The Tower of Babel is a story told in the Bible in the Book of Genesis. According to the story, everyone on Earth spoke the same language. The people began to migrate from the east and settled in the land of Shinar. In Shinar, they sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its top that towered high into the sky. They wished to make a name for themselves, so that they would not be scattered over the world. When God came down to look at the city and tower, he remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach. God went down and confounded their speech, so that they could not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. Thus the city was called Babel. ‘Babel’ comes from the Hebrew word balal, which means to jumble.
There are many who will say that we are all alike. That is true enough… we are alike, every one of us. But yet we are so different in so many ways. Similar but different – that would probably be a good way to describe people. We live in a jumbled world today where everyone speaks in a different language or dialect. But language is just the superficial difference between us all. If you dig deeper everyone is so much more different from his neighbour. Communities of people differ from each other in their cultures, values, beliefs, opinions, and backgrounds. If you look at a metro city in the world like Mumbai or New York, you will begin to understand how many diverse people reside on Earth. And then consider this, that this same diversity is now replicated in almost every major city around the world.
When a brand or a company wishes to talk to such a diverse group of people, they need to send out one common message that can be understood and accepted by everyone so that the brand gains customers and in turn loyalty. Global advertising agencies are springing up all over the major cities that serve the purpose of advertising a brand to a diverse audience. In many ways you could say that global advertising agencies are very much like the Tower of Babel – it is an attempt to create a common language that will be understood by all. If you wish your brand to be understood by your target audience irrespective of where they are from, make sure that you have your Tower of Babel in place which means that have an agency that can speak the global language and converse with your audience so that they are made aware of and love your brand.
