How catchy ads boosted these small brands

Fevicol did it and how. Its advertising established it as a household name and a generic for the category and won the agency O&M tonnes of awards. Other brands in low involvement categories like plywood, pens, glass are now following suit. So, why are agencies and advertisers getting so involved with these brands?

Plywood - now how many people are really excited about this product category? Chances are that very few don't even know that there are at least a 100 brands in the market. A majority of these brands don't invest in any form of advertising. But market leaders Greenply and Century Ply want consumers to remember just their brand names.

And they are doing this by creating some simple yet eye- catching advertising.

Advertising that is winning awards like the Greenply film that won an Abby Gold early this year or the Century Ply ad which is getting talked about within days of its launch. This film took a year from conception to execution and finally hit television channels only in December. The brief given to the agency was just to create an interesting ad with a single-minded proposition!

Deputy MD, Century Ply, Sanjay Agarwal told CNBC-TV18, "There have been certain failures as far as certain creative are concerned in the past. But this time, it has to be good. We are trying to reach the masses. Plywood maybe low interest category but when you make your house, you are spending 15 per cent of your expenditure on plywood."

"This is a lot of money and if the name Century Ply is in your mind and if we can convert even 3-4 per cent of people from other brands - that's a big development for me.

"It's a Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) market and a small shift for us. Another reason is we are into plywood but diversifying into cement and the agri business, and for that we have to create a brand and Century Ply is the brand that will go to the masses."

It's every brand's attempt to reach out to the masses, even if they are not going to directly buy your product. Brands that have very low consumer involvement tend to make the mistake of focusing on what they think is their USP.

The trick actually according to other brands like Camlin is, to forget about product applications and focus on creating a high involvment emotional product that will eventually deliver sales.

Executive Director, Camlin, Shriram Dandekar says, "Any soft sell ad will never give you direct information on the number of units sold or the number of units picked up but we believe that over a period of time in a continuity, when people see this ad, it will have good recall value - the theme will have a record and will leave an impression that Camlin has created a good ad and that means Camlin has a good product."

Group Creative Director, Lowe, Preeti Nair explains, "Unlike a detergent or a soap, your involvment is very clear, these are the categories you don't care what you are buying, therefore what name remains salient is what you will ask for. Saliency will happen only if you are memorable. A brand gets registered - it's not because of how often the brand name comes, it's at what time it comes, so if you take a single-minded benefit and do a commercial they'll remember, you'll get saliency on the brands. Brands like Fevicol, Greenply have done it."

Such advertising has a definite advantage in terms of longer shelf life over advertising campaigns in the FMCG space. For most such brands, there is greater emphasis on the creative idea rather than the media plans. Most of these brands don't spend more than Rs 3 crore (Rs 30 million) annually on advertising, but definitely get a lot more bang for their buck!

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