Pretty recently a campaign broke out in National Media for Union Bank of India. It was pretty visible at least to me. I saw the ad on TV, hoardings on my way & back every day! A fairly large PSU Bank has again embarked on a mission to remind the customers about the brand after I think 3 years.

The campaign features Aruna Vishy, Ajit Tendulkar & Manoj Singh. Celebrities. NOT.

India and Indian family system is much interconnected. We are more social that the average social animal of the west. Family values are based on strong bondage and interdependence is very high within the members of the family.

Unlike the west, it is almost impossible to live alone and manage your life with the kind of facilities that are (or are not) available and one tends to depend on their immediate family a lot more than most other countries. Kids are under the aegis of their parents even till 24-25, while the average ‘walking out’ age in the west is 18 (or less)?

Beautiful insight. Transalated into communication by Union Bank of India.

The campaign features some unlikely heroes in their own way. Vishwanathan Anand’s wife, Sachin Tendulkar’s brother, and Vijender Singh’s brother, who are publicly known to be the pillars of support for the well known gods of their respective sporting discipline.

However, they were not in public eye till date.

Reems of paper and documentation have been made about Ajit Tendulkar. Sachin never forgets to mention his brother every time there is an accolade that is showered on him. But never has he been considered a celebrity. Till one views this campaign, chances are that they wouldn’t have seen Manoj Singh (Vijender’s brother). While Aruna has been in public eye before, I don’t remember her endorsing any brand.

Brilliant idea. It seems to fit with the brand’s communication well too. As a bank they claim to share your dream. Moot point being that one’s dream is never one’s alone! At least in the Indian context. This I believe is a fantastic premise for a brand to take. Especially one in the financial services space and that too – a large PSU Bank. Brings in the consumer closer to the brand in more than one way.

Using celebrity spouses or family members seems to be picking up in India. I remember Viru’s mom, now Aruna, Ajit & Manoj and Indian Cricket’s first lady Sakshi Dhoni. Snooky but viable idea. Make celebrities out of celebrity family members and get them cheap (at least relatively). I also believe that Abhishek (Aishwarya’s husband) is endorsing a few brands right? (Ha! My sarcastic self has to peep up someplace!)

However, I believe that the execution has its own minor glitches. The TVC is way too breezy and doesn’t get to the point. In the pretext of making it very classy, the point about driving home the key message is almost lost because the TVC is not crisp. Clearly the story could’ve been told in a 30 or 20 seconder rather than a 40. It almost sounds like the creative vs client argument. Client wants the story told shorter and the creative wants that extra 10 seconds. Things haven’t changed much in the last 5 years at least on this front

In all, I believe it is a great insight in the Indian context, but a not so great execution.

Must admit however that the advertising from PSU entities lately have been creative & catchy. That however has to be a separate discussion by itself!

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First flight journey. First flight ticket. It was a rectangular booklet containing 3 self-carbonated sheets which had the details neatly printed. It had my name and the best part was that it was next to the Indian Airlines logo. Felt proud! The pride was because the ticket cost was almost Rs.10,000 (which was loads of money around then).

I still remember how tickets used to get booked then. You called up your local travel agent and he would quote a rate for different airlines and different timings etc. You need to choose and then you end up ‘blocking’ the ticket. Once you pay, the blocking becomes a confirmation and you had you ticket to your destination. Whoa! Was it that complicated?

Let us take the trip back to today’s times. You want to take a trip, you get on to the internet and choose amongst the many aggregator brands like Ixigo, Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, Yatra etc, choose the sector, the dates and voila! You have details of all flights for the sector you require across all time frames and the cost of your travel including all taxes etc. You can choose your convenient flight which comes within your budget and you are e-mailed your ticket which you take a print out of and travel. If that wasn’t enough, you can follow any of these brands on Facebook or Twitter and you will keep getting the best deal at any point of time!

What has been explained in the earlier paragraph almost killed an industry, but made an EMPEROR out of the customer. The entire ilk of Travel Agents had to change their business model because of technology helping what can be termed ‘Price Discovery Mechanism’.

Taking a cue from where I left day before, I am trying to explore the pricing function and the effect of Web 2.0. Airline industry is just an example.

To my best knowledge all airlines uses a system called Galileo for their ticketing and sector planning requirements. Crudely put, Galileo is something similar to the Finacle of the Banking industry. But Galileo suffered from an ugly-face syndrome. Basically the entire system lacked a decent front end.

With a bit of help from Web Technologies like AJAX, Flash etc Galileo acquired a beautiful front end. All airlines started building their own front-ends running on the same back end. And thus started the advent of aggregator websites like the ones mentioned earlier and they started giving pricing of the various airlines on a real time basis on their website. Your friendly neighborhood travel agent was replaced by a user-friendly web application.

Add to this another entity called the payment gateway. This entity again uses Web 2.0 front end technologies to run on their complex database heavy back end engines and process payments through the internet. So once you as a customer discovered the price at which you will buy a product / service, you have these payment gateways which will help transfer funds from your bank / credit card to the vendor and your transaction is complete.

This poses a great challenge for the airlines. Especially the budget kind. They now have to track the pricing of their competition from all these sites and ensure that their pricing is at least a Rupee less. Thus price wars have acquired a new dimension. And basking in all this is the customer. He surely is the king.

This now is true of many other industries. Some examples:

• Rural India now uses Web 2.0 technologies sponsored by corporates like ITC (ITC e-choupal) to trade on their produce. The produce includes agricultural produce like Potatoes, Sugarcane, wheat etc.
• If you have ever used the internet to trade on stocks and shares, you have been touched by Web 2.0. These technologies help you in identifying the latest price of a particular share in the market and help you complete a purchase or sell transaction.
• Amazon, eBay, Flipkart etc are more examples of Web 2.0 helping in identifying the price and giving you the ‘best’ deal.

So the next time you get a quote for a stock, air ticket or a quintal of sugarcane over the internet, remember that pricing of the offering has been reached to you using Web 2.0 technologies. In the fond hope that the price that is being quoted is dynamic enough to appeal to your sensibilities and aid your purchase. Price Discovery has acquired a new meaning with the advent of Web 2.0.

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I find the phrase ‘aall eeej welll’ across FB & Twitter and it seems to have clicked for them. Well, they seemed to have placed their bet on the winning horse and no wonder these guys will certainly take a fat bonus this coming year!

However, I would be curious to see how this success pans out to benefit the brand. That my friends, is a continuous arduous task. Success of the film does not mean success of the brand! So the wait and watch must happen!

However, all the best to you guys! And congratulations on a fantastic pick! Cheers

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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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