Heed those jingles
“Yelling with gusto used to be the best way to advertise your wares. There was plenty of media and if you had plenty of money, you were set. Today, of course, yelling doesn’t work so well” Seth Godin, best selling author of Permission Marketing
Of course, different people have different memories of what worked, and what did not. Straight up, the fundamental difference over the years, according to Anand Halve, Co-founder, Chlorophyll, a brand and marketing consultancy firm, is that while FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) was the most visibly marketed categories from the 1960s to the 1980s, the years since then have seen durables, services, hospitality, entertainment, retail, and technology as the most aggressively marketed segments. “In durables and in services-led categories, ‘brand behaviour’ and ‘actual performance’ are far more important than in FMCG. As a result, the role of mass media has weakened, and the role of customer recommendation, or, word-of-mouth and customer service have become far more critical,” he says.
{mosimage} Story of brands
There are many ways of telling a story and it serves to check them out in time slabs and in terms of the influences (largely moving from print to television that has grabbed popular imagination). The economic and social realities of an era tend to play upon what we as consumers desire and seek. In retrospect, periodic themes also become apparent. In the immediate post-Independence era, the dominant images were those of the jawan (soldier) and kisan (farmer). Everyone else was in between these two heroic personas. The soldier protected the nation from external enemies and the farmer fed a hungry nation not yet self-sufficient in food. “Advertising then spoke of saving, hard work and frugal consumption. Products were very long lasting, functionally strong and even cosmetically hardlooking. The landmark ad from that era was the one depicting Lifebuoy,” says marketing expert Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults.
This picture of a sweaty, hardworking man bathing with a hard, red carbolic soap, on the tandorosti (health) platform somehow stood the test of time and continued till well into the 1990s. Hindustan Unilever (HUL), which owns the Lifebuoy brand, changed the product as well as its imagery only in the early 2000s. Interestingly, certain themes have endured—like Lux, with its plank of “Cinestar’s Beauty Secret” but the same story is now more consumer-centric: “While Lux has always stood for being a filmstar’s soap (it was prestigious then for actresses to be asked to endorse Lux as it afforded them greater visibility), now, its plank has shifted to ‘Discover the Filmstar in You’. There’s a huge difference,” points out Santosh Desai, Managing Director & CEO, Future Brands.
The 1980s, and the advent of colour television sets in India brought about a seismic change in the Indian advertising scenario. Consumers were exposed to more complex shades of influences. At one level, there was the bikini-clad Karen Lunel under a waterfall, the poster girl for Liril soap, who successfully pushed the sales of the soap up (the ad made its debut in late 1970s but it was a watershed moment that ushered in the radical and more complex influences of the next decade). In fact, this is when motorbikes, too, make an entry in a big way. “These were (comparatively) more ostentatious machines than those available at that time; and Hero Honda turned us into a biking nation,” says Shripad Nadkarni Director, MarketGate Consulting.
In many ways, this was the era when the Indian middle class had its first real brush with the outside world. Pranab Mukherjee, as Finance Minister in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet, cut tax rates and allowed NRIs to invest in the stock markets; Swraj Paul launched hostile corporate raids against Escorts and the Shriram Group; and a clutch of upcoming business tycoons, led by Dhirubhai Ambani, Raunaq Singh, Vittal Mallya and others, challenged the hegemony of the incumbent corporate leaders. The old order was changing; Indians were beginning to lose their innocence; and the ads captured the spirit of the times.
The 1980s was also the time when Bajaj Auto launched its Hamara Bajaj ad line (it kept changing its imagery but retained the line till recently), close on the heels of the government’s Mera Bharat Mahaan and Miley Sur Mera Tumhara campaigns that both helped drive and rode a still incipient pride in all things Indian. During this decade, Karsanbhai Patel and his Nirma brand of detergent stormed the market with a catchy Washing Powder Nirma jingle and its affordability plank, and HUL (then Hindustan Lever) fought back with the “Lalitaji” campaign for Surf and initiated the Wheel detergent into the market. But the decisive moment was the launch of Maruti 800, which, in many ways, allowed the middle class to visualise an escape from socialist drudgery.
