Almost Imperfect: Moved to recaptured.in

Advertising, Marketing, Strategy and Photography

Friday, 19 June 2009

Why copy (and why lie about it)?

Read this (courtesy afaqs!).

Right. The creative director of an agency working for Honda Siel is not aware of arguably the most popular words of arguably the most impactful movie of last year (one that displaced even The Godfather from IMDB’s alltime #1 for a few days!) spoken by one of the most appreciated characters of popular fiction played by arguably the most admired actor last year. If we are to believe Mr. Hola, there was no one around him to remind him that ‘Why so serious?’ would invariably be connected to the Joker - not the people at Meridian (creative people I presume - that don’t watch blockbuster movies), not the people at Honda Siel.

Yes we believe you. The ‘similarity’ between your tagline and the Joker’s refrain is “totally coincidental”.

Funny thing is that the line ‘why so serious?’ does not have any connection with the alleged brief (that the article mentions) of breaking down the hierarchy in the car segment (of SUVs and hatchbacks), or of positioning the Jazz as a car in a ‘league of its own’. Why would you use the line then if it doesn‘t connect with your brief? There can only be one reason then - to cash in on the buzz that line generated very recently.

Of course the Honda Siel and Meridian people have never read, watched or heard of the Joker or maybe even Batman :-)

Labels: ,

Fantasies can crash?

If Microsoft made cars, goes the story. And it’s been ringing true for so long.

I was reminded of this story, because I saw a web ad for MS’s masterpiece browser Internet Explorer 8 today. The storyline of the ad goes thus: a lissome damsel in a frock is busy eating a sandwich in such an engrossed manner that would remind you of good ol’ Liv Tyler, while our hero is busy watching her from a distance. In the midst of this, we see the worried hero trying to look around an insurmountable obstacle, followed by the text “Fantasies can crash”. And then we see a rather rotund gentleman just standing between the two, while all we and our hero can see is his posterior. Then the hero starts making faces, from which I can only guess that the rotund gentleman has just performed an act with his posterior which causes considerable noise & air pollution.

We then see the Vista-esque dialog box asking whether you want to restore your last session or go to your homepage. And then we are informed about the groundbreaking new innovation in the new IE8 - Automatic Crash Recovery (where is the ™ guys?)!!! Of course now you are dying to use the new & improved IE8 right? With this automatic crash recovery feature that was not present so far in the IE, IE is now complete and can take on the other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome, which anyways used to restore crashed browsing sessions (they can even save sessions when you are closing the window, if you preferred). Heck, even MS’s Office software do a half-decent amount of crash recovery.

But the best part of the ad is the sort of self-aware admission that “Fantasies can crash”. Refreshing to see MS admitting in their promotion itself that their software crashes, and we have to just live with it. But look at the new shiny feature — Automatic Crash Recovery! Don’t you just love the IE, now that it can restore your session after crashing it? Make it more stable and reduce crashes you said? No sir, can’t do. We’d much rather advertise the most irritating thing we can show you — our crash screen telling you that your browser crashed last time you opened it.

Coming back to cars, wonder if cars advertised like this. ”Your car can crash or break down, but look at this feature — it puts you back on the road you were going on (after 3 months in the hospital or garage maybe)”. Do you want to advertise that your product does not fail (or that you have made efforts to prevent it from failing), or do you advertise that your product can fail, there’s nothing wrong with it, just look what we have added — it remembers what you were doing when it failed.

And then there is the copy — “Let’s you start from where you had stopped”. Weren’t copywriters supposed to be good at language? But then maybe in the new age of freestyle apostrophe usage, I am a purist.

Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, 22 April 2009

TLA anyone?

TLAs, for those of you unaware of that acronym (which suprisingly isn’t an acronym itself), stands for Three Letter Acronym.

After the initial WTFness has subsided, I would just like to raise one simple question for marketers with the big brands out there - is OBA taught at whatever business classes you’ve attended? Now OBA, for those unaware of that too, stands for Obfuscation by Acronymisation — with that, I have scored double points for not only inventing an acronym, but also inventing a new word. Thank you, thank you.

First we had seen the ever-so-reassuring safe-for-my-health All Out mosquito repellent, which kills more mosquitoes in my bedroom because it’s loaded with extra MMR. After a big sigh of reassurance, I take another look at what the MMR stands for. It stands for Mosquito Mortality Rate. So let me get this straight — the liquid will kill more mosquitoes because it has extra mortality rate? Talk about causes and effects getting mixed up.

