SHOOTING CARS: Car ad film shoots are a big affair. The innocent shot of the side of the car with the road showing may in fact require special rigs and fixtures. And the car has to be shot from an angle where it looks its sexiest. So it needs to sit well, hug the road when it moves. Cement bags inside the car help achieve some of that road hugging effect. The rest, the camera work has to take care of.
The film went on to run for a few months and was widely appreciated.
It is true that for many years Maruti 800 defined the automotive industry in India and this in turn created some exciting brand building opportunities. The Chennai-based tyre company MRF took tyre advertising to a new level by launching MRF Zigma tyres through a ninety-second film that was shot at enormous cost featuring a spaceship and special effects that were, pun intended, alien to the country then. Alyque Padamsee of Lintas is full of respect as he recalls the passion of the late Ravi Mammen in brand building and his vision for making MRF the most popular tyre brand in the country2.
The success of Maruti in tapping the value mindset has also been its weakness – Indians do not consider Maruti as an aspirational badge – which it is successfully addressing in the 2010s with the launch of premium cars and even a premium dealership chain. In the Auto Mood studies done by FCB Ulka in the years 2000 and 2007, the car has undergone a significant image change in the minds of the auto buyer. A car is no longer just a transporter of human bodies but of egos. And badges like Honda are seen as more aspirational.
Cars and two-wheelers are among the most heavily advertised categories around the world. In India, too they are emerging as big advertisers over the last fifteen years. In the car or four-wheeler category, new segments have emerged and are growing rapidly. Mahindra should be credited for seeing the opportunity that India offers for rugged SUVs. Their campaign for Scorpio, crafted by Interface Communication was a landmark for that segment. The first ad for the SUV took a shot at the sedan class with the tag line, ‘Cars will now suffer from low self-esteem’. Remember Esteem was a very popular sedan from Maruti. By taking on the sedans, Mahindra changed the narrative on SUVs. Others have followed.
No discussion on great car advertising can conclude without an ode to the Volkswagen Beetle advertising from Doyle Dane Bernbach. Ad legend John Hegarty recalls how some fifteen years after the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe in the Holocaust, it took a Jew – Bill Bernbach of the American agency Doyle Dane Bernbach – to help Germany re-establish its manufacturing credentials3. A little lesson there in humility and dangers of prejudice. Great advertising for cars has continued to roll and every year the American Super Bowl is full of dazzling new advertising. A few years ago, Volkswagen once again dazzled the world with its little Darth Vader film that soon went viral. Driving is a part of US culture, not so in India, till recently, thanks to our economic condition and, yes, poor roads.
I was invited to speak at a sales conference by an auto major about the changing Indian consumer. And I decided to pose a question to the audience: ‘Who is the architect of the modern Indian road network?’ I was pleased to hear the name Atal Bihari Vajpayee shouted across the room. I asked them: ‘Who was the person who thought of a road network, before Vajpayee?’ And Sher Shah Suri said a voice from the back. I said yes, then asked who came before Sher Shah Suri? A lone voice from the back said Chandra Gupta, rather timidly. But remember, the Gupta dynasty ruled more than 2000 years ago and Sher Shah Suri almost 500 years ago. It was only in the year 2001 that the Indian government proclaimed the need to link the nation through wide roads.
Indian road networks got a big boost with Prime Minister Vajpayee’s dream of the Golden Quadrilateral. Road network jumped up from 2,447,000 kms in 2001 to 3,320,000 in 2011; an addition of almost 900,000 kms of roads, more than the entire road network the country had in 19714. The growth of the road network in the United States of America after the Second World War spurred many industries, including the auto industry. In India, the growth of the road network is a sign of prosperity for millions of families who are touched by the roadways. Economist reports that if a village is a few kilometres from a highway, it has an instant impact on the GDP of the village. The villagers are able to reach hospitals and schools quicker. They can sell their produce in a town nearby, without losing time and effort. Their young can find employment in towns and commute home every weekend. And for the urban young men and women driving down highways, exploring new adventures is in itself a great pastime – as has been captured so well by the Mahindra film for its range of vehicles with the anthem-like song ‘Live young, live free’.
