BRANDLOGIC
BY L K GUPTA
It is said that the biggest enemy of a brand is the Brand Manager. The dream of every advertiser – brand and agency alike – is to create that everlasting legacy of the most memorable campaign that people will remember and cherish forever. It’s true often times, with the annual or bi-annual urge to do something new and different being so strong, that many of us end up changing, or even destroying the hardest working parts of our marketing mix. Nowhere is this more evident than in advertising campaigns that we see year after year.
But what about consistency of proposition and execution? What should be the holy grail of an advertiser with regard to his campaigns? That, friends, is the ability to be recognized, understood and bought without even saying the brand name! The most difficult thing in advertising is not to come up with the great “Aha!” creative idea, but to be true to the core of the brand whilst devising new creative expressions and executions repeatedly.
Whether we’re an agency or a brand, we have to invest time and effort in discovering those parts of our advertising that create visual, audio or emotional mnemonics that become inextricably woven into the very fabric of our brand/product.
Then begins the hard part – that of finding it in ourselves the obstinate spirit to apply the message and mnemonics again and again without fail.
These comprise three key elements:
• The core brand/product differentiated proposition
• A simple and easily understood way to express the proposition
• Non-verbal cues and symbols that create a brand signature
The more we change any of these, the more we run the risk of becoming lost in the crowd or, worse, misattribution of our work to a competitor’s. Salient examples of good work in this area are Colgate Dental Cream, HSBC, Garnier, Docomo and many others. These are brands that have created razor sharp recognition either through brand logos, feature/benefit mnemonics or audio-visual executional signatures.
But it is the most recent example of an Indian brand on television media that has left me at once delighted and flabbergasted. Delighted because I can see the marketer’s keen sense of branding working, and flabbergasted because I’m just taken in by the audacity of it all. I’m referring to the latest Kotak Mahindra Bank’s TV commercial – this 1-minute TV commercial neither mentions the brand name, nor shows the logo even once.
The proposition of ‘6 is better than 4’ was itself a psychological masterstroke that began with the first campaign 1½ years ago. Since then, we’ve watched the lead character drive home the message again and again in four campaigns and possibly a dozen ad units, each time establishing and reinforcing the ‘6-better-than-4’ message singlemindedly, and conditioning our minds to the brand’s colour palette and the endearing presence of a second-tier celebrity.
Besides the fact that Kotak constantly found different ways to reinforce this – mobile account opening, sponsoring of four’s during IPL, etc – I’ve just been struck by the strict temptation avoidance to do more than was necessary with their advertising. It always remained simple and the execution and tone consistent with previous commercials.
The proposition and the campaign saw them achieve consumer acquisitions in one year that they had cumulatively done in the prior nine. From an attribution level in low double digits, they reached 80+% ad recognition in this period. Then the unthinkable! An ad without the brand name and logo.
As the long ad unwinds in a song and dance, all you see are the familiar visuals of the celebrity, the accentuated brand colour (via his sports jacket) and of course the ‘6-better-than-4’ proposition. Even without the brand name and logo, this creative communicates the brand, its promise and sells the product effectively. To think that it comes in the same era when advertisers are still saying “Make the product stay longer” and “Let’s have the brand logo in the left corner throughout the 30 seconds”! I shudder to think of the amount of debate and opposition this bold step would have met on its way to completion. That is one brave CMO!
For thinking of this idea, and for having the conviction to push it through, the marketing team at Kotak and their agency deserve our kudos. This is one definitely belongs to the category of I-wish-Ihad-done-that.
Long live consistency!
(LK Gupta is Chief Marketing Officer of RedBus)
lkgupta610@gmail.com
