Does dowsing work? Can dowsing help you find water? These are the subjects of many online articles. Several theories attribute dowsing to the dowser – citing an ideomotor effect, triggered by the person’s unconscious muscular movements. But Sharad Haksar, Founder-CEO of Chennai-based creative shop 1pointsize, says dowsing can even help you distinguish potable water from other water. A combination of dowsing, numerology and fibonacci is what is used at specialist arm 689 launched by Haksar to create brand names and logos. And clients are buying in.
“Numerology has always proved to be popular in India. Lots of clients believe strongly in choice of colour and numerology in India, for whatever reason. Dowsing is something I was introduced to during Covid. It’s a niche space and I wanted to be convinced about it. Once I was confident enough to start, we started taking it to clients,” explains Haksar, whose initiation into the use of dowsing in branding itself came through a client, who had engaged another specialist.
689 now works with a team of specialists in dowsing, in order to eliminate personal biases in the process – a triple layer of filtration, according to the founder.
“Dowsing has been around for thousands of years. It’s all about energy. If you go into a building or office, you get a positive or negative energy about that place. With dowsing, we are creating with the energy,” he added.
Haksar goes on to cite the case of a shoot for a perfume spanning 15 products, where a dowsing check showed two of them to be problematic. A check with the supplier revealed that there was a problem with the ingredients.
Besides checking for the energy slant of a logo for a brand (positive or negative), one can also use dowsing to check the level of positivity to arrive at a choice, underlines the photographer-ad man.
There may be sceptics but there are also about 10 clients who have used the new service. One of the more recent clients was apparel brand Stori, whose kidswear brand ‘No Mondays’ was the subject.
“We started the process a long time back and had created 30 to 40 names, and things were on hold. When we applied dowsing, only a couple of names were positive. So we went with this,” noted Haksar.
So what happens to the sceptics? For them, 1pointsize continues to operate as a regular agency. “There are surprisingly many who want to use one more tool to increase the chances of a best suited logo or brand name,” surmised Haksar.
