But here’s taking lazy marketing and riding the celebrity (celebrities in this case) to a ‘brand’ new high! Reliance Life Insurance expects to make a song from the movie ‘3 idiots’ as the brand proposition. Read about it here.

I have great respect for Reliance as a brand and they have actually ‘bought’ brand recall amongst the average Indian consumer. Someone tweeted today and I have a screenshot here:

Don't actually take this as a threat!

Just as much as the tweet states that not watching Avatar demands execution, one can say that Reliance with all their businesses have touched almost every Indian’s life. But does that give them the authority to get lazy? I beg to differ.

How can an entire Marketing team get this lazy? This may just end up having binary results.

If the film performs at the box office… good. What if it doesn’t? Do you ride your entire organisation and its pride on the wise shoulders of Aamir Khan, Sharman Joshi (wowowow!) and Maddy boy?

What if the film fails? My views…

• Reliance Life will be forced to think of executing another set of creatives and unfortunately, ‘all may not be well’ then
• They would be forced to spend further sums of marketing Rupees behind another campaign.
• Not realising that this is around time when the average man on the road wakes up to ’save tax’, this strategy may prove to be scarily wrong. So they will have to run a parallel campaign on tax saving
• However they try to convince that this is not a promotion for the film, they should realise this and I quote myself here…

The average human being is lazy, however very intelligent. (S)He does not have the time to process your message the way you want it. Aamir, Sharman & Maddy not necessarily in that order are more liked and discussed about by them as against any ‘brand’. So, having ‘3 idiots’ as your campaign mainstay would make better promotion for the film than the brand itself.

• If this (All is well!) was a great proposition, then why wasn’t it thought of earlier? Why were we always doing this soppy, emotion stringing, tissue paper wetting commercials that claim that Insurance would take care of your family whether or not you are alive nonsense!

Ain’t we just lazy?

Disclaimer: Many years in financial services has led me to do this! I do not blog about financial services brands as a policy since I work in a financial services organisation (NOT in a Life Insurance company though!). However, this is just an exception. All views are strictly personal and does not reflect the views of my organisation / brand.

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