The Indian consumer was very careful of what medicines to take and who to consult. In fact, the British pharmaceutical company ICI ran a series of advertorial ads in the late ’50s, building the reputation of the allopathic doctor. One such ad run in the Reader’s Digest, 1957, says, ‘Your doctor is a man with a cause. Having chosen his profession, he has dedicated his life to fighting disease and to bringing relief and succour to the ailing and the sick’4.
Coming back to our Coldarin story. The brand was facing the might of the triumvirate headache pills: Saridon, Anacin and Aspro. Saridon was promising ‘Relieves pain and refreshes you’, and had a catchy jingle, ‘Sirf ek, sirf ek, Saridon’ (Just one Saridon). Aspro spoke of its ‘Microfined Formulation’ that promised fast action. And Anacin had a ‘Four-way action formula’ that worked for headaches, colds and fever.
Boots decided to delve deeper into the psychology of a cold. Involving a psychologist, the company set out to meet consumers, cold sufferers, those who treated their colds and those who did not. They discovered that the consumer was used to the idea of getting the common cold once or twice a year. Someone even said, ‘If you treat a cold, it will go away in seven days. If you don’t treat a cold, it will go away in a week.’ What the psychologist was able to discover was that cold was a minor illness, but it was a major botheration. When you are suffering from a cold, you find it impossible to work. And the company latched on to the trigger that could help it sell Coldarin: why suffer through your cold, when you can take Coldarin and work well. The film that was made by Prahlad Kakkar for Clarion Advertising in the late ’70s had a chemist working in a laboratory – the film was shot in the Boots development lab at its Sion factory, now an apartment complex. The chemist is suffering from a cold and is sniveling as he works. Suddenly, he sneezes and drops the glass beaker from his hand. The beaker falls and shatters. He sits with his hand on his head, deeply disturbed. His boss, a gentle old man walks up to him, puts his arm on his shoulder and says, ‘Kya haal bana rakha hai? Kuch lete kyun nahin?’ To which our young hero replies, ‘Bahut si dawaiyan li, sir, kuch farq hi nahin pada’. The old man offers Coldarin, ‘Coldarin li? Yeh sardi ke liye banaya gaya hai.’ (‘What has happened to you? Why don’t you take medicine?’ ‘I did take a lot of medicines, but no difference.’ ‘Did you take Coldarin? It has been made to treat the cold’). The young man takes Coldarin and the brand promise is heard, ‘Sardi se aaram, chusti se chale kaam. Coldarin.’ The ad worked like magic and the company continued with this formula of advertising for almost two decades and managed to thwart deep-pocketed competitors.
OTC drug brands were trying to convert consumers from traditional home remedies and were starting to taste success. One brand that managed to break through the ‘home remedy’ syndrome was Woodwards Gripe Water, which is given to babies who have colic pain – modern day paediatricians do not encourage the use of this brand, though I remember running to a Santa Cruz chemist on a rainy night in Mumbai in 1986 to get this magic potion to relieve my son who couldn’t sleep due to colic pain. Woodwards had an ad which featured a baby crying due to colic pain. The mother announces that she will give the child Woodwards Gripe Water. Then the baby’s grandmom tells the baby’s father, ‘Give the baby Woodward’s Gripe Water, when you were a baby I gave you that.’ Then the baby’s great-grandmother comes on the scene and says to the grandmother, ‘Give the baby Woodwards Gripe Water. I used to give you that when you were a baby.’ She in turn goes to the baby’s great-great-grandmother to tell her about the baby crying. The great-great-grandmother then says: ‘When YOU were a baby, I used to give you Woodwards Gripe Water too.’ And so on, to show how like an allopathic remedy, even Woodward’s is a quasi-home remedy, used for many many decades. Yet another early victor were rubs and balms. Brands like Amrutanjan, Iodex and Zandu succeeded to build traction.
