both better. Physically, both groups were more agile and flexible. They even scored higher on IQ tests. But the men who had been asked to pretend they were the same age they’d been in 1959 showed markedly more improvement than the group who’d been asked to simply swap reminiscences. As Langer told the New York Times, the men had “‘put their mind in an earlier time,’ and their bodies went along for the ride.”10

  Langer’s study was very much on my mind when I began working in England in the early 2000s on a project for Saga, the English equivalent of America’s AARP, an organization aimed at men and women over 50. Saga had asked me if I could help them identify and understand its elder demographic, with the goal of helping to design a cruise ship, the Saga Sapphire, that would make the passengers feel at home. Intuitively, I knew I wanted to fill the cabin suites with the same furniture, music, appliances, colors and games these men and women had grown up with in the 1950s and 1960s, the goal being to cement the strongest possible bond between passengers and the era in which they came of age.

  A bigger challenge was to ensure that Saga management understood the importance of perceiving the world through the senses of an elder demographic. Most Saga employees were in their 30s and 40s. I asked them to consider the design of the ship by pretending, for 24 hours, what it might feel like to be 75, 80 or even older. I asked them to imagine putting on an outfit similar to those worn by firefighters, to imagine adding aluminum weight to their shoes to detract from their agility, to imagine wearing glasses that blurred their distance vision, earplugs that compromised their hearing, and thick gloves so that when they pressed the elevator buttons, they would know what it felt like to have limited dexterity in their fingers. We proceeded to design the Saga Sapphire with these perceptions and experiences in mind. The Sapphire proved to be a big success, and it also taught me the importance of putting yourself, literally if possible, in another person’s shoes, which I was about to do in India.

  The habit of noticing, like letter writing, is a vanishing art, in part because today our cell phones give us an automatic out whenever we are alone with ourselves, away from the usual distractions that keep us from focusing on our surroundings. Even if we weren’t seduced by the digital sirens in our hands, it’s fair to say that most of us aren’t in the habit of stringing together clues as evidentiary; moreover, what if a single clue causes all the others to unravel?

  The truth is that sometimes you have to entertain a symphony of insights or observations that at first make no sense, and follow them to wherever they take you. You may in fact end up Small Mining a bunch of clues that lead nowhere. But you may also notice that a narrative has begun forming, that threads connect the figurine on the windowsill with the old, half-tied shoe with the mayonnaise inside the refrigerator—or in this case, that a thread links together the placement of kitchen spices with a generational color preference that’s ubiquitous across India.

  Understand that even in huge, relatively modern cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad—and notwithstanding Walmart, which owns and operates twenty Best Price Modern Wholesale stores in eight Indian states—no organized retail really exists in India. Instead, Kirana, or local retail, made up of a congeries of mom-and-pop stores, is the dominant form of buying and selling. Inside these stores, almost every food is sold in a single-serve portion, an essential concept in India, Thailand and the Philippines, where natives lack the space, and the money, to do a single weekly shopping trip.

  For the next few days, I stood on the sidewalk and observed the mummyji going in and out of stores. The temperature was close to 100 degrees, but I stayed where I was and tried to see what they saw through their own eyes. I even trailed some mummyji inside, maintaining a discreet distance behind them. Did they glance to their right, or to their left? Did they hesitate? What made them pause? When they reached out for an item, was it at eye level, or below or above eye level?

  Similar to how I had asked Saga
employees to see the world through the senses of an elder demographic, I was trying to put myself in the shoes of a 50-something Indian female. I went through store after store in an effort to perceive the world from her height. It didn’t take me long to notice colors and patterns that people in their 50s weren’t able to see. The aging eye is the same all over the world, and most people over the age of 40 are vulnerable to presbyopia, the medical term for the natural hardening of our eyes’ natural “zoom” lens. I went so far as to visit an Indian optometrist, who told me that the eyesight of a glasses-wearing population in their 50s and 60s is two or three times worse than the average eyesight of a 40-year-old man or woman. Once I could see for myself the differences between what Indian daughters-in-law perceived versus the mothers-in-law, I had, I believed, the beginning of a solution.

  A day later, I had found glasses that duplicated the mothers-in-law’s weakening vision. I returned to the stores, this time walking around with my shoulders hunched. I never put on a wig, or makeup, but I came close. By the end of my experiment, I returned to my hotel surprised to learn how unfamiliar the universe was from the perspective of an older Indian female.

  But I kept returning to the concept of vision. From an Indian mother-in-law’s perspective, almost everything had blurred edges and lines. The only thing she could really make out were colors. The problem was, those she was least able to discern were the same ones—“natural” browns and “fresh” greens—that the daughter-in-law preferred. There were other considerations, as well. From what altitude, or angle, or perspective was the mother-in-law gazing at the breakfast cereal on the store shelf? To understand this question, it’s important to grasp a physical phenomenon about supermarkets, and shelving, and the critical role that both darkness and light play.