Ad for high-speed Internet above a Tehran supermarket |
By
Heidi Noroozy
My
borrowed cell phone dinged every few seconds as I walked along Valli Asr Avenue
in Tehran. Who could be texting me? Who even knew I had a phone in my pocket?
I’d been in Iran for less than a week, and the phone was an old one that nobody
had used in years.
Unable
to read the Farsi texts, I showed them to my husband. He rolled his eyes in
disgust and handed the phone back. “They’re all ads.” And they kept rolling in
faster than I could delete them. Eventually, I turned the ringer off.
Marketing
in Iran has come a long way in the 10 years I’ve been visiting the country—at
least as far as I’ve noticed. Perhaps text marketing has been there all along,
but the neon that brightens much of North Tehran after dark definitely wasn’t.
On
my first trip to the Islamic Republic, the sign above the Super Star Restaurant
grabbed my attention, partly because of the rarity of its blue neon glow, but
also because it looked like a knockoff of an American Carl’s Jr. burger franchise,
complete with a smiley face on the shooting star. Since then, coffee shops,
juice bars, and fast food joints have sprung up all along Valli Asr Avenue, Shariati
Street and other popular youth hangouts, most of them with signs in both Farsi
and English. Even a number of Baskin Robbins ice cream parlors have sprung up, with
their signature pink and white signs.
On
my most recent trip to Iran, I avidly (some would say obsessively) photographed
signs everywhere I went—shop signs, billboards, and banners on bridges spanning
highways. Sometimes, it was the item being advertised that grabbed my attention.
(Such as American and European brands—um, what happened to the embargo?) Other
times, it was the message itself. And some signs were just so lovely, I
couldn’t resist snapping a photo of them.
Here
is a selection of my favorites:
Apple’s
iPad 3 had been released only six weeks before my trip to Iran, and yet here
was an ad for it on a billboard at the base station of the Velanjak Telecabine,
the gondola that runs up Mount Tochal just north of Tehran.
And
across the street stood this food stand selling hot chocolate. The sign does
not say shir cacao, the Farsi name of
the beverage, but the actual English translation. While I made good use of such
signs to practice my Farsi reading skills, it took me forever to decipher this
sign because the last thing I expected to read was English words in the
Farsi/Arabic alphabet.
Over
the years, I’ve noticed a boom in junk food consumption, along with expanding
girths, a phenomenon that is represented by this snack bar, with its American
candy bars, English-style biscuits, and chips on a stick (which I’ve never seen
anywhere but in Iran).
Pedestrian
bridges over busy thoroughfares have become popular places for large
billboards, like this one near Lahijan in Gilan Province, which advertises koloucheh, a walnut-filled cookie that
is a local specialty.
Concern
for the environment is just as big in Iran as anywhere else, as demonstrated by
this billboard for LG inverters, which proclaims that this brand saves money
and energy. The banners beneath the sign hold slogans praising important
Islamic religious figures—a reminder that religion overlays nearly everything
in the Islamic Republic.
Occasionally,
I just couldn’t resist taking a pretty picture, like this handwritten banner in
Gilan Province, which advertises land for sale.
Or
this sign above a shoe shop in the Tajrish Bazaar in Tehran. All the stores
here have such elegant calligraphy lettering on pretty tile plaques.
Like
everywhere in the world, Disney characters appeal to Iranian kids. This sign promotes
ice cream. Have you noticed how many of these ads are for food?
And
here’s a sandwich shop with its menu printed on the window. The choices include
kotlet (a kind of flat, meat patty), morgh (chicken), kalbas (cold cuts), sosees
(sausage), and zaban (tongue).
A
symbol can often be more effective than a sign. Many Iranian towns are famous
for a specific product, usually an agricultural one. And often they have a
sculpture advertising the local specialty on the road into town. This orange
symbol is from a town in Mazandaran Province, on the Caspian Sea. Orange groves
are everywhere in Iran’s northern provinces, and in May the trees were blooming,
perfuming the air throughout the region.
What
fascinates me the most about these signs is just how much they reflect a phenomenon
that I observe on every trip to Iran. At its very core, the country is a
fascinating blend of the old and the new, tradition and modernity, religious
devotion and secular life. I can hardly wait to return to the Islamic Republic
and see the next phase of its marketing metamorphosis.
Heidi I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this post!! I felt as if I was walking along Iranian streets with you!! Thank you for taking us along!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sangeeta! So glad you enjoyed the post. Writing it made me feel like I was back in Iran, too. :)
DeleteI'm really intrigued by chips on a stick!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, aren't they? Unfortunately, I never got around to trying them. Next trip...
DeleteSo much here! First off, I got tons of irrelevant marketing messages on my borrowed cell phone on my last trip to India....every time it dinged, I thought it was an urgent call! They were coming in so fast, I thought there was something wrong with my phone, until one of my cousins told me it was totally the norm. Wow. And second, that cyber cafe pictured up top looks just like the ones I've seen in India (and emailed you from in fact, Heidi)! And third, Farsi has such a gorgeous alphabet! The one in the field selling land looks full of smiley faces, no? Such a fun post.
ReplyDeleteThat restaurant at the top is a chain. Maybe they have them in India, too. Although it's not a cybercafe per se. They had WiFi, though, and people were surfing the Web on their laptops. Farsi calligraphy is really an art form. We saw examples of it in galleries. The writing on that banner is not too hard to read, but some forms look like abstract paintings.
Delete