Vicks Vaporub entered the advertising arena and decided to focus its brand in the cough-cold area. One of its most famous ad films of the ’70s featured the love of a young kid for his mother. The house bell rings and the pretty lady of the house, played by model and actress Radhika Bartake, opens the door to see her son soaking wet, who sneezes as she opens the door. She admonishes him, ‘You went out in the rain again. You will catch a cold. How many times have I told you not to go out in the rain.’ To this the boy produces a bunch of flowers he was holding behind his back and says, ‘Happy Birthday, Mummy’. The mom hugs him and you can see her moved to tears. The films cuts to night and the mom is liberally applying Vicks Vaporub all over the young boy’s chest and throat. The next day, he is fit to go to school.
Iodex around the same time did a very catchy film that used the terms ‘Ooh, aah, ouch’. Zandu balm decided to not just focus on back pain or cold or headache but to offer itself as a universal remedy, the brand’s jingle captured the promise ‘Zandu balm, Zandu balm, pida hari balm’. The brand took the high ground of not just pain relief but ‘pida hari’ which is ‘relief from all troubles’.
There were also brands that were trying the humour route. Hamdard’s tonic Cinkara had a catchy tune that spoke about how hard work can kill you, but thanks to Hamdard’s Cinkara Tonic you can continue merrily. Starring the actor Javed Jaffrey doing a sort of robot dance, the film was a big hit.
Cough drops too were a big category those days with the battle raging between Halls, Vicks Cough Drops and Strepsils.
Vicks Cough Drops had a charming film with a father in the middle of narrating a story to his daughter but is not able to continue due to throat irritation. The brand used the catch line ‘Gale main khich khich’ – an idea that was tested out in one of the Asian countries as the ‘Ahem Bug’. The little kid winks and does a throat irritation sound to cadge a Vicks tablet from her dad.
Strepsils ran an ad which was one of the most loved on television in the 1980s. The films starts with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor lion coming out of its ring to roar, but he emits a ‘meow’. The brand is offered to the lion, ‘Gale mein kharash? Mazedar Strepsils’, then the lion roars!
Indian consumers were slowly giving up their home-remedy obsession. This was enabled by the rapid growth of the television medium in the mid-’80s. Conservative family-owned companies started advertising on television. Products which were till then seen as cottage industry products started getting branded and advertised in media.
The floodgate was opened with the launch of Dabur Chyawanprash through the Shriram Lagoo film which had the grandson asking him, ‘Dada ji, badminton?’, to which Dada ji, played by Shriram, replies, ‘Pehle Dabur Chyawanprash’. The advertising in its own way managed to create a bridge between the older and the younger generation, with one strong statement. I am told the ad was a big success prompting Dabur to start advertising its digestive tablet, Hajmola, on television.
Television helped Indians rediscover ayurvedic remedies once again. Dressed in modern packaging, supported by strong consumer-insight-based advertising, ayurvedic products from companies like Dabur, Zandu, Emami, Baidyanath, Vicco started getting seen in shops all over India. Vicco Vajradanti along with Nirma was probably one of the most recalled brands in the ’80s.
The government, in its wisdom, decided to allow all ayurvedic formulations to be retailed without a restricted drug license. So a small pan-bidi retailer would need a license to sell a brand like Saridon but could sell Hajmola. Realizing the potential, brands decided to adopt a unique strategy of ‘ayurvedic labelling’. All the major rubs and balms quickly started declaring their ingredients in ayurvedic terms, so ‘camphor’ became ‘karpoor’, ‘menthol’ became ‘pudhina ki phool’, ‘eucalyptus oil’ became ‘nilgiri ki tel’ and so on. In addition, they also decided to go into smaller and smaller packs. Vicks Vaporub got a big fillip with its ₹1 tin. Even Halls Cough Drops got re-labelled as an ayurvedic medicine. But of course, not all brands could go the ayurvedic route but they did benefit from the rapid growth of television and pharma retail outlets.
A savvy young marketer from Ahmedabad realize
d the potential offered by television and soon launched a series of brands. The company Paras tasted huge success with its Moov balm, which subversively repositioned Iodex as a pain balm that stained clothes due to its colour. The company followed that with yet another blockbuster, Krack Cream, aimed at heel repair. Once again the company managed to go razor sharp at one segment of the market and create a winner. Paras followed these two successes with two more brands, Itch guard and Ring guard, but I am not sure how successful they were. Paras managed to sell these brands to private equity companies just a decade after they were launched, and have given every Indian ayurvedic brand owner dreams of untold wealth.
