Making people laugh is no laughing matter. A great deal of thought and planning goes into it. Perfetti CEO Sameer Suneja speaks to Bhupesh Bhandari about quirky and funny ads.
Film maker Vidhu Vinod Chopra came up with the name Lage Raho Munnabhai for his film, after Munnabhai MBBS (2003) had proved a runaway success, in the hope of cutting a deal with Perfetti Van Melle, the country’s largest confectioner, which used the tagline lage raho (stay at it) for its Alpenliebe lollipop. The deal never happened, and Chopra released the film in 2006. It was an even bigger success. That was perhaps acknowledgment that the quirky and funny advertisements of Perfetti had worked well. On YouTube, the buzz around its ads is unmistakable. The Centre Fresh ad, in which the security guard-turned-robber gets caught because he can’t stop when called, has 121 likes and only three dislikes. The Center Fruit jugalbandi ad, where the vocalist gets the better of the table player only after his tongue swirls at the sight of the gum, has 79 likes and two dislikes.
Cut to the latest, the ad for Non Stop Golz, Perfetti’s recently-launched salted snack. There’s a soldier in a bunker snacking on Stop Not, while his colleagues fall all around him. A bullet catches his pack of Stop Not which turns into a ghost. The soldier comes out to challenge the enemy and is shot dead. His ghost unites with the Stop Not ghost. Some people felt that the ad denigrated the armed forces. On YouTube, the ad had got 17 likes and 22 dislikes till Tuesday. Some people enjoyed the ad, while many found it distasteful. Sameer Suneja, the managing director of Perfetti India, says that feedback, on the product as well as the ad, has been positive so far. “I was a little surprised at the controversy.”
Rensil D’Silva, the executive creative director of Meridian, which has done the ad, says anything that’s edgy will have its share of controversy. “We are a country of nitpickers.” The film, produced by Prasoon Pandey of Turquoise Films and shot at Film City in Mumbai, shows soldiers in World War I (1914-1919) gear, and the uniform of the soldiers, D’Silva says, is not from any Indian war or confrontation. Even the radio belongs to another age. This was the first script that D’Silva had prepared for Stop Not, and though there were a few others also, Suneja decided to go with it. “The ad shows the ultimate in irresistibility,” says D’Silva.
But the question people in the advertising and marketing fraternity seem to be asking is, has Perfetti lost the plot? Perfetti has grown in India through its quirky and funny ads. Gullu Sen, the former executive vice-chairman and national creative director of Dentsu India, says humour becomes a handy tool when “there is no rocket science in the product” and the taste cannot be experienced on television. “So quirkiness works.” Perfetti has mixed the communication with some funky taglines: Zubaan par rakhe lagaam (reins in the tongue) for Center Fresh, Kaisi jeebh laplapayi (how the tongue swirls) for Center Fruit, Dobara mat pooochchna (dare not ask again) for Chlor-Mint and Dimag ki batti jala de (lights up your brain) for Mentos. These are all expressions borrowed from everyday usage of the youth — the bulk of confectionery buyers are between four and 24 years.
The trick seems to have worked well till now: Perfetti’s turnover has doubled to Rs 1,500 crore in the last three years. Three of its ten brands sell in excess of Rs 250 crore each (Alpenliebe, Centre Fresh and Big Babol), and two have crossed the Rs 100-crore mark, while a third is ready to join that club. There have been glitches, though. Perfetti’s digestive candy, Chatar Patar, for example, couldn’t dent Dabur’s Hajmola.
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Comedy is serious business. A joke badly told can backfire on you. “Of all the forms of advertising, humour is the riskiest,” says Max New York Life Chief Marketing Officer Anisha Motwani. “You don’t smile at the same joke twice. Fatigue sets in quickly. For humour to succeed, everything from script to production and acting has to be perfect.” Some others say that Perfetti has at times slipped on creative quality. The first Happydent ad, which showed people chewing it as light posts in a period film, had swept award functions in India and abroad; but later Happydent ads couldn’t match up to it.
Suneja, 40, slightly-built and peripatetic salesman, knows too well the dangers in humour. “It’s not easy to maintain the tempo. First and foremost, you have to get the right joke. Two, a joke is all about delivery,” says he. “The product message, if it gets lost in the joke, makes you dead meat. At times, you run the risk of the creative (idea) becoming stronger than the brand. In that case, the consumer may not connect with the brand or your positioning may not build up.” There have been times, Suneja says, when he has scrapped ads even after they had been shot.
Suneja is a veteran of almost 15 years at Perfetti. After he passed out of IIM Bangalore in 1994, Suneja had joined Colgate Palmolive; from there he moved to Frito Lays and finally to Perfetti in early 1997 as a brand manager. After a two-year stint in Italy, he returned in 2002 as the head of sales and marketing. In 2008, he was named CEO. To maintain the tempo in humour and quirkiness, Suneja has worked with the same creative brains and film producers for long: Ad men Prasoon Joshi of McCann-Erickson and Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy, and film maker Abhijit Chowdhury.
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Suneja knows the need to institutionalise creative thinking in his company. Or else, the brands will lose recall. In a sense, it’s like riding a tiger. “We have a young team. We also have movement between functions, which gives us some freshness,” says he. “It’s an open environment in the marketing team; it’s like they are in college. We are fussed about the quality of work, not about the number of hours or the dress code. People run marathons in the morning, play badminton in the evening.” D’Silva too knows that the next ad for Stop Not has to better the one currently on air.
Stop Not, after all, is a test case for Perfetti worldwide. A little over two years ago, Suneja suggested to the Perfetti headquarters in Italy that he would like to enter new product categories. Worldwide, Perfetti stands third after Mars and Cadbury in size. But in India, it was right on top with a 25 per cent share of the market — the only country after Italy where it was the leader. There was appreciation for what Suneja and his men had done. The buy in was trouble free.
The discussions included outlandish ideas like an amusement park, before narrowing down to biscuits and salted snack. Suneja chose salted snacks because “biscuits are highly commoditised and the profit margins are under pressure”. The trouble was Perfetti had never made or sold anything with even a hint of salt in it. Suneja put together a team of experts, drawn from India and abroad, to develop a snack that was different in form from others in the market and carried some distinctive Indian flavours. Finally, a few months ago, Perfetti launched Stop Not Golz — ringed snacks in four flavours (tomato, masala, southern masala and khatta meetha or sweet and sour).
Suneja says it’s too early to comment on Stop Not’s performance, and it’s more of a learning experience. So there could be course corrections in the days to come. In the market are worthy rivals like Frito Lay (Kurkure, Lays, Cheetos, Uncle Chipps and Lehar), ITC (Bingo), Parle (Hippo), Britannia (Time Pass) and Haldiram. Only, the advertisement for Stop Not has landed in a spot of controversy.