The second case-in-point is our good ol’ Parachute. With its misspelt (but a smart branding tactic) Advansed. You ofcourse are aware of the Parachute therapie (another one, but smart) hair oil. And its advertisements. They said their scientists have done research and found out the reasons for hair fall. Do you know what those are? They are (gasp gasp!) RDF!! Wow, you think! They have finally found what destroys the roots of hair to make them fall! This is great news! Until you look carefully to see what RDF stands for. Root Destroying Factors. Had the brand owners not come out with that advertisement, would you have known that hair roots are destroyed because of Root Destroying Factors? I am bummed!

The business world apparently loves acronyms, and those of us who have lived a part of our lives in the SGAs, the RTMs and the CRISPs, even swear by them. But such OBA leaves even the likes of us gasping for air.

And ofcourse, when the consumer gets curious and looks for the real meaning of your TLA, like I (and many others) did, do you think the brand would come across as honest and trustworthy? To me it looks like, the people developing the product did not do much work in research, but they still want to tom-tom their “efforts” and want to sound important by using acronyms and smart-looking animation. Can your brand afford such an impression?

What do you think? And do you know of any other such examples of OBA?

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Asian Paints: dada-dadi

I have been seeing this advert on television for some days recently, and think it’s effective.



Now why do I think it’s effective? In line with the previous posts on advertising (which include quite a few reviews and dissections of ads, now that I look back at it all), let me write about this ad right here right now. Okay? So here goes.

What works:
  1. Humour. Whichever ad has humour as a strong point, it’s always the first point for me. It grabs attention, entertains and makes the ad memorable. One person’s misery is another person’s humour. And in this case, the dadaji’s misery emanating from his weak memory provides moments of pride for dadiji and amusement for the rest of us.

  2. It’s a story! Stories engage us. We love hearing and telling stories. Once upon a time we painted the house… nice! And the characters from the story tell the story in autobiographical mode… nicer!!

  3. Lather, rinse, repeat. The story is in loops. We get to understand it after two of the loops - dadaji is reminiscing about an incident from old times and remembers one artifact of the story, while dadiji knows that he has made a mistake, and corrects him. By the third time, the audience is onto the game. We already know dadaji would again be making a mistake, and dadiji would correct him.

  4. The product. The yellow bungalow is prominent in the frames throughout the ad. I think the way Asian Paints present a house in their ad is well-defined in their minds, and they do it exceptionally well. Right from the first frame I could tell it is an ad for an exterior paint, most probably from Asian Paints.

  5. The story communicates the benefit very well. Memories may fade with time, but the paint would not.

Labels: , ,

Sunday, 18 January 2009

Wish Karo, Dish Karo

Have you seen Shah Rukh Khan on TV sitting on a terrace in a couch, hair flowing back in the wind, asking the world why they are content with their current cable connection, and aren’t switching to DishTV immediately?

Remember what he’s been telling us lately? “Aasman me live Dish TV...”

So?

So, in India the only airline which offers in-flight television is Kingfisher, and what I see there is no live TV. No sir.

KF’s in-flight entertainment list contains NDTV Good Times, a Hindi movie (on air premiere), a channel showing Star One or Star World, an animation channel, an English soap, maybe one or two visual channels and some ten radio channels while the screen shows a map or information screen.

And none of those channels are showing anything “live”, that is what the people down there on the ground are able to see through their cables, Dish TVs, Tata Skys, Big TVs etc. It is programming that is pre-set for the flight. And what is worse? The content repeats. For each flight that flies in a day, the content is identical.

How do I know this? At times I have to fly Kingfisher twice or thrice in a day, and I find the same Friends/Khichdi/Sarabhai vs Sarabhai episode running on the Star entertainment channel, or the same feature on the NDTV Good Times channel, the same “premiere” movie, the same cartoon film. So the entertainment is entertaining in the first flight, but in subsequent flights during the day, it gets stale.

Anyways, the point is why advertise something (and give the public guilt over it), when it is obviously not true? Why lose credibility?

Labels: , , ,

Friday, 9 January 2009

Earn it, Cadbury’s!

Cadbury’s relaunched their premium chocolate bars, Bournville recently. With new rich packaging and a new format, reminiscent of their other premium range, Temptations, Bournville looked promising.

But then, advertising happened.

Take a look at the following two print ads for the brand:
And then, this TV spot:
Link courtesy aFaqs!