Himalaya is a unique company among all ayurvedic product manufacturers. It is the only company that has a brand that is prescribed by almost all allopathic doctors in the country. Its brand Liv52, launched in 1955, is ranked among the top ten prescribed brands in the country reports Business Standard, 19 January 20155. An amazing achievement. The company launched a range of ayurvedic products under the brand ‘Ayurvedic Concepts’ which did not succeed, and the name was dropped and the umbrella brand name ‘Himalaya’ was adopted in the 2000s. The Himalaya brand is today present in ninety countries and is a rather visible brand in the Middle East.
We saw that in the 1950s, British pharmaceutical companies advertised to build the credibility of the allopathic medical practitioner. It was an attempt to wean the reluctant Indian consumer from the grips of their grandmothers, the local Hakim or Ayurvedic doctor or even the magic of the local temple priest. It is not as if these genres of healthcare have vanished, but the last fifty years has seen the relentless rise of the allopathic doctor, to the extent that some think tanks are worried that we may lose the gems that are present in the ancient Indian texts such as Sushruta Samhita, the Sanskrit text on medicine, written more than 2500 years ago.
The rise of allopathic medicine has triggered yet another phenomenon where brands which were Rx – prescription-only – moved to become OTC. Some of them, such as Gelusil and Digene, continue to be promoted by doctors and advertised on TV. Some others like Revital, the multivitamin capsule, used Bollywood star Salman Khan to promote itself.
However, marketers do feel that Indian consumers are not willing to commit themselves to OTC medicines like the consumers in more affluent countries. What is stopping the rise of OTC brands?
If we were to look at the growth of OTC brands, we will see that they have had problems convincing Indian consumers to switch from home remedies to an orally ingestible product. The biggest successes have been topical applications like Vicks Vaporub, Moov, Krack etc. Tonics have had limited success. If at all, it is the malted beverages like Horlicks, Pediasure and Complan that have had some level of success since they managed to straddle the food and medicine ladder together. Research shows that we are not a ‘pill-popping nation’. Even in affluent segments of society, the habit of taking daily vitamins is very low.
The second affliction is the inherent faith in the doctor. Be it rich or poor, in most cities, a doctor is consulted for the smallest of complaints. Among the poor, there is blind faith – transferred from the traditional pujari of the temples – in the ‘Doctor Saab’. And many Indian allopathic doctors also dispense medicines. So why would you spend ₹50 on an OTC brand, when for the same money you can meet a doctor, get a liquid mixture and also an injection – placebo, most likely.
My other hypothesis is that the lack of a suitable retail environment has also had its impact on self-medication. If you analyse the growth of self-medication in neighbouring countries, you may find that they got a big fillip when consumers started seeing the display of OTC medicines on modern self-service retail shelves. They could pick up, examine, read and interact with self-medication brands. Unfortunately, in India, modern retail trade is yet to gain ground, but, given the high margins in the business, the classical chemist outlet population is growing and consumers end up at best interacting with the the shopkeeper and his assistant, both of whom often act as semi-doctors themselves.
Dr Hasit Joshipura, former CEO of GSK, India’s largest pharma company, laments at the state of Indian healthcare: In a country which prides itself on being the ‘pharmacy to the world’, the government’s report on Macroeconomics & Healthcare of 2005 suggest that even today there are parts of the country where one has to travel two kilometres to buy a tablet of paracetamol, six kilometres for a blood test and twenty kilometres to a hospital bed. Public investment in healthcare is at an incredibly low 1.2 per cent of GDP. For a population of 1.2 billion, we have a doctor population of 600,000 and similar inadequacies with respect to hospital beds. Besides, 80 per cent of these capacities are urban centric, whereas 65 per cent of the population is rural6. If we juxtapose the urban fixation to visiting a doctor for every ailment, you can imagine the lack of interest in young doctors to set up practice in rural India.
While challenges remain, it is not as if nothing has been achieved in the healthcare arena. In some states in southern and western India, the primary healthcare system and dispensation of free medication is among the best. While challenges remain, advertising has played a role in spreading word about the problem of HIV/AIDS. The high impact advertising, using themes of ‘delay sexual intercourse’, ‘stay with one partner’ and ‘use condom protection’, have helped reduce the threat.