If Indians are driving more, across the country, we are also seeing more women drivers. Of both two-wheelers and cars. In 2014, it was reported that almost one-third of the scooter buyers were women. Hero Pleasure aptly captures this mood with its tag line, ‘Why should boys have all the fun?’ In many homes, the scooter is the vehicle for the entire family, while the motorbike is for the head of the household. I suspect, there is also a breed of young women who are getting on to a motorbike to ride across India. The actor-activist Gul Panang is their role model.
The number of cars sold in the country has risen from 32,000 a year in the 1970s to over 2.5 million in 2014. I feel that the Tata Motors Nano had the potential of pushing these numbers even higher. Many experts have opined about the challenges that Nano faced and I will not try and present my theories, but say that India will continue to be a market for value cars. For example, the sub-4 metre sedan pioneered by Tata Motors – Tata Indigo CS – is the perfect recipe for the Indian psyche: it is a sedan, has status value and can accommodate two large suitcases. It is compact to park and navigate; given its size, it is also very fuel efficient.
There is substantial head room for growth. Indian Readership Study (IRS) 2013 says that over twelve years, mobile phones have a penetration of 77 per cent across urban and rural India, two-wheelers are at 23 per cent and cars are at 4.7 per cent. The Socio Economic and Caste Census of India (SECC) 2011, released in August 2015, says that compared to 1.3 per cent of rural households with a four-wheeler in 2001, the number has jumped to 2.46 per cent in 2011; the comparable rural figures for two-wheelers are 6.7 per cent vs 17.4 per cent.
Urban dwellers are constantly complaining about traffic woes. Thus, the revival of scooters in the form of gearless versions has been attributed to their easy navigability through crowded city roads. There is also a growing shortage of chauffeurs. This has spurred governments to look at urban transport beyond two-wheelers and cars; metro rails, monorails, buses and even the humble tram is being thrown into the pot as a possible solution. A city planner once wrote about the US suburban phenomenon, that when a commute exceeds one hour either way, the commuter starts looking at other options. Maybe change of home, change of job or change of transport system.
Riding this mood for change, online taxi companies stormed the Indian market in the year 2014. Brands like Uber and Ola are trying not just to move consumers from the standard taxi to their better taxis, but I think their bigger game is to get people from owning cars at all. When my son was in Boston for a year in 2013-14, he was a strong votary of the ‘no car, only Uber’ bandwagon. I think this is bound to happen in India soon, if not already.
But a car plays many roles in a person’s life. It is a status marker in addition to a pleasure-giving machine. The horse has been replaced by the modern car. So here is an amusing tale, purportedly a true story.
A Bollywood star, who also has his own film production company, was sitting with his production manager and cinematographer working out the budget of the next film he was planning. He told the production manager to budget ₹5 lakhs as the fee to be paid to the dialogue/screenplay writer. As they were doing this, through the window of the office they saw the dialogue/screenplay writer getting out of his chauffeur-driven Skoda Superb. The Bollywood star saw the car, turned around to the production manager and is reported to have said, ‘No no, let us budget ₹10 lakhs for the
dialogue/screenplay writer.’
And to end the story on scooters and two-wheelers – my neighbour’s maid drives to work every morning on her own Honda Activa scooter.
Ghar Ghar Ki Raunaq Badhani Ho
IN THE LATE ’70s, Jenson & Nicholson, a Kolkata-based company, stunned the country with its iconic outdoor campaign, ‘Whenever you see colour, think of us’.This was probably one of the earliest examples of a corporate brand-building campaign done through the then primitive outdoor medium. Subhas Chakravarty, the then brand director of Rediffusion, Kolkata, explains how Aloke Kumar, the media manager, was tasked to rotate around forty designs through the 300-plus hoarding sites across key cities of India. Please remember, in those days, each hoarding had to be hand-painted and the hoarding contractor had to send proof of painting – often the day’s newspaper or the weekly news magazine whose cover would be visible in the photographic proof attached to the bill. I remember hennaed hand, egg yolk, flame of a match, airline ticket etc. Created by Arun Kale – who incidentally won the Art Director of the Year Award at the Ad Club Annual Awards so many times that he stopped entering his work in that category; a bit like Lata Mangeshkar who did not want Filmfare to give her the best singer award after winning it many times – and his long-serving copy partner at Rediffusion, Kamlesh Pandey, the campaign not only won numerous awards, but also created a huge amount of word of mouth for the brand in the right circles.
