Cover Story - Marketing Campaigns that Indian Marketeers can learn from || Vinay Jain || IIM Shillong || November 2015 edition

Marketing Campaigns that Indian Marketeers can learn from

-Vinay Jain

IIM Shillong

The marketing campaigns that we see nowadays in India are really creative and are more than just advertising and sales promotion campaigns. Ask your dad, he will tell you that the marketing campaigns during his time weren’t even half as cool and engaging they are now. We might feel proud believing that the Indian marketers are stepping up the game in the field of marketing with their innovative ideas. Sorry to say this but we would be wrong in believing so. The marketing campaigns that were launched in the other countries will not only blow your minds but also make you ask yourself that why such campaigns aren’t being implemented in our country. Let us take a look at the campaigns that I have been talking about:

Skyfall:

The marketing of an Indian movie includes actors walking into TV shows, calling a press conference, attending the talk shows of Cricket matches or launching Games at most. These may do the trick but are really expensive and not innovative and hence doesn’t attract as much attention. What Skyfall did in association with Coca-Cola was something that needs to be appreciated. They gave away free tickets to people. How is giving away free tickets creative? The catch here was the way they gave those tickets. They had to prove that they too are as good as James Bond, they literally had to! They were given 70 seconds to reach a different floor of the mall to get free tickets with a set of obstacles in between which did make many people fall on their face. The successful ones got their tickets and both Coca-Cola and Skyfall got their publicity for a very meagre expense.

Watch the video on YouTube: Unlock the 007 in you. You have 70 seconds!

Volkswagen: 

Since, social marketing is the cool thing now, all Indian firms are trying to capitalize on it. Ads like Jaago Re! By TATA Tea are all over the place now and also widely appreciated because it is for a social cause. Volkswagen has taken social marketing to another level by its Campaign in a theatre in Hong kong where an ad starts with a person driving a car and only the road view can be seen from the driver’s point of view. All the people in the theatre look at this like any other ad shown in the theatre. Then, a location based broadcaster was used to send a text based message to all the people in the theatre all at once. Everyone in the theatre look at their phone and the next instant the person driving the car in the ad crashes into a tree with a loud bang. Everyone in the theatre is left shocked for a few seconds. Then the screen flashes “Mobile use is now the leading cause of death behind the wheel”. This was another cost effective and creative way of spreading your message.

Watch the video on YouTube: [FULL] Volkswagen Eyes On The Road Cinema Stunt - Shocking Danger of Texting and Driving

Coca-Cola Friendly Twist: 

Coca-Cola is said to have few of the most creative campaigns of marketing their drink. One such campaign is the ‘Friendly Twist’ campaign that they used on the first day of college. As a usual first day scene in any college, the freshmen year students were all sitting alone listening to music, texting on their phone, just looking around. Amidst all this there was a refrigerator containing bottles of Coca-Cola which can be drunk for free. Obviously, most of the students went to get for themselves a bottle of Coca-Cola. The catch here was that these bottles didn’t have the usual caps and weren’t getting opened by any of the students. Only after sometime did the students realise that these could be only opened by another bottle where both the caps were to be connected and then twisted to open both the bottles. The trick here was that to open a bottle a student will have to talk to another student and will end up socializing with people around him. The campaign was a big hit and couldn’t have gotten a better response from across the globe.

Watch the video on YouTube: Coca-Cola friendly twist

 The Smoking Kid: 

Everyone is aware of the famous ‘Gutka Mukesh’ anti-smoking campaign that is shown before the start of every movie in the theatre and sometimes even on TV. A lot of us only find it funny and not something that compels us to stop smoking. The Thai health promotion foundation wanted to make sure that people quit smoking and they commissioned Ogilvy to come up with a campaign that made sure that happened. Ogilvy came up with a master campaign which made every smoker realise what a big mistake smoking was. The video starts with people smoking all over the place some old, some college students, some even school kids. When all of a sudden two small kids go to the smokers and ask for a lighter. The smoker is shocked looking at such small kids and gives all sorts of reasons as to why the kid shouldn’t smoke stating reasons like “Cigarettes contain poison”, “it leads to cancer”, “you look old when you smoke”, “if you smoke you die faster, don’t you want to live and play?”. The kid replies to them “if it’s so bad, why are you smoking?” and then hands them a paper asking them to take care of themselves too and reminding them to quit smoking. This campaign received a lot of appreciation from smokers and Non-smokers equally.

Watch the video on YouTube: Smoking Kid - Best of #OgilvyCannes 2012 / #CannesLions

Why is this happening?

The Indian audience is not as such developed and mature as compared to the common population in the other countries shown in the above campaigns. We still have people here fighting daily for three meals a day therefore the thirst for new marketing campaigns is definitely not on their list. Also, the marketing managers of the country didn’t really take the marketing campaigns to the ground level and were stuck