No more shopping around

CAMPAIGN LOGIC

The Himalaya Drug Co is tired of waiting for its customers to finally buy its products. It wants to be the first and only choice.

All hell breaks loose when pimples break out on a young girl's face. Her family swings into action, cajoling her out from behind locked doors. Her younger sister grinds sandalwood for a home-made mask, while frantic calls to the NRI brother result in bags full of "foreign" creams and lotions.

They all fail and the girl now switches to camouflage mode. First, she hides her cheek with her hand, then her hair and finally stops going out altogether. When all experiments fail, there's a sudden brainwave. The girl runs to the nearby store and buys a tube of Himalaya neem face wash.

The voiceover, which has been humourously recounting the young lady's woes, now reproaches, "When you knew it would work, why didn't you try it first?" In the next scene, the girl's skin is clear once again and she turns heads as she walks down the street confidently. The tagline comes on: "Himalaya First".

On the face of it, this is a fairly simple ad for a single product. Dig deeper, and it is a studied response to important consumer insights. A few months ago, routine internal research by the Bangalore-based Himalaya Drug Co came up with some good and some bad news: while the company's range of 140-odd herbal healthcare products found favour with most customers, Himalaya didn't score too well on loyalty. Customers turned to its products only after having tried various other brands and products.

Himalaya's immediate task was clear. It needed to build top-of-mind awareness among target customers and, more importantly, make them pick its products first from the shelf. Accordingly, its new agency, Meridian Communications, was given a two-point brief: project Himalaya as a young, relevant FMCG brand and convince consumers to make it their first choice, not last resort.

Meridian, which won the Himalaya pitch last September, is Ogilvy & Mather's second agency. It took over a month to offer the client various executions based on the theme. The neem face wash ad and two other ideas "" for a hair loss cream and toothpaste, both of which are yet to be released "" were finally selected.

The tone of the ad "" simple lyrics, middle-class setting, no celebrity endorsement or even well-known model "" was selected to appeal to the widest possible consumer base.

"We went for the girl-next-door look to connect better with the customer," seconds Indrajit Mookherjee, vice president, Meridian Communications. "We wanted to keep it realistic and the characterisation, the casting and the setting all demonstrate that."

The other two ads in the series, which will appear on television in the next three months, also reflect that thinking. "We are sending a simple message to our consumers: Himalaya is a good product and should be given the first chance," says Padma Bhatt, marketing manager, Himalaya Drug Co.

The decision to kick off with the face wash ad, though, is a pointer to the company's strategic shift: repositioning the brand as young and vibrant, more than five years after it was launched. Not only is the product one of the top sellers in Himalaya's portfolio, the company also considered it to be the most relevant to the target group "" young people, especially women, in the 15- to 25-years bracket.

Himalaya says the "Himalaya First" campaign is its biggest since the 1999 launch, when the 77-year-old pharma company ventured into personal and consumer care products under the "Ayurvedic Concepts" label. The face of the company then was the "cool dadi" (agency: Contract): an up-to-date, laptop-lugging grandmother who knew everything, from mobiles and hip slang to the best ayurveda-based solutions for problems ranging from indigestion to acne.

A couple of years down the line, when Himalaya switched to "active ayurveda" and brought the range under the umbrella brand, the grandmother bowed out gracefully. Since then, all communication has centred on the brand. The last campaign "" Happy Hair, Happy Skin, in 2003 "" moved the company away from the therapeutic side of the business. "But not completely, as it was a very short campaign," points out Bhatt. "This one will run longer and reposition the brand strongly."

Once the brief was approved, the advertisement was filmed in Goa by Good Morning Films' Shashanka "Bob" Chaturvedi. "We were lucky that although clouds were threatening, the rains didn't disrupt shooting," says Mookherjee about the week-long shoot.

The 35-second film, along with a 20-second edit, will be aired on over 20 cable channels. Dubbed versions in Tamil and Telugu will appear on Sun TV, Star Vijay and Eenadu, while the original Hindi ad will be beamed on general entertainment channels such as Star Plus, Zee TV, Sab TV and Sahara One.

Meridian has also booked space on niche channels such as Zee Cafe and VH1, in keeping with the youth focus. Print versions will appear in various women's magazines, including regional language editions, while banner ads are planned for popular websites such as Yahoo! and rediff.com.

Himalaya also plans to increase its presence at the point of purchase, to give a fillip to impulse-drive buys and convert window shoppers to buyers. Large cutouts of the ad with the tagline prominently displayed will be installed at the 100-odd company-owned stores as well as the roughly 4,000 shops-in-shops and exclusive counters. (Himalaya also has a presence in over 40,000 kirana stores and chemists.) The visual cues will help increase trials, believes Bhatt. "The tagline speaks for the brand and the other 140 products. We can't advertise them all."