You surely know Pompa. If you haven’t met her, you certainly have seen her belting out numbers from the latest Hindi blockbuster on stage. She is the girl next door who we all think has a very sweet voice. We are also unanimous that she will do very well in any one of the talent shows on television.

She herself is confident; her confidence partly fed by the good things she gets to hear from neighbours, relatives, friends and audience. The inevitable happens: Pompa, the girl with a sweet voice, enters a talent search contest. She gets past the initial screening but finds the going tough. She gets rejected in the next round. Dejected, she returns to familiar territory. Along with her, all her well-wishers start to wonder. How did she get rejected? The inescapable conclusion — the judges at the contest were either biased or stupid. Probably both.

A year passes. This year Pompa’s neighbourhood club is organising a similar talent search contest. The idea is to entertain the local populace. The cable guy has been persuaded to telecast the contest live. The organisers approach her to be a judge. Pompa accepts the honour. Sitting in the judge’s chair this time, she starts listening to the singers.

She finds it extremely tiring. Almost a hundred singers are contesting over the week-long screening process. Pompa finds it hard to concentrate, even trickier to choose. Marking them on the prescribed sheet was becoming farcical.

Finally, the ordeal is over. All the singers have now had their few minutes of fame. Pompa closes her eyes and tries to look back. In the beginning, everything seems blank. Then ever so slowly, one by one, faces and voices, tunes and lyrics start floating back. She is curious. Why these? Why not the others? She had no biases. She realises that her chosen few were not necessarily significantly better singers. The common thread was that all of them were different from the rest. That is why they stood out.

Looking back to her own candidature last year, she realises what she did not do right. Singing well was not enough. It not only had to be better but it had to be different from everybody else.

Some of you, if not all, must be wondering what makes this story fit into a column that normally discusses marketing and advertising. There is a very simple answer. Close your eyes — try and remember the ads you saw on television yesterday evening or the day before.

See how many you can remember and more importantly, why you remember them. Most advertising is created in the cocooned world of the maker and marketer. They usually do not have the luxury of sitting on both the chairs — the judge and the judged. More importantly, both feel obliged to stand by their creation. You and I do not have that compulsion.

That is why we forget most. And remember a few that stand out in a crowd.