Darshan Patel asked me a strange question, ‘Why have you dropped the second line of the Nerolac jingle?’ If Karsanbhai Patel taught Hindustan Lever some new lessons in marketing by launching India’s and maybe the world’s first economy washing powder, Darshanbhai created a storm in the self-medication market with a slew of launches in the late ’90s. Brands like Moov, Krack and Itch Guard rolled out at regular intervals from his company – Paras Pharma – to take on the might of established Indian and multinational companies. I had decided to meet him to learn something about his magic and maybe ask for some business. So Darshanbhai’s question was in a sense a compliment and a complaint.
Nerolac Paints is one of FCB Ulka’s oldest accounts and the agency had created a very memorable jingle for the brand. The jingle went ‘Jab ghar ki raunaq badhani ho, Deewaron ko jab sajana ho, Nerolac…’ (When you want to do up your house, when you want to decorate your walls, Nerolac). The new ad that had broken in 1999 had a group of painters singing the song, drumming on cans of paint as the house owner busts their party, and then joins them in the jiving. The jingle in the 1999 film took its inspiration from the jingle that was created in the early ’90s but was set to a rap beat with a lot of interesting percussion arrangements. Darshanbhai had noticed that the original jingle’s second line had been dropped. He even remembered the second line, ‘Rangon ki duniya mein aao, Rangeen sapne sajao, Nerolac’ (Come to the world of colours, decorate your dreams with colours, Nerolac). I was amazed that he remembered the second line of a jingle that had been off air for almost seven years.
It is true that paints have been the single-most important home décor product that has been consistently been marketed for over forty years through some very powerful advertising.
Asian Paints created a revolution by establishing a supply chain that could handle thousands of stock-keeping units and built an IT system well before multinationals such as Hindustan Lever had automated their depot and distribution processes. Asian Paints soon decided to challenge the dominance of brands like Jenson & Nicholson and ICI’s Dulux by launching their own high decibel advertising. In 1990s, they caught the imagination of the country with an ad that featured a young man returning home as his mother is preparing food. The director of the film – Rajiv Menon – who later made some wonderful Tamil movies, used the Tamil festival Pongal to build a great look for the film. Ogilvy, the agency for Asian Paints, went on to create some iconic ads including one where a young couple are in Rajastan on a holiday; the lady spots a Rajastani man wearing a bright blue headgear, she loves the colour of the headgear and her husband chases him through the mela to buy it off him, because she wanted that particular shade of paint for her home. The series of ‘Mera wala blue’ films went on to build a distinct identity of Asian Paints.
Almost as an answer to Nerolac, Asian Paints too did a beautiful film on how colours are a reflection of the people who live in the house with their ‘Har ghar kuch kehta hai’ (Every home tells a story) ad; the ad was narrated by Piyush Pandey in his own characteristic voice. In the mid-2000s, Asian Paints launched its ‘Home Solutions’ where they started painting services through a dial-in facility. In 2014, they launched wallpapers under an endorsed brand name. Obviously, they are not resting on their laurels.
As paint brands were weaning away Indian consumers from the standard ‘chuna wash’ or lime wash, which was the staple wall paint for many decades, cement brands too started touting their own strengths. In fact, traditional Indian homes, almost till the ’50s were made with very little cement. But the ’70s, saw cement brands entering the marketing fray. In a first, Birlas launched Birla White, India’s first white cement, and boldly branded it Birla; the first product to carry the Birla name. Ambuja cement broke into the scene in 1989 with their muscleman advertising. The Ambuja campaigns created by the young agency of that time, Trikaya, made deep impact and helped Ambuja threaten the dominance of older players like ACC.