All this has left me befuddled. With such finishing and the obvious amount of money spent on the campaign, what is the level of thought and creativity that’s gone behind it?

The positioning is simple: You don’t buy a Bournville, you earn it. So far so good. Shall we see what the “creative” has done with the idea?

In the first one, “Booker, Oscars, Nobel, Bournville... Hope you get the drift”, it took me a while to understand that they are trying to hook on to the “earn it like an award” idea. Oh right, Bournville is such an earnable thing as a Nobel Prize or a Booker.! And then “hope you get the drift”. No I don’t. You have to do better than that. Preposterous at its worst, unimaginative at its best.

Then I saw the TV ad, where a reporter tells us that the way to eat it is to break the bar (trying to own the sound), smell it (like wine) and then tells us of the “legend of Bournville”, again that “you earn it”, which according to him is British mumbo-jumbo. Then he proceeds to eat it without having earnt it, and gets lifted off by a giant bird, reinforcing the idea that “you dare not eat it without earning it first”. Hence, we know the agency is short of ideas.

And in the end, you have “The food of the gods and other top management”. Had it just been “The food of the gods” it’d still have been okay. A bent enough headline, though dated. But “... other top management”? What does that mean? It doesn’t add to the “earn it” idea, neither is it funny.

Neither of the three ads have been able to give me any impression that Bournville is a premium product or that the advertising is smart,or at least clever.

To Cadbury’s: you earn your place in the consumer’s mind and in the advertising world, and this time you haven’t. Sorry.

Labels: ,

Saturday, 22 November 2008

Latest Mac-vs-PC Match

Apple’s Mac-vs-PC campaign hit a raw nerve with this ad.



Though it’s a bit below the belt since it mentions Vista (which is a pointed reference to Microsoft), while the earlier ads mentioned PC only, which does not necessarily point to Microsoft, Windows or Windows XP/Vista (refer).

But the brilliance of the ad is in the simple message that it gives out to Microsoft.

Labels: , , , , ,

Monday, 22 September 2008

Microsoft says “I’m a PC” and well... thanks Microsoft :-)

When Microsoft released ads answering the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads from Apple, the blogosphere is bound to write about it.

Chandoo has also done that. And while reading his post, I wrote the following myself.

Stuff I appreciate about the ads: it fights the idea of stereotyping users, though that is not the intent of the Mac ads. It’s a good strategy - take the strength of the competitor’s communication and turn it around as their weakness. It celebrates diversity - that the hardware I use does not define me. And ofcourse PC (the x86 PC architecture to be precise), being the open systems format, is the perfect “mascot” for that diversity.

And that’s where it does not fit in with M$. It does not work. Why? Mac-vs-PC works because Apple OWNS Mac - the software as well as the hardware. PC is not OWNED by anyone. IBM invented it, and it’s been since taken over by the open market. Even Intel can’t claim to own the PC market. There are many more players who define PC - there’s HP, Dell, AMD.

And Microsoft does not run on just PCs anymore. After Intel entering Macs, Windows also is aiming for people owning Macs.

So why is Microsoft spending so much money on promoting a franchise which it does not own nor which comprises its entire target market?

Note that none of the people say “I’m Windows” or “I’m a Windows user”, nor would it fit if they did.

I guess if they are serious, specialized PC users, they’d NOT be using Windows, let alone Vista How many of these “PeeCees” were Linux users, how many were BSD users? How many use XP (remember the ad ends with a Vista graphic)?

Next, since the ad celebrates diversity so much, does Microsoft support the idea? Is its software or UI that customizable? The idea that the computer you use should not define who you are or what you look like - shouldn’t it be carried forward in the goods delivered? Why does M$ software (Vista) hog so much of resources that it does not let the real software which DOES define what us PC users are work properly?

Just making smart ads isn’t going to get M$ back in the good books of computer users. Making software that works properly would.

In the end, if you’d remove the last screen mentioning Microsoft, the ads make a stronger case for the x86+OSS systems (read Linux/BSD on PC) rather than Windows/Vista.

Being a devout x86+OSS (rather x64+OSS) user myself, all I have to say is “Thanks Microsoft ;)”.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, 26 July 2008

Samsung phone ad

While listening to a song ‘roo-ba-roo’ from Rang De Basanti on iTunes/HP laptop/iBall headphones, I hear a sound from the left and wonder who’s standing next to me. And then I realise that it’s a part of the track.

