Nestle did not succeed with its first Maggi product, Subhas Chakravarty, the ad and market research guru, once told me. In fact, Maggi soup cubes failed, but when they launched their brand of instant noodles ‘Maggi 2-Minute Noodles’ in 1982 and positioned it as a snack for the family – they hit pay dirt, making a product till then alien to the Indian palate an everyday meal and snack item. The most widely-remembered advertisement has two kids running home after school, shouting ‘Bhook lagi hai, Mummy’; the mother says ‘Two minutes’ and makes them a delicious plate of Maggi 2-minute noodles. The brand was positioned as ‘Fast to cook, good to eat’. The brand, thanks to its powerful television advertising aimed at kids and moms, attractive pricing and simple instructions, went on to capture the imagination of a whole nation. Maggi noodles must have spurred the Indian chinese restaurant movement. But in mid-2015, Maggi became mired in a major controversy regarding its ingredients and package declaration leading to a nationwide withdrawal of the product. I am happy to report that as the year 2015 wound to a close, mothers and students around the country had reasons to rejoice as Maggi made a comeback.
If we look back at the thali theory, we will see how brands like Parle G and Maggi managed to sidestep the mighty thali and go for the snack-break market and with tremendous success.
Taking a leaf out of the Maggi story, marketers of oats have managed to build a ₹200-crore business in a few years leading up to 2015 by tailoring oats as a snack for the Indian palate. Saffola Masala Oats offers a snack that claims to be ‘Hot, spicy and delicious. And it helps keep you in shape’. The brand even has a flash that says it is ‘Ready in 3 minutes’.
In the 2000s, there has been yet another food revolution brewing in big city India. Driven by brands like Dominos, pizza is now becoming the most recognized foreign food item after noodles. Bollywood movie 3 Idiots even makes a comment about how in our country a pizza promises delivery in thirty minutes, while an ambulance can take two hours to arrive. McDonalds has also created a burger mania among children. Modern-day shopping malls have become new dining destinations for middle-class India. Private equity firms are eyeing this space and are investing heavily in what is known as QSRs or quick-service restaurants. For example, Mumbai’s humble vada pav has a national chain, Goli Vada Pav, that is now present in over forty cities.
FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY: Shooting food calls for a lot of careful planning and execution. More importantly, food looks tasty when it is shot in extreme slow motion. As against twenty-four or twenty-five frames per second, food is often shot at 1000 frames per second. Add to this the extreme close-up shot and you will feel like licking the television screen.
Food habits will continue to evolve as we see more and more middle-class women enter the work force. Many myths will get dispelled. For example, there is this myth that Indians are all vegetarian. But according to reports – Outlook, 10 December 2007 – 80 per cent of all South Indians are non-vegetarian and the number is 44 per cent for North Indians10. Are we going to become more and more non-vegetarian? Even hard-core vegetarians like the Birlas had to break out of the age-old custom of serving only vegetarian food at the company dining rooms when the group actively embraced globalization11.
While Indians are changing, they are not changing fast enough for the ready-to-eat brands; they are yet to accept something that can be put into a microwave and plonked on the dining table in three minutes – at least not for a main meal – like dinner. Marketers are figuring how to break this barrier. What if you leave the last bit of cooking to the homemaker? What if you give ten options to garnish the dish? There are many more such ideas to be explored and advertised in the coming years. Television and digital media will play a big role in this transformation, both in the adoption of ready-to-eat foods as well as improving the image of cooking as a profession, art and science. The launch of cookery shows on general entertainment channels like Star Plus and cookery channels like Zee Khana Khazana are doing their bit to spread the joy of cooking and experimenting. At the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2015, I was amazed to see the hoard of young men and women chasing celebrity chef Vikas Khanna. Economist, 27 June 2015, reports that programmes like Mr Paek’s Home Cooking is helping the relatively cooking-shy South Korean men to take up cooking12. I suspect, even in India there are many million young men and women who are trying their hand at cooking after seeing interesting cookery shows. My colleague’s fourteen-year-old son can reportedly produce a three-course continental meal in less than an hour. And he likes doing it. I suspect he is going to be much in demand among the girls of his generation wherever he chooses to live.