The floors of Indian homes also needed a makeover. From the traditional ‘mosaic’, there was a move towards different flooring materials. Spartek was the first flooring tile brand to use the power of mass media advertising. Lintas, their agency, used lifestyle imagery to help the brand reposition mosaic and traditional marble as old-fashioned. Unfortunately, the company could not recover from a wrong acquisition that they made in the early ’90s and I suspect they got swallowed up by yet another player. The brand Spartek has virtually disappeared.
As walls and floors were changing, it is but natural that furniture too had to change. One company tapped into the furniture market by doing some iconic advertising for a simple product – glue. Fevicol from Pidilite Industries partnered with Ogilvy to build a huge business out of a simple white product called polyvinyl acetate. The earliest ads of Fevicol featured a thick board, which had been glued together using Fevicol. This board was being pulled from either side with the chant ‘Dum laga ke haisha’ (Pull it with force). A man walks in, laughing at them because ‘this board will not break since the joint was stuck together with Fevicol’. Fevicol was ‘Furniture ka saathi’. From there, the brand leaped up to show an overcrowded bus that is slowly going along a village road, with men sticking to every side of it. As the viewer is wondering what is happening, they are exposed to the back of the bus which carries the Fevicol brand name. Yet another one has a carpenter trying to break an egg but the egg does not break; we discover that the hen is feeding from a Fevicol container. The advertising of Fevicol has won international acclaim and I would submit there is probably no other glue brand anywhere in the world that has such a status among the advertising folks. Interestingly, the company does not stick with these ads alone. They have an elaborate carpenter training programme, and every year, they produce numerous carpentry and furniture books, all of which are widely used. Pidilite has expanded its product range to include children hobby gum, water proofing materials, instant glue etc. As long as there are carpenters making furniture in India, Fevicol will continue to dominate.
As Indians were getting more and more décor-conscious, even a bathroom fittings brand like Jaguar started advertising on television. The fact that a simple tap was being advertised was in itself a novelty that got them the enquiries. Jaguar, rated as a Superbrand in 2005, used some very bizzare ads to gain attention. One of their ads featured a gang of thieves who break into a classy home only to leave behind jewellery and steal their bathroom fittings. When the kid wakes up in the morning and finds the bathroom flooded, he says – ‘Oh no, not again!’ In another ad we have a young man forget his girlfriend when he sees the b
athroom fittings in her house. Here too, the girl says, ‘Oh no, not again’ at the end.
Suddenly, material possessions were finding their pride of place in the living room. In the early ’80s, refrigerators started arriving in bright colours like red, blue and green. Boring white and cream were no longer the flavours of the month. A red refrigerator became the central attraction in the living room. Around that time, the humble television too was becoming an object of desire and display. Onida entered the market with possibly the most outrageous advertising the country had ever seen. They actually showed a broken television set. The line ‘Onida. Neighbour’s envy. Owner’s pride’ created by the ad agency Advertising Avenues founded by Goutam Rakshit, captured the imagination of a nation that was waking up to colour television with the telecast of the Asian Games of 1982 held in Delhi. Suddenly, the boring black and white television gave way to colour television. And yet another material object started becoming the centre of attraction in every middle-class home. Right through the mid-’80s and early ’90s, neighbours did come to watch colour TV especially on Saturdays and Sundays. The launch of Ramayan on Doordarshan (1986-1988) made the purchase of a colour television almost an act of faith, blessed by Lord Rama and later, Lord Krishna. Roads used to empty on Sunday mornings and media planners used to estimate that over 80 per cent of all television-owning homes were glued to their Ramayan telecast; religion no bar.
Washing machines, refrigerators and other household durables got a leg up when the government decided to reduce the excise duty from the 60 per cent levels to a modest 15 per cent during the wave of liberalization in the early ’90s. It was reported that a Socialist party member stood up in the parliament to complain to the then PM, Narasimha Rao, that if washing machines became cheaper, thousands of poor women who were employed as domestic servants would lose their jobs. To which the erudite PM is reported to have replied, ‘Do you want us to be a nation of maids?’
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