WHAT I’VE LIKED
Brand recall is all
Our television screens are full of really well-made ads these days. Good production values. Engrossing story lines. A really upgraded class of actors. Cute babies, interesting sound tracks…the works. All of which makes what used to be tedious gaps in our entertainment, not so intolerable anymore. But there is one area that still needs to be worked on and that is a very crucial area. And that is Brand recall. Most of these engrossing 30 second entertainers unfortunately remain as entertainers leaving a very high recall for the entertainment aspect of the ad and absolutely no recall of the brand.
Which, as you can guess is pretty much the same as money down the drain. I remember an incident that David Ogilvy narrated, where his wife told him that she had seen an excellent hoarding and when he asked her the name of the product, she drew a blank! Why, you can test this on yourself. Most of the time charming slices of life, snatches of dialogue, a music bar etc float through our memories leaving the brand frame totally blank!
So when I picked the Eno ad for this fortnight, I did it because it has an engaging story line and good production values, but more importantly its brand recall is very high, probably because the entire story is woven around its benefits. It’s like a long ‘before-after’ product window, only that here, the ‘before’ and ‘after’ aspect is part of the story line itself. Which makes the brand and its properties an integral part of the ad and not a disconnected frame at the end of 30 seconds. It’s hard not to remember it as the Eno ad, rather than saying ‘that ad with the cute kid’ or ‘the one where the family leaves the father behind’ etc…And as far as any marketer is concerned that is what makes an ad truly successful.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
‘If you can dream it, you can do it’
No matter how many times I repeat Walt Disney’s quote, I am still amazed at how true it is even though at first reading, the declaration might sound wishful to some. If ever there was a perfect articulation of changing your destiny, this would be it. Understandably the first person who springs to my mind when I read this is Dhirubhai Ambani. This line could just as well have been inspired by him, so truly did he live up to it. But there are many like Dhirubhai who have successfully managed to dream ‘impossible’ dreams and have their dreams come true in their own life time.
One is the story of a BPL (Below the Poverty Line) family, someone I see every week—a coconut seller outside our temple. It was his dream to see his daughter as a doctor. Seemingly wishful thinking one might say, for a coconut seller. But after approaching several people (me included) for help he managed to put his very bright daughter through medical school and it gives us all great pride to see her in the IV year today.
The second real life story that I am witness to, is that of a nurse, who as a divorcee mother dreamed of making her daughter an IAS officer. With great difficulty she would send her Rs 3000 every month to finance her hostel stay in a nearby town and that child too is well on her way to becoming a highly placed civil servant! It is stories like these that lift our spirits in today’s dismal financial times. Very heartening to see that even with meagre resources personal peaks are being scaled, all of them fuelled by the power of dreams. The good news is that we as a nation are becoming more self-confident. We are daring to dream. Something that even fifty years ago, we would not have the courage to do.
Simply because we did not have any precedent. All of us were resigned to our lot in our life, convinced that we were not in control of our destinies. A few radical stars like Dhirubhai changed that forever, not just for their immediate circle but for the entire nation, filling us with the hope that if they could do it, maybe so could we. This is the power that will help us ride the storm. The knowledge that even if we are knocked down, we have the strength to pick ourselves up and keep going and that our dreams will most definitely become reality one day. This is the real wealth of New India. And we most definitely are getting richer by the day.
agkbrandconsult@ yahoo.com.
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