And then I remember the Aamir Khan spot for Samsung mobile phones - the one where he jumps around while listening to something on the headphones. And I wonder why Samsung, their agency and Aamir Khan (the perfectionist) is intent on selling a ‘feature’ that has been around for like decades now, and is dependent on the track rather than the hardware playing it. 3D surround sound effect on headphones in songs has been around since the times of Shaalimar (remember ‘mera pyaar shaalimar’?) and has been used to good effect by the likes of R. D. Burman, A. R. Rahman, Jatin Lalit to good effect. Those who are connoisseurs of good music and understand and use sound equipment have enjoyed surround sound ever since the mono recording system gave way to stereophonic.

Heck, I can remember some tracks from some 10 years ago where the sound appeared to come from inside my head when I’d play them on a portable tape player and headphones.

So do you think that a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone or an Apple iPod would not give you the surround sound experience that Samsung claims to give? Or that the said Samsung phone would give these effects on even a flatly recorded track? Maybe a K. L. Saigal song?

I like the wheel on the phone Aamir models though.

Labels: , ,

Monday, 9 June 2008

Frankfinn & doing your own thing?

See here, this:



A TV spot for Frankfinn air-hostess training institute. Well-made, well-executed, but it’s a surprise everytime the ad ends, because apart from the last vignette there is nothing to indicate that it is talking about an air-hostess training institute.

Why are you talking about girls being themselves, not caring about the world, about their individuality, in an ad for an institute training girls for the stereotypical female profession?

Plus the brands that have been using the air-hostess aspiration on Indian television lately have been all the stereotypical female ones: fairness creams etc.

In my opinion, the entire spot fails to connect with the brand being advertised.

My take is that this ad will build recall, but not for the brand, but just for itself. I don’t think that is what any marketer wants for her communication, or does she?

Labels: , ,

Thursday, 22 May 2008

Who?

For the last six months, I have been seeing TV spots by this one advertiser: V-Guard, who claims that this is a name you can trust.

Pretty tall claim for someone about whom I don’t know anything - not what they make, not what they sell, not where they are from, not who the chairman/CEO is, not even an idea of the broad sector or field they are in. Since their ads have been on TV, they have not talked about any of these things once. All I see is “V-Guard: the name you can trust”. Yeah, you wish.

Pretty clumsy way to be bit by the “build the brand, not sell the product” bug.

Labels: , ,

Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Most popular...

So you're the biggest, friendliest, most exotic, most democratic, most aristocratic company selling the nicest, brightest, darkest, blackest, tastiest, nastiest, most effective, most stylish product in the fastest, loudest, most innovative, most unobtrusive, most traditional way. But are you the most popular company?

Well, I came across an advertisement of one company which claimed to be the most popular in its category. And if I'm not mistaken, the category is not a niche one either.

So how come if you're the most popular company in your category, you need to advertise, and advertise that you're the most popular, while I already know your competitor and I read your name for the first time in that advertisement of yours.

Bottomline is: do you think long and hard enough before framing and publishing your marketing communication? Does it make sense to you? Would it make sense to anyone who's reading it? Don't give me the faff about TG here - if your message is out there, it will be read, analyzed, criticized and ripped apart by anyone who sees it. Are you prepared for that?

Labels: ,

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

Yes the public are idiots...

I love Tata Sky. They keep making ads that I can keep writing about.

First they claimed to revolutionize home entertainment, never mind that what they are providing is just improved signal fidelity on what the local cable guy anyway has been providing us for decades now, with an ad depicting people throwing out every home entertainment device they had (including television sets??!!??). Then they thought that a man dressed in grass along with a Hrithik Roshan was a funny way to depict the public's affinity with cricket. Then it was the cartoons trying to bundle a Tata Sky box with a television set in an unbreakable bond. Never mind that those who threw out their TVs after seeing the first spot are still wondering where the picture appears on the new Tata Sky box they bought. Then it was the education campaign with the little Einstein spots - which was cute and made a good connect. And somewhere in between were the nice, simple and classy endorsements by the likes of Boman Irani and Kiron Kher - remember them standing on a stage in front of curtains reading a feedback letter in a microphone? Then came the 1500 /1499 kasamm se ad, which was hilarious and made an instant connect.

I thought they were improving. Then suddenly, we hear a jingle - "inke saath rahne ka raaz..." in an ad targetting family with choice-led togetherness (!!??!!) And after boring us with that irritating ad in a variety of lengths, they are back with the education focus. After that lengthy intro, let me describe the ad to you.

