Marketing is the most difficult task in the entire lifecycle of a product. In today?s competitive scenario where there are so many players jostling for a space in the market, erstwhile concepts like visibility, brand recall, consumer loyalties are becoming a notion almost impossible to cling on to.
It is exactly in this ambit that the adverts made to endorse the products assume greater nay pivotal significance. With today?s savvy consumer who knows and demands the value of every cent he spends, gone are those days when the big brands could just sit back and be rest assured that they will do brisk business. Just to point out, only a handful of the brands/companies, which meant big business in 1900, have managed to survive to this date.
Market me please no matter how big/prestigious a brand maybe, it needs to be smartly marketed. There is a subtle difference between pushing a brand down the throat of the consumer and building a brand image/loyalty. The sale ability of a brand depends on factors like pricing, quality, differentiators, alternatives, segmentation, availability, serviceability, reliability et al and it is in this context that the marketing/advertising guy has to pitch in and add to the brand?s appeal and its subsequent reach to the masses.
With this brief background, lets get into the topic of the review and focus a little on the marketing/advertising strategy followed by the beverage giant Coca-Cola in India and how it has adapted/changed to the ground realities in the local market. Someone once said to sell you have to sell local well what means, is that, no matter how good the product maybe world wide but ultimately it has to appeal to the local masses and should strike a chord with them. What could be a perfect thing to do in India would be a thumbs-down in Mexico or Malaysia.
The Challenge Coke has always been lambasted for their inability to come up with a campaign-able idea, something which had a mass appeal and struck a chord with the common people. Coke has had a series of ads which flirted with the romance of popular cinema but is soon realized that where the cinema ends, popular life begins and there was always a gap in its marketing strategy. It was not able to shed its image of an aloof MNC no matter how hard it was trying to reach out. India has been billed as the biggest prospective Cola market in the world and Coke did not want to miss out on this opportunity. Maintaining an MNC tag yet identifying itself with the Indian psyche was the biggest challenge that it was facing.
The Indianization begins Coke as a campaign was being handled by Leo Burnett who came up a series of ads that as I said earlier had a cinematic charm about them, remember the life ho to aisi series of ads with a group of kids rehashing some tune of their own in the radio station with a chirpy Aish jiving to the tune in her balcony or the tapping in the rain fever theme ad which has Ameer and Jyothika sheltering under a Coke umbrella in the rain, and how the bottle of Coke fizzes up the romance between the two or Hrithik Roshan dancing his way into a bedazzled Aditi Govitrikar?s heart. Coke was beginning to tread into un chartered territory already, what with it shedding its notion of not using celebrities to endorse their brands, to having a distinctly Indian feel to their ads.
The glitch these ads were brilliant and endorsed the product to nicety, but was missing was a popular appeal, an appeal which related to the common masses. Coke top honchos realized that it was competing for the same space which had a glass of nimbu pani for Rs 3 to an ice-cream gola for Rs 5, also the target clientele for the product was the hoi-polloi, the populace of India which was not suave yet had the purchasing power. What was needed was just to establish a rapport with him, to reach out and portray the image of a common man?s brand, so to say. The adverts were looking at creating something with universal appeal, something that could cut across boundaries to have a pan-Indian appeal to it. Between all this coke changed hands from Leo Burnett to a brief fling to Lintas Lowe to finally falling in the kitty of McCann Erickson.
Thanda is not so thanda it is when Coke came into McCann?s kitty that things took a real turn, with Prasoon Joshi, national creative director, McCann Erickson Ad Agency coming with an idea that would fire up the beverage advertising market and reap rich rewards for both the client and the agency. While working on the ads for Coke, Prasoon and his team chanced upon the possibilities of the word thanda and its universal appeal across India, what was needed was to equate thanda with Coke and make thanda generic for Coke. Thanda became the central theme of the subsequent Coke ads and has spawned many an ads and yet has marketability to it. Once the idea was conceived and developed, it became an instant success and one of the most lovable ad campaigns to be done in the recent times.
Thanda matlab Coca-Cola ads saw the smart blending of product promotion with film narration. The ads had ace film director Ashutosh Gowarikar of Lagan fame together with Ameer Khan, and the rest as they say is history. The ads had an oafish Ameer as a tapori who swaggers into a down-market restaurant and demands a thanda, the dumb-witted counter boy uncorks some cola for him, irking Khan who breaks into a menacing tapori lingo only to drive home the point that thanda matlab coca-cola.
This ad changed the complete complexion of the way Coke was being marketed in India. The ad series had other smart ones, which saw Ameer as a smooth talking Hyderabadi stall owner flirting with a non-interested Rimmi Sen, to the Punjab farmer serenading urban belles read morniya with his rustic demeanors, natural wit and smooth talking.
The beauty of the thanda ads is that it was able to talk the language of the masses. In the words of Joshi himself ?We are a talking people, I understand our oral tradition and it pays to make use of the regional dialects.? The ads associated with the Indian masses and spoke to them as their own, and fulfilled the objective of establishing a better connect with rural and SEC-C and D urban consumers and it was bound to break the shackles in terms of content, expression, reach and impact.
These ads brought about a paradigm shift in the cola market and it pushed the marketing strategy of Pepsi from being the aggressor, firing the first salvo to the retreating replying counterpart. Remember how Pepsi stole Coke?s thunder during the 96 world cup with nothing official about it campaigns? Pepsi came up with their reply to the thanda ads within 24 hours with the tagline business thanda matlab Coca-Cola which had Rahul Khanna and Fardeen Khan as the main characters, yaad hai na??
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