These were, in fact, just a trailer to the decade that followed—when Indians gave free rein to their aspirations. “When I joined advertising in the mid-’80s, shampoos were still an exotic category. Hair oils ruled and it was the image of thick hair, groomed neatly in place. Shampoo advertising sent out the image of a liberated woman, outdoors, with unbound hair,” says Desai. It was a powerful subliminal sub-text in the transformation of a society where the product (that had existed long before) finally clicked along with its message. As the 1980s were drawing to a close, it also saw the cricket field being used in a big way for the first time by advertisers in the Reliance World Cup in 1987.
The 1990s saw the bottle "open up" as Pepsi suggested that people could have frivolous fun. This decade also unleashed another beast in the form of the mass media. At another end, Kamasutra condoms established the legitimacy of pleasure. And there was also the instance of communications experts creating the Fevicol brand out of an industrial adhesive.
The current decade has seen the true arrival of a personal media in the form of the mobile phone and the Internet. It has also been marked by a dizzying rise of celebrities in advertising as brand endorsers and the fullfledged emergence of cricket as the new playing field.
Shifting Image
But why have certain ads that build great brands, including those that people still recall, faded out? That's a trick question. "Do you mean ads have faded? Or do you mean the products themselves have faded out?" asks Desai. Among the many calls that marketers have to take, the most difficult are those relating to pulling back popular ads that have worked brilliantly. Related to this issue, sometimes, is the call on when a product itself ceases to be relevant to consumers.
Often, brands that connect very powerfully with an era find it difficult to stay relevant at another point in time. "Brand imagery, too, needs to be constantly reinvented to keep it relevant. Often, brands represent much more to people than the product itself. Hence, when times change, people either lose sight of what a certain thing stood for or they find that the product represents others and not them," he says. Interesting marketing is about a strategy that has a connection with times that the people live in.
But advertising is not the only vehicle of communication. "Ads, along with sales promotions, personal selling, direct marketing and public relations, form the pancha tantra of communication. Some companies that don't even advertise become great brands. Infosys Technologies was built primarily on PR, i.e., stories written about Infosys in newspapers. For that matter, have you seen any ad of Reader's Digest?" questions Y.L.R. Moorthi, Professor of Marketing, IIM Bangalore. According to him, there are some interesting benchmarks in other modes of communication as well.
In fact, Moorthi offers some business-to-business examples of success.such as BHEL, which started as a collaborator for ABB and became a powerful competitor. Bharat Forge (the largest manufacturer of forgings in the world), MicroInks (new avatar of Hindustan Inks whose customers include The Washington Post), Essel Packaging (it makes the tube of the toothpaste you use; it is also the world leader in that category), Sundaram Fasteners (which has consistently earned the Best Supplier Award from General Motors). "And, of course, there is the outsourcing SWITCH story (SWITCH is the acronym given to the "Awesome Sixsome".Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL.by Gartner)," he says.
TUFF choices
Often, the big mistake that marketers make is to try to create a sensation, or, offer inane planks that mean nothing. "For instance, there was a coffee called MR Coffee, which pretty much showed the sexual act on screen with the backdrop of a steaming cup of coffee. It vanished from the shelves before even the ad registered." Then, there was a brand of shoes called Tuffs for which models Madhu Sapre and Milind Soman stood almost nude. It did not help the brand much. This happened because the other three Ps were not properly aligned to the promotions and ads. "No wonder they didn't fly," says Moorthi.
What's the theme?
This begs the question: is there any overarching theme in ads now? "One finds the notion of the body gaining ground. That it is not God-given, but a project-inthe-making. There's greater awareness of the way one looks," says Desai. However, at another level companies are seen to be becoming more inclusive in their approach to brands. "A brand, by its very definition, is an exclusive concept, but one finds greater social responsibility creeping in, as in the case of Idea Cellular's branding, or the Lifebuoy ad that shows kids cleaning up their neighbourhood and Surf articulating the need to save water," says Bijoor.
In a nutshell, the basics of marketing have not changed.whatever the mode of execution. And for those interested, exactly a decade ago, Business Today carried a cover story on Recession Marketing that spoke of the back to basics approach. Unfortunately, those who do not heed history are forced to repeat it.