Kraft’s Macaroni & Cheese is the single-most popular packaged food item in the US, a staple in homes of working couples with kids, accounting for one dinner every week. We are yet to see a brand becoming a dinner staple in India. But the coming decade will see the emergence of packaged rotis and packaged veggie dishes among others. Farmers of India will be able to get a better price from more amenable new Captain Cook brands. And the mighty citadel, the centre of the thali, will finally fall.
Hamara Bajaj, Hamara Bajaj
The crown for the most popular advertising by an Indian automotive brand, car and two-wheeler, would undoubtedly go to the Bajaj scooter film Hamara Bajaj, created by Lintas. This was the year 1989. The country was heading towards a crisis and the government was trying its best to prop up the morale of the country. The famous ‘Mile sur mera tumhara’ song had been unveiled on Independence day, 1988. The time was indeed ripe for a brand to appropriate the national aspirations and desires. Which better brand than the brand that was the cynosure of every middle-class Indian, the Bajaj scooter.
During the ’70s and ’80s, a scooter was the most prized possession of every Indian. I remember my father buying a new Lambretta scooter and booking his next one the day he took delivery of the new one. There are stories about a young father of a three-year-old girl booking a Bajaj scooter for his to be son-in-law; planning ahead for more than a decade and a half. There were also schemes for NRIs to get a Bajaj Chetak scooter under a special dollar payment offer. My father got his first Bajaj Chetak scooter by cajoling my cousin who was returning to India from Malaysia!
In this milieu, it was appropriate for Bajaj to send out a message about the brand being in the heart of every Indian. The film, a montage of everyday use of the scooter, cutting across religious groups, regional differences, dress cultures, urban and rural etc., was a great hit with the masses. The jingle spoke about how the scooter was a part of India, today and tomorrow, a strong India’s strong picture, our very own Bajaj. If you sit and counted the number of situations and people you will run out of fingers. I could spot a Parsi, a Muslim, a Sikh, a villager, an urban father, a running coach, a young lady and even a dog taking a ride on the Bajaj scooter.
Thanks to the spread of television and blockbuster programmes such as Ramayana and Mahabharat, the jingle was on everyone’s lips. The company even managed to get a stay order from the court preventing a film production company in 2013 from using the title ‘Hamara Bajaj’; almost twenty-five years after the film first aired. That was the power of the jingle and the film. In advertising parlance, this genre of advertising where a brand is shown being used across the country, in different situations is known as the ‘Mera Brand Mahan – Hamara Bajaj’ type film, immortalized by the ad agency Lowe Lintas.
Why was Bajaj prompted into advertising, if their scooters were still in waiting list?
For an answer, one has to drive from Pune, where Bajaj was being manufactured, to Delhi, the headquarters of the company that was set to dethrone Bajaj – Hero Honda.
RL Ravichandran, the then marketing head at Bajaj, made an interesting observation at the Pan IIT Conference at Delhi. He spoke about the challenges faced by Bajaj and how they were overcoming it. He mentioned that the day Hero Honda was launched, June 1984 to be precise, and started tom-toming fuel efficiency with its iconic campaign ‘Fill it, shut it, forget it’ – created by FCB Ulka D
elhi, by the way – he realized that the scooter category’s dominance may not last forever. He explained that scooters and motorcycles had co-existed in the Indian market for decades. In fact, motorcycles like Enfield Bullet even had iconic advertising – ‘Bullet meri jaan, manzilon ka nishan’ (The Bullet is my life, the aim of my destinations) made by film-maker Prahlad Kakkar for the agency Sistas (incidentally Prahlad used to ride a Bullet in the mid-’80s). The Bullet had also been featured in superhit movies like Sholay in the song ‘Yeh dosti’ featuring Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan. New-age Japanese motorcycles like Yamaha had also entered the market. But Bajaj scooters remained the all-time favourite. The reason: it made a sensible choice in terms of safety, fuel efficiency, maintainance etc. The motorcycle was always seen as a young man’s vehicle, not meant for a family man.