A kid who is happy to see bubbles, a ferris wheel and to get quite a handful of lollipops comes to share his glee with his father. In each case, the father connects the kid's activity with some facet of education - like "colors batao...", "ginke batao...", "shape batao...". Every time the kid gets a little disappointed and sad, and finally breaks out into tears.

A voiceover tells us all that kids should have fun in order to learn. Ergo, we should all take a Tata Sky to let our kids learn while having fun.

But I thought learning how to count was more fun if I was counting real soap bubbles rather than counting with a badly-designed interface with numbers in comic sans! :) And learning about shapes was more fun and done better with seeing shapes in real life. And that making the child learn in the real world is preferable to binding your child to the "idiot-box".

And anyways, the child in the ad was not crying because he found this way of learning wrong, but because he did not want to learn while he was having fun. So what are the odds that he would like to "learn" with the television? The "solution" proposed by the ad is not really a solution, it just transfers the problem from outdoors to indoors.

Thanks to Tata Sky for reminding us that the public are idiots...

Labels: , , ,

Monday, 12 May 2008

Is Originality Dead?

First we saw how Colgate is trying to position itself in a position that is already occupied by arch rival Oral-B. Then there was Havell’s, who copied the idea of doorbells delivering shocks from Anchor. Then it was Samsung Guru and Idea on the tourist-guide-meets-foreigner-tourist-and-communicates-with-the-mobile-phone- in-a-special-way concept.

And today I noticed something. Not only did Tata Motors launch a vehicle named “Magic” (remember that Airtel’s prepaid service has been called “Magic” ever since it acquired Spice’s networks), but take a look at their identity, and then see Airtel Magic's identity.

Labels: , ,

Monday, 21 April 2008

Feeling Blue?

Those of you who were in or around Bombay yesterday and were channel surfing on the radio must have noticed something strange. Red FM 93.5 was calling itself Blue FM 93.5 yesterday, and even their jingle was customized for Mumbai Indians, the IPL team representing Bombay.

Interesting. How many times has a media property changed their name to match their sponsors' message in the past? It was a buzz-generating tactic for only a day it seems. They don't seem to be planning to repeat this stunt during the future matches when the team would play.

But what is more interesting is that through the time that I was hearing that channel, there wasn't one commercial played between the songs or jingles. Apparently, Reliance had sponsored them enough for them to be able to just play songs, do the channel branding and the occasional soundbites about the game.

Like the possible options with the controversial London 2012 Olympics logo, Red used their own identity to carry a sponsor's message, and wove it into their programming as well. Smart move, not considering the probable damage to the channel's brand equity.

Sounds like a media planner's and programme manager's delight!

Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, 16 April 2008

I don't say this blog is best...

There was a time when promoting your business meant saying out loud “We make the best stuff”. But who would trust you when your competitor also said the same thing?

Then there was “We are the best makers of stuff”. But who would trust you when your competitor also said the same thing? And isn’t vanity a sin?

Then you hired someone famous to say “These blokes make the best stuff”. But then people figured out that these famous chaps were paid to say this, and were lying.

Then you hired someone not so famous to say “These blokes make the best stuff”, so that they do not look like highly paid famous people, but genuine users of stuff. But then people figured out that no matter who is saying this, they are paid. And were lying.

Now you say “We don’t say we are the best makers of stuff. You (or ‘Our Users’) say.” Aaah the smugness! The subdued, almost veiled, confidence! The assumption that the receiver of the message is such an ass that he would not get that the message is just twisted around - and the money that would have been spent on getting someone to say it is also saved. And I see it everywhere... not the big makers of stuff, just the small shops who sell stuff.

How long do you think it will last?

Labels: , ,

Monday, 31 March 2008

Shortcuts to Sales

There are quite a few shortcuts to get sales, volumes, numbers. Discounts, promotions come to mind. Advertising is one.

Design isn't. Design is the long-route to get your brand, your product, your organisation where you want it to be.

Labels: , , , ,

Thursday, 13 March 2008

Choice = Togetherness?

Tata Sky after its 1500 pricing advertisement has come up with a bubbly upbeat spot comparing two families. One stays together, does everything together and is very happy, while the other is not happy and not together. The head of the latter family peeps through a keyhole presumably on the door of the former, and finds the secret to their togetherness - Tata Sky. We are then treated to a series of shots showing the benefits of Tata Sky and that these benefits would keep our family together.

