Repositioned

MARKETING: Hindustan Lever's example of how not to be mindlessly global or hopelessly local.

Doug Baillie doesn't want global brands to be either "mindlessly global, or hopelessly local". So said Hindustan Lever's CEO at the CII Marketing Summit being held at Delhi's Taj Palace Hotel.

That his presentation would strike some sort of global-local balance was clear from the apology he made at the very start. If talking brands in a hall full of marketing professionals was "teaching my grandmother to suck eggs", he joked, or half-joked, he was sorry.

It was a theme that was to draw applause later on in the presentation, when the "fiendishly complicated" business of brands came to the crux of what he meant: exemplified by Unilever's Omo/Surf case study.

The brand's global mission was to reposition "dirt" in the consumer's mind as "good" instead of "bad".

Wouldn't work, not in Asia. So said local Asian marketers. Everyone knew dirt was unhygienic and thus bad. Well, that depends on how the story's told, responded Unilever.

Cut to this TV commercial for Surf Excel: little girl and elder brother are walking back from school along a dirt track. Little girl stumbles into a puddle, and breaks into sobs.

Protective brother decides to rectify matters, and stomps into the puddle to pound it silly, demanding an apology ("say sorry"). The ad closes, both caked in mud, with the brother's arm around the little girl, and the adline, "Daag achche hain" ("stains are good").

No bio-babble about "gram positive" or "gram negative" germs (recall suds advertising five-six years ago?). Just a simple message to let kids be kids, free to do their own thing, and free of years and years of parental conditioning.