Monday, December 11, 2006

What Pays in Advertising, An Enthusiast Viewpoint


Everyday we see several advertisement campaigns on the Television that position / reposition a product in the minds of the prospective consumer. It is important to realise that the consumer today is overloaded with information, which ultimately reflects in poor brand recall.

In the light of this the job of an advertiser becomes difficult to the extent that he / she have to ensure that the message does not loose its product focus. Many an ad campaign that we see today definitely brings smile. Simply from a marketer’s point of view, a smile on the face of the viewer is not what we want. What we want is the smile on the face of our consumers and especially in the case of our prospective consumers, which will eventually result in positive brand recall and ultimately in the purchase decision. It is here that the product orientation of the advertisement campaign becomes important.

Many of us will remember the
Fevicol Advertisements (TVC shown below) which started way back on 1990 and still have not changed their brand positioning statement or punch line i.e. Yeh Fevicol ka Mazboot jod hai; totega nahi (This is a Fevicol bond, it won’t break). The remarkable point in the punch line and the overall message is that it has not deviated from the product. Creativity here is utilised to showcase a product and never it has overshadowed the product.



That brings us to the important question of creativity overshadowing the product. A very impressive and widely acclaimed TV campaign was Waah Sunil babu
(view Storyboard here) by Asian Paints. This campaign was launched somewhere around 2002, and the aforementioned punch line widely captured the fantasy of the people and became a matter of common parlance. Right now in 2006 many of us would not be able to correctly recall which brand the above punch line was associated with.

Both of the above TVC’s were exceptional; the only difference lay in creativity. In the case of Fevicol creativity juxtaposed a product in the minds of the consumer and in the case of Asian Paints creativity superimposed itself on the product, so much so that the punch line still is a hot cake but the product has moved on to another positioning statement, which is Kyunki har rang kuch kehta hai.

Related:
Print Campaign of Fevicol, Asian Paints review by Ravi Dixit on Mouthshut.com, download Fevicol TVCs and participate in a contest.
Fevicol Print Campaign image from vivekshah.wordpress.com

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