Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It feels like last Friday was a really long time ago. Over the last week, pollution in Delhi has gone from soaring at deathly levels to just plain unbearable; sweatshirts and conversations around layoffs have become the norm. Even if this is when many of us are either wrapping up annual goals and/or meeting deadlines, it’s also that time of the year when talk begins about holiday-season vacations.

Winter is almost here, but today’s edition isn’t about any of those things I just mentioned. It is the second and final edition of our new narrative series on Ayurveda. 

Last Friday, I wrote in Inciting Incident about how one of the oldest and definitely the largest Ayurveda-focused consumer goods company—Dabur—was reinventing its identity to suit the new narrative environment.

This edition, we’ll look at why the largest chain of hospitals in India has acquired a majority stake in a chain of Ayurveda hospitals. 

That’s right. 

Two months ago, Apollo Hospitals acquired a 60% stake in the AyurVAID hospital chain. On paper, the former is a chain known for tertiary care that involves surgeries and in-patient care. And you’d think an alternative healing system like Ayurveda—involving herbal medicines and traditional rituals—doesn’t really belong under the same roof.

But this acquisition is a crucial development in the new narrative centred around integrated medicine that’s been gaining ground. And you know what else? Both Ayurveda and these hospital chains may have the home in India, but the audience they’re targeting aren’t Indians.

Ayurveda + allopathy is the new medical tourism attraction

The very first principle of effective storytelling is putting yourself in the audience’s shoes. Understand how they think and feel. To drive home this message, a story we tell in our narrative-thinking workshops is the example of Betty Crocker cake mix. It goes something like this.

Betty Crocker was a consumer goods giant that popularised cake mixes in the 1940s, and it had a problem. Although cake mix sales tripled in the late 40s, they soon plateaued.

The point of this story is that, initially, General Mills did not really understand what its audiences were looking for. In this case, the women, who were their target customers, wanted an easy way to make cake.