India won the battle against small pox a couple of decades ago. It is difficult to imagine that even one generation ago, it was common to have someone in the family who has suffered from small pox.
The year 2014 was momentous for India’s fight against polio. The last known polio case was reported in January 2011. And, as recently as in 1978, there were 500 children paralysed with polio every single day. The launch of oral polio vaccine and the relentless campaign have helped eradicate this scourge in less than three decades. I believe mass communication played a very important role in building the momentum behind the campaign. The promise of ‘just two drops’ was amplified through mass media advertising. The creation of Polio Drop Days brought immediacy to the vaccination campaign. And over the last three decades, several advertising agencies, celebrities and film makers have played a useful role. In the year 2001, FCB Ulka was involved in making an ad where the superstar Shah Rukh Khan said that he was taking a day off from shooting to take his kid to the polio vaccination camp in order to give him the vital ‘two drops’. The superstar did the film pro bono. In later years, Amitabh Bachchan played a big role in building momentum behind the polio immunization drive, lending his time and voice selflessly, ably guided by the agency, Ogilvy & Mather7.
The growth of mass media will open up new avenues for healthcare service brands. One of the early movers who capitalized on the power of mass media television advertising is the Chennai-based Vaasan Eye Care institutions. Powered by private equity money, they have been able to build a formidable brand. Interestingly, Tamil Nadu is the breeding ground for eyecare institutions with Madurai-based Arvind Eye Care, Chennai-based Shankara Netralaya and Coimbatore-based Sankara Eyecare institutions. While Vaasan is using advertising, the others depend solely on word-of-mouth and have a strong social angle to their operation with less or no focus on profit-making.
We are now seeing the rise of hair transplantation and hair treatment services around India. Many of these hair treatment centres are funded by private equity firms. Big business has also entered the hospital arena with a vengeance and they are adopting all the marketing communication arsenal at their disposal. For instance, in the movie 3 Idiots, Aamir Khan takes his friend’s sick father to the hospital on a scooter; the hospital that featured in the film was Fortis and it was a great example of seamless brand integration into the film narrative.
Advertising, over the last fifty years, has tried to play the role of an information disseminator, attitude-change catalyst and behaviour-change driver in the healthcare space. Over the coming decades, the role of advertising may have to get a lot more nuanced to tackle the many new issues that healthc
are will throw up. We will have to go beyond selling cold remedies and go back to seek the help of ethnographers, anthropologists and psychologists all over again.
Asli Swad Hai Cricket Ka
COMPLAN WAS FORMULATED by the pharmaceutical company Glaxo. Launched in 1954, it was promoted as a pharmaceutical nutritional supplement. In the ’70s, Glaxo moved the brand to its family products division and wanted take on the might of Horlicks. In terms of formulation, each spoon of Complan contained a lot more nutrition than a spoon of Horlicks. But its early days as an advertised brand were not very promising. The brand had been positioned against milk and it claimed that a glass of Complan contained a lot more than a glass of milk. The campaign did not create the desired impact and Horlicks which had almost mythical properties, especially in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, was not touched by Complan.
The brand then moved to FCB Ulka in the early ’80s. When the advertising agency started engaging with the client team and the consumers, they realized that the brand needed a sharper focus. Just a broad theme of better than milk, aimed at all and sundry was not going to cut ice. Further, milk is seen as the gold standard of nutrition, a brand which is often used as a milk additive is just damaging itself by going against milk, said the consumer expert. A lot of brainstorming from the agency side led to the conclusion that the brand will succeed only if it is positioned as an expert nutritional supplement for the young. The first ad in the series featured the national swimming champion, Anita Sood, with her international coach explaining why she recommends Complan for champions. The brand finally had a voice, that of confidence and success. Anita Sood went on to become the fastest Asian woman to swim across the English Channel and set yet another record.
The brand Complan went on to become a formidable player in what is known as the milk food drinks category, but the ad done by the brand using the teenaged swimming sensation was a first for Indian advertising, especially since sports like swimming were not all that popular across the country.
Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles Page 19