About two decades ago, Pepsi’s “ Yehi hai right choice baby” and Coca-Cola’s “ Thanda matlab Coca-Cola” broke new ground. The catchy taglines with the liberal use of Hinglish immediately caught the attention of the target audience.
Fast-emerging e-commerce companies, rapidly expanding their target market from the urban elite to semi-urban and even rural areas, are now going for similar ambush marketing, using the vernacular to reach the masses.
From OLX’s “
“Everywhere we changed the tagline to the local language,” Raj Nair, Chief Creative Officer, Madison India, which developed CarTrade’s tagline, told
“These are State-specific, in the local vernacular language, with only a changed voice-over,” he explained.
“Before writing the tagline, we study the slang, especially that of the youth,” said Nair, describing how his company came up with the CarTrade tagline.
“We wanted to plant the thought in them. We felt ‘Car hai lena , CarTrade haina ’, in a question-answer format, would be easy for them to understand.”
Brand recall Bharath Sastry, Business Head-Consumer, CarTrade, said the ad campaign, launched in December 2014, has been very successful in increasing brand recall. “It increased awareness of our brand two-three times,” he said.
For most e-commerce firms, quirky ads in the colloquial appear to be the best bet to reach the consumer. For B2B portal IndiaMART, the challenge was a little different.
Different target “In the clutter of e-commerce advertising, the challenge put to us was to differentiate IndiaMART as a business destination — a one-stop sourcing and selling exchange,” said Prateek Bhardwaj, Creative Head of McCann, which came up with the IndiaMART tagline.
“We had to take care to not alienate the casual shopper. That’s why we came up with the line ‘ Kaam yahin banta hai ’, a tagline that conveys no-nonsense dhandha (work) to the business owner, and also conveys the ease of finding the things a casual shopper may want,” he said.
“For phase two of the campaign, we drove the frequency with short films that captured the range of products available on the site. Actor Irrfan Khan gave us instant cut-through and while the scripts were celeb-neutral, he helped ensure audience engagement through the story.”