Here comes Hero Honda with its model CD 100 claiming a fuel efficiency of eighty kilometres per litre as against other motorcycles and even scooters that offered 30 kmpl. In addition, the CD 100 shied away from any macho imagery, clearly signalling to the middle-class married man to get off his scooter and get on to a motorbike.
The story of motorbike vs scooter in the Indian market has many twists and turns and you could write a potboiler just by tracing the many characters and their moves, but suffice it to say that Bajaj decided to exit the scooter business after losing the fight to modern motorbikes. However, after the launch of Honda’s gearless scooter Activa, scooters became the fastest-growing segment in the Indian two-wheeler market in the year 2013-14, rising to become almost one-third of the total market1. I am sure Bajaj is wondering that ‘Hamara scooter, hamara na raha’ (Our scooter did not stay ours alone). In addition to Honda, all other players too have scooter offerings including Hero, Suzuki, TVS, Mahindra, Piagio; all except Bajaj.
The Indian’s journey from the humble cycle to the scooter to the motorbike was, in fact, facilitated by the success of yet another category of two-wheelers, the moped. Kinetic launched its first moped in 1972 and even had iconic advertising ‘Chal meri Luna’ in the mid-’80s. TVS too launched a moped, TVS 50. Bajaj had Bajaj Sunny. Enfield launched a 32cc mini-moped Mofa that did not require a driving license.
The rise of Bajaj and later of Hero Honda, rang a death knell of the moped. Except for Tamil Nadu, where TVS 50 continues to sell – and even had some wonderful advertising to support it with ‘Namma ooru vandi, TVS 50’ (The vehicle of our land, TVS 50) – the moped category has virtually disappeared. So while cycles have continued to flourish, scooters have had a second coming; even the mighty Enfield, powered by some real smart marketing communication piloted by V Sunil of Wieden & Kennedy and RL Ravichandran – formerly with Bajaj – has risen from the ashes. Mahindra Group which bought Kinetic’s scooter operations may be wondering if they should have bid for Enfield when it was a possible acquisition target. But before we lament the demise of the humble mopeds, don’t be too surprised if a smart company is able to create an Indian ‘frugally-engineered’ moped that can deliver 150 kmpl efficiency or maybe an electrically-powered moped!
The single biggest event in the Indian auto sector was probably the rolling out of the first Maruti 800 on 14 December 1983, which would have been the thirty-seventh birthday of Sanjay Gandhi – Indira Gandhi’s son who died in a plane crash before his dream of the ‘people’s car’ was realized – from the Gurgaon factory. The first Maruti 800 was bought by an Air India employee, Harpal Singh. The car had an order backlog running for many years.
Maruti 800 dramatically changed the landscape of the Indian automotive industry. It was also the first public sector undertaking – albeit a joint venture with Suzuki Corporation of Japan – to sport a god’s name, Maruti, the name of the mighty Hanuman. In the ’70s, the total number of cars sold in India was around 32,000 units. The two marques that ruled the roost were the Ambassador from Hindustan Motors and Padmini from Premier Automobiles. These brands in a great year managed to hit a sales number of 37,000 – Padmini in 1987 – and 24,000 for the Ambassador in mid-’70s; but in just a few years, Maruti changed the dynamics of the Indian auto industry. When competition entered the market in the ’90s, Maruti upped the ante with a great service network to dispel the notion that it is difficult to service a car that has Japanese genes.
SYSTEM WORK: The computer has turned the fine art of a car shoot into a technical challenge. Gone are the days when cars were carted to distant locations to get fantastic still shots with the sun gleaming on the windscreen. Now the car is created on a system and superimposed on to the background.
The most famous Maruti ad featured two young men driving in the high mountains. They have no idea where they are when they spot a young lad. They call out to him, ‘Kancha, is there any place where we can eat?’ Kancha, meaning a young boy in Nepali, shakes his head. They then ask him, ‘Is there any place where we stay the night?’ The answer again is a ‘No’. Then, against all odds, they ask him, ‘Is there a Maruti service station here?’ To their utter surprise, he nods ‘Yes’. And the signboard says ‘Zozilla Engineering Works – Maruti Service Station’. When I was discussing this film with Arun Malhotra, who used to be with Maruti, he had an interesting story to tell. The film had been made and everyone loved the film. But they had their Japanese bosses visiting who when shown the film, to their utter dismay, thought the film made a ridiculous over-claim. Winning their approval was a challenge. The bosses were soon at a dealer conference in Punjab, and Arun in his wisdom decided to show the dealers the ‘Kancha’ film, to see what they may say. To his delight, the dealers stood up as one and gave the film a standing ovation. The Japanese bosses were won over and the film soon went on air and won the hearts of millions of Indians. As an aside, Zozilla Engineering Works is a Maruti-authorized service station located in Kargil, a place which became famous many years later.
