The Hindu Business Line : Everybody! Paint lagao!

A painting competition for schoolchildren, of which Asian Paints is a sponsor. The company works hard to get consumers involved with the brand and the category.

Saturdays have always signified weekends and holidays to me and yet, as a child, I never looked forward to Saturday. That was the day of our weekly oil bath. We all had to wait our turns for a shower, hair and body dripping with oil. (Strange though it may seem now, one actually had a lot of curly hair in those days.) One also usually leant on the wall to shrieks from my mother saying that we were dirtying the walls. (And the greater ordeal was that we could not go out into the sun and hence could not play cricket.)

Yes, oil was a necessary evil in our lives. And I was reminded of all this when I saw the new Berger Easy Clean "Everybody! Tel lagao" commercial, which has a racy jingle that exhorts people to rub it, shake it up, on the wall, on the hair ... yes, everybody rubs oil not only on their bodies but on the walls as well and the solution is Berger's Easy Clean Paint. It is a really nice commercial with a catchy tune and reminds everyone of life in India, our dependence on oil and our propensity to spread it on surfaces that we ought not to, like the walls of the rented houses that we live in or on the pillars of heritage temples!

I have a soft corner for any commercial that strikes a chord in me as a consumer. As for this commercial, I can certainly relate to and empathise with, unlike the hundreds of ships that cross me at night on TV, which can otherwise be described as "pointless commercials."

Ads that paint a thousand words

Historically, I have always been fascinated by paints. The smell of fresh paint still attracts me. And paints as an industry used to be really attractive to management students in the early '80s when we were at management school (I hope that is the case today as well, though I can't say for sure). Asian Paints was one company that was certainly an "employer of choice." The company believed in MBAs, hired them, trained them and promoted them.

In my case, though I never really applied to a paint company, I was, and still continue, to be fascinated by the company's advertising. One of the finest campaigns that we in India were exposed to was a campaign for Jenson & Nicholson Paints. The campaign "Whenever you see colour, think of us" created by Rediffusion, created waves, won critical acclaim and awards.

Then comes my own all-time favourite, which I still show in my classes on the power of creating for a specific region in a particular language. I refer to the Asian Paints `Pongal' commercial. I am sure many of us have seen and admired the commercial shot by Rajeev Menon bringing out emotions that warmed Tamilian hearts as we realised for once that a national brand was recognising and accepting our uniqueness and also created in a tone and manner that was uniquely Tamilian. And it made smart business sense as well as rural and semi-urban Tamil Nadu sees money only at that time of year and is willing to spend it readily at the time of the harvest.

This successful experiment, done nearly two decades ago, has now been followed by other savvy marketers and successful brands. And Asian Paints has extended this to other markets such as West Bengal which exhibit unique characteristics as well.

Asian Paints, which has always been an integral part of Bengal, has instituted a Sharad Samman Puraskar for the best Durga Puja pandals in different neighbourhoods and actually created ads for that market. The `Har ghar kuch kehta hai' commercial featured lyrics by some famous Bengali contemporary writers. This is a brilliant, insightful commercial talking about how every home is a reflection of the people who live in it.

I have said it before and will continue to say it till the cows come home — the value of consumer insights and their importance in making similar-looking, similar-performing and similar-sounding products stand out from their competition is something that has been recognised by and capitalised by very few communicators.

The Asian Paints theme commercials continue to bewitch — the later renditions with two cute kids have the children decking up the walls to their own taste. Once again, heartwarming stuff. And this is really the brand's greatest achievement - creating benchmarks in creativity not only for this category but serving as a yardstick of what can be achieved with smart thinking and slick execution.

Low-involvement to high-involvement

Marketing has not been simple in the past and is unlikely to be simple in the future. Consumers have fleeting involvement with products and categories and even more fleeting interest in how the buying decision is made. Take categories like motorcycle chains, automotive batteries and tyres. Most marketers focused on the original equipment manufacturers, provided great quality, were beaten down on prices and lived in dread of losing the relationship and the business. They realised that there was a huge replacement market out there and brands like MRF used advertising to build their brands and consumer pull. They reduced, even if they were unable to entirely negate, the influence of the mechanic.

Even as our automotive sector is booming, so is our construction industry. Several categories like cement, tiles, water tanks and paints have come into their own. India must be one of the few markets in the world where cement is advertised so heavily. The mason still matters and on occasion even the architect, but there is a conscious and concerted attempt to woo the customer. And what better way to woo the customer than Asian Paints `Mera wala green' and the campaign for Colour World outlets that lets the consumer make the choice. Yes, products can be moved up the consumer's involvement chain with time and effort.

Sunil Babu to Chandru

Any analysis of paint advertising would be incomplete without a mention of Sunil Babu. Exteriors, hitherto unimportant, were brought into the forefront. The house looked as good as new even if the car and the biwi showed signs of wear and tear in one case and prosperity in the other.

Usually commercials created in one language with great success do not have the same impact when translated. And to people who only know the local language in which the commercial has been translated, the rendition sounds obtuse and weird. The pronunciation is alien and the thought process convoluted. However, `Kalakkariye Chandru,' which is a translation of the hugely successful Sunil Babu, does not suffer from these maladies. It has the local touch and the expression was quickly adopted by the Tamil media and entered the mainstream conversation of the average Tamilian.

The power of advertising

Agencies yearn to handle categories driven by advertising, like cola. These categories need advertising in summer, winter or even when a pesticide scandal strikes. Tyres and paints did not belong to this exalted status. But savvy marketers saw the opportunity, empowered their agencies, built brands and showed the way.

So what is happening in your category? Have you realised the power of advertising? So whenever you see a great commercial think of your own category. Maybe it could be the beginning of another "Sunil Babu!"

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO of Brand-comm.)

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