Brand Bromo

Mount Bromo is an active volcano in East Java. I first saw a picture of it some ten years ago. It’s one of the images that sears permanently in your mind, because unless your mother is from Mars, it’s like nothing you’d ever seen. There is an eerie out-of-this-worldness about this serrated giant of a cone spouting sinister puffs of sulphur.

So last year, when a friend suggested a trip, I was on the plane in two minutes clutching my toothbrush and barf-bag. Flying into Surabaya, my imagination ran wild. I thought of Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, and wondered if director Peter Jackson had ever considered the moon-like landscape of Mt Bromo as a set.

All this fantasy and my lunch went out the window in the six-hour taxi ride from Surabaya to Mt Bromo. The traffic is leagues more terrifying than any volcano. For to get to this lunar landscape, you must first endure the lunatics on Java’s roads. Only in the deft hands of true third-world drivers, can a 2-lane road become a six-lane highway. I was clutching the hand of God.

By sheer miracle, we arrived with limbs intact. I was as pale as the under-belly of a dead fish when I staggered out the cab. But my jaws dropped to my ankles at my first sight of Mt Bromo. The picture did not lie. It looked just like the photograph I saw ten years ago. This was no photoshop job. I was over the moon. No, actually, I was on the moon. The caldera is ten kilometres across, and in it, are five baby volcanoes, the most celebrated of which is Mr Bromo.

The people who live here are the Tenggerese, and they speak a Majapahit dialect. There are some 30 villages, and they get about on horseback and Land Cruisers. The hottest of days is a dry skin-peeling heat ; on the coldest nights the mercury dips to 12C.

So what has this to do with branding? Well, if branding is about connecting with the mind and the heart, then Mr Bromo certainly delivers. It is distinctive and stands apart in its imagery and its reality, both to natives and curious tourists. And like all decent brands, it promises a unique experience, and serves it up in heaps.

Strong brands also have the advantage of an aura. There is almost a superstitious level of belief in them. And superstition is what Bromo has lots of. In the annual Kasada festival, thousands converge to offer all manner of animal sacrifice. Devotees toss chickens and entire cows into the gaping mouth of this volcano to appease the spirits.

Superstition isn’t just some ancient thing found in exotic places. It’s pretty much alive in modern societies, though in very different forms. Our Mt Bromos come in the shape of stores, superstars and sports. Lines of people flocking to the launch of a new software or game, is not all that different from thousands of Tenggerese making their pilgrimage up Mt Bromo.

At the bottom of it, our behaviour is driven by the belief in the choices we make.