Maruti understood the psyche of the Indian auto consumer and has time and again reinforced the value-conscious Indian car buyer’s belief that Maruti spells value-for-money. In a fitting rebuttal to the Hero Honda ‘Fill it, shut it, forget it’ claim, they came out with a film which has a young sardar boy playing with a toy Maruti car and he goes around the house continuously making a ‘bhrrrrr’ sound. His dad, a burly Sikh, finally gets irritated and tells him, ‘Oye chote, bas kar yaar’ (Stop it, little one); to which the young kid replies, ‘Papa ki kara, petrol khatam nahin hunda!’ (What to do, Dad, the petrol doesn’t get over at all). Maruti time and again has managed to hit the fuel efficiency button with their advertising. In 2010, they came out with a series of ads that used the phrase ‘Kitna deti hai’ (How much does it give?) meaning how many kilometres per litre does the vehicle allow. This term is used by all car buyers when considering fuel efficiency. The first in the series of films they rolled out has the value-conscious Indian consumer asking a space station director, ‘Kitna deti hai?’ for the space shuttle on display. If we were to dive deeper into the origin of this exact turn of phrase, you may find that this is the exact phrase used between a buyer and a seller of a cow – ‘how much milk does the cow give?’ The highly focused value-for-money advertising by Rediffusion and then later carried on by Prasad Subramaniam of Capital Advertising helped build the Maruti citadel.
I was closely involved with the brand that first threatened Maruti’s dominance of the Indian small car market. The brand, Tata Indica. The year 1999. After a round of highly-targeted print advertising – there was one which said, ‘50 CC Moped. 100 CC Motorbike. 800 CC Car. Time you can ask for more’ – we were thrilled with the first ad film we had made for Tata Indica and were hoping that the client too would love it. But there was a twist in the tale and that taught me a useful lesson.
The film began with a young lady looking for a lift since her fancy car had broken down. She waves down a car, a brand new Tata Indica, driven by our young hero. She knocks on his window – air-conditioned car, you see. He lowers the window and she politely asks ‘Lift?’ The young man obliges, the pretty lady gets into the car, looks arou
nd and says, ‘Nice car.’ The man is pleased as a punch, smiles and starts driving as an English pop song starts. The film then runs like a fantasy dream of the young man. He is dating the pretty girl, takes out for a boat ride, a candle-lit dinner, throws a bouquet to her balcony (standing on top of the sturdy Indica), her father chases him with a gun, he escapes, then asks for her hand in marriage, they have a pretty church wedding, drive off in the Indica, they have their first child, a second one too is born, soon they have their two children, the mother-in-law and a big dog in the car, all singing loudly when he stops the car; he cannot take it anymore. At this stage, the film rapidly rewinds to the ‘knock on the window’ scene. The film ends with the car driving off and the tag line appears ‘More dreams per car – Tata Indica’.
Did he give her a lift or did he not? The film-makers had shot two endings and wanted to have the car driving off with the girl on the road – the young man chickens out of a life of marital bliss and noise. The other ending just shows the car driving off; the viewer was left to figure out what really happened.
The agency team was keen that the film should have an open ending. The film-makers were keen that no young man will want marriage after hearing the cacophony of two kids, a dog and a loud mother-in-law.
While the agency has the final say in these matters, it was felt that the film-makers’ views should also be presented to the client.
When the two films were shown to the client, he picked the agency version as his choice. And he explained that as the first Indian car, the brand has to present good values even in its advertising; the Indica owner will not leave a damsel in distress in the middle of nowhere without helping her.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 10