Mohammed Ali. Lance Armstrong. New Delhi.
As sporting comebacks go, the rise, fall, and rise of Brand India in the wake of the Commonwealth Games is destined to become the stuff of myth and legend.
As I sat and cheered Indian athletes at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on a Sunday evening, basking in the warm afterglow of a collective “We did it”, I couldn’t help thinking about the lessons brands can draw from this turnaround.
There are so many reasons brands lose ground. Relevance, or lack thereof, becoming predictable and formulaic, being overtaken by better (or cheaper), judgment errors and many, many more. Sometimes, a brand just starts off on the wrong foot and never seems to recover. However you look at it though, there is one common thread that binds.
Complacency. I started my career working on Liril soap. We all remember the breakthrough work that launched the brand – the gorgeous Karen Lunel frolicking with gay abandon under a waterfall, wearing a bikini no less. Trouble is, who remembers anything else about the brand? If after more than a decade of advertising, the first memory remains the only memory, the brand clearly took things for granted. The freshness proposition had gone stale. A new interpretation of freshness needed to be found, and it never was.
Surprisingly enough, the same company that played safe in this instance also has to its credit, one of the sharpest brand comebacks I can remember. After being pummeled on price for a fair while by a product that was decidedly inferior, the marketing and advertising geniuses behind the Surf ‘Lalitaji’ campaign need to be enshrined for their game-changing response.
Another brand is Bajaj. The face of two-wheelers in India for as long as anyone can remember, the brand got complacent. Staid products, predictable advertising, yawn.
The first attempt at course correction was a shift in the tone of the advertising, but the products stayed exactly where they were. And unsurprisingly, so too did the image. But after that, Bajaj has been a recurring case study on the art, craft and science of brand reincarnations. They introduced two exciting new products that actually changed how people saw them, and then backed it up with fresh new advertising that drove the point home. They walked the talk.
Unfortunately, brands don’t always learn from mistakes. Peugeot entered India with a car that was already being phased out worldwide. They took the entire market for granted. Little wonder then, that a globalizing India quickly rejected it.
Complacency. It will kill you every time.
The Commonwealth Games were plagued by it from the moment we won the bid to host them. Everybody simply assumed that winning the bid to host the games was half the battle won.
The powers-that-be were the paragons of complacency. Every sound-byte was the same. Have faith, it will happen, we’ll get there, the games will be grand, the village will be spectacular. Like brands that refuse to wake up and smell the coffee, we simply stopped buying it after a while.
Fittingly, it was our athletes who finally delivered the pride, and the lesson. You never stop. You never relax. The job is never quite done. Minutes after winning a Gold medal, one athlete was talking about training harder for the Asian Games.
The OC, on the other hand, was convinced an Olympic bid was in the bag.
(The author is Executive Creative Director, Dentsu Creative Impact)