But wait a second... the features all point to one thing - the choice and variety Tata Sky offers - the games, the "mandir darshans", the special sportscasts. Off the top of my head, if my TV offers all these, and members of my family have interest in these things, would they sit together to watch TV? Does the TV show each of these items to its respective fans+recipients? Or do we have to flip channels to switch to either of the content streams? The latter is no doubt the case, and in that case, I don't think you'll get a family which would sit together to watch TV, not atleast because of the variety that's on tap.

Case in point - did families watch TV together when there was more variety on television or when there was less? Did different members of the family start getting different TV sets for their bedrooms when there were more channels or when there were fewer?

Does the Tata Sky ad then seem to hint at the right "benefit" arising from its variety?

Labels: , ,

Tuesday, 11 March 2008

Proud & Cute: Airtel on television this season

When you run out of ideas to get across your message, fall back on the most common tactic - use mushy emotions.

Two approaches to mushy emotions top the list - cuteness/relationships/family and pride/patriotism/togetherness.

Airtel has recently released two spots banking on these two.

The cute spot is very sweet. The kid is looking like an angel and you feel for her when she wants to "do drawing" with her father but her father initially expresses inability to do it. It drives the one position that almost all telecom players in India are trying very hard to own - best network. But as all mobile telephony users in the country know, none of them are in a position to honestly make that claim, and until any of them really delivers what they keep promising, these advertisements are not going to help their perceptions.

The pride spot has a message - that a Nokia phone is being bundled with an Airtel connection. But what has pride got to do with it? Why did they waste such a long ad with an expensive celebrity expressing feelings of pride and togetherness for a bundling message? Can anyone help me out on this one?

So what is Airtel's agency actually adding to the advertisements, apart from execution? Apart from the breaking barriers kids playing football spot from a few months back, Airtel's campaigns recently have been short of ideas. And even the breaking barriers idea was lifted from a New Zealand telecom company's ad.

Idea has launched the recent guide at Taj Mahal advertisement, strengthening the "Idea" positioning it has (is it a real position in the market by the way?). Vodafone's regular value-added-services and 'magic box' bundled phone ads keep hitting us regularly. Reliance Mobile is also consistently hitting us with its old but fresh and cinematically brilliant "total network" ads (though as I already mentioned, it is tough to justify claiming that position for anyone). Tata Teleservices' new avatar Virgin is also starting up with its ATL efforts.

In this scenario, is Airtel not being complacent with its marketing above the line? What do you think?

Labels: ,

Saturday, 1 March 2008

The Tata Sky at 1500 Melodrama

Two friends chatting in a party, and their wives just disappear one by one. Sounds like a scene from a suspense thriller, right? Well, this story has got suspense, drama, humour and a very clear message for all of us. Surely it’s a superhit movie!

That’s how the new Tata Sky advertisement goes. While Dish TV is still using a celebrity to sell category benefits, Tata Sky has moved on to assuming that it is a well-known brand in an on-the-way-to-be-established category (correct on both counts), and instead focused on that P (out of the traditional four we know) which is probably the only reason the category isn’t taking off like it should, given the benefits it is providing - price.

More of a tactic than a strategy surely. Instead of bundling a six-month maxi-subscription in an installation package which costs around three to four thousand rupees, Tata Sky has stripped down its offering to offer just the installation at an attractive price of Rs. 1499, plus whatever. Key point is, the advert attracts you quite well.

So what works?
  • Humour - the plight of the two husbands whose wives (and their respective Geeta Bhabhi and Seeta Bhabhi) have just vanished into thin air is hilarious.
  • Surprise
    • Let’s face it. Who would ever have dreamt that the oft-repeated filmy line of “tumhari kasamm” would indeed end up in its implied consequence, even in make belief?
    • “What? It’s not 1500? So why is the company placing this ad on air?”
  • Direct communication - to the point. The advert aims at making the audience aware that Tata Sky is now offering its base system at Rs. 1499 only, and it does just that - with aplomb.
  • The brand somewhere comes out to be painfully honest in here: “So what if the difference is just 1 rupee? It’s a lie alright.”
What might not work?
  • Price wars. Have never been good. We have no evidence they will be good in the future.
  • 1499 is the price of only the hardware. Software costs an extra 1000 rupees. And monthly charges are not included in this pricing. Consumers would not actually take nicely to this point. The lowered “entry barrier” might not really translate well into sales if we see that once the customer reaches the point of purchase, she feels cheated that a package of 2499+monthly charges has been sold to her as 1499 only.
What do you think?

Labels: , ,