Survival of the specialist

AGKSPEAK

They started off by being different. In the world of garment advertising, they dared to display their range with no models, no expensive shoots, and if my memory serves me correctly, no television.

Now how much more different can you get? All that they had were a clean, striking spreads of shirts in colours that the country had not seen before "" colours with names like mandarin and plum and desert and stone.

To a layman, the texture was secondary. What stuck in his mind was this dazzling range of shirts. And there were entertaining headlines to match "" slightly risque at times but always tied in to the product.

The advertising for Color Plus has won many awards, but I would like to applaud them for consistency. The quality of work has not flagged.

The strategy has not changed. Models or props have not crept in. It is not often that you see such high calibre work maintaining steady ground over such a long period of time.

Yes. Color Plus has broken new ground. Today, an ad with tight product shots and headline is referred to as "let's do a Color Plus".

What I've learned.
What next, ad agencies?
I joined the advertising profession in 1972 as an account executive at Shilpi "" a really big agency in those days. In a short time I started its Ahmedabad branch with Calico Textiles as the main client.

Calico had an amazing range of fabrics with separate names. Just four months later I was sent by the agency to make a presentation on a total re-branding strategy(!) to some really high calibre heads from the client's side.

These were people who knew everything about every thread ever woven. And I was a total greenhorn with little or no knowledge of fabrics, or its marketing, trying to tell them how best to brand and sell their product!

Four years later, I became a client "" at Reliance Textiles . We were hunting for an agency to handle a product range and a brand, called Vimal Suitings.

Four big agencies made long and elaborate presentations, and all of them declared quite emphatically that "Vimal" was too "feminine" a name and a suitings brand by that name would fail. The name as you now know, was never changed and the brand went on to become a runaway success.

The point is that agencies display little learning about the products they handle, though consultants seem to be doing the job pretty well.

Ad agencies don't realise that their money is being diverted to individual consultants and design shops.

It seems that while consultants are slaving diligently over acquiring more and more expertise on products, agencies try to hop, skip and jump their way through presentations turning them into macro overview capsules.

Consultants, believe it or not, take the trouble to hire "category specialists" to handle their brands while most agencies are content with their superficial knowledge across a wide range of brands.

This, I am afraid then, is the wake-up call for the advertising profession. It's time to change.

It's time to become specialists. To draw an analogy "" the days of the general physician seem to be well behind us with multi-specialist clinics taking centre stage.

agkbrandconsult@yahoo.com