It pains me to see creative advertising professionals still churning out campaigns that are just flogging the brand and nothing more.
Some of the most memorable ads across the world ( several from India ) have been greatly successful since they always focused on selling an emotion or experience, more than just the brand it belonged too…
Be it the age old Liril campaign with the stunning Karen Lunell or the darling of a pug in the Vodafone campaign, the focus was always an experience or an emotion that it triggers in its viewer/ reader. For that matter even the more recent campaigns for Mahindra’s range of off-roaders, is a good examples of the need to get high involvement from the viewer/ reader.
And yet, creative minds take refuge in just flogging key brand attributes and allow the viewer to steadily move on to another channel or flip a page of the publication they are in. Whatever happened to even the more basic sensory routes used by perfumers and cosmetic companies with scratch and sniff patches on their ads ? Publishers even upgraded machines and added amazing features to enable such innovation and today, they rot in the high end presses of the country’s leading media houses.
No, this isn’t about advertising being sluggish. There is enough advertising happening to be able to showcase emotions and much more. It’s just that advertising houses have got complacent with the shoddy work that is being put out. Most often it is the client who decides what the campaign will look like and depending on the character at the client end, the campaign can turn out bad, horrid or unbearable as the case maybe.
My apologies to these people in question but what has to be said, must be said, and that is why independent commentators like me exist. So to be able to do justice to my self induced raison d’être I must go on relentlessly until we see method in this creative sluggishness.
What must be abundantly understood, is that our world today is highly inclusive and thus emotional connect at all levels is critical, be it, in inducing a purchase decision or just boosting recall levels. Social media a typical example where you can actually see the difference in analytics when a post is simply shared as opposed to adding a few lines to introduce the share…
The latter works far better and this has nothing to do with algorithms. It’s simply the human brain that is at work. It needs stimuli of a constantly evolving genre and this is where emotions play a critical role.
Consumer neuroscience in fact addresses this beautifully and despite what critics may have to say, there is a lot of merit in understanding the way audiences react to different stimuli, and more so in a highly cluttered brand marketplace. Consumer buying is greatly affected by perception, emotional connect and a familiarity that often stems out of peer behaviour. The latter is the reason for the immense popularity of the ‘reviews’ for each brand/product that you may intend to buy.
Building on the emotional quotient of a seemingly boring brand isn’t always easy, but, isn’t that what creative professionals are supposed to do? At one stage this was the core objective I would imagine, but today, it is reduced to just sitting back and watching great campaigns at Cannes. Inspiration comes from attending these conventions and festivals, I have been told for a few years now. Nothing outstanding seems to be coming to the surface though, besides the million photographs of the exotic locales be it Cannes, Goa or anywhere else.
It is a pity and I seriously think all my friends in the fraternity need to seriously introspect to be able to have their creative minds work on advertising that will address the ever flirtatious audience of today. If not, the inevitable will happen and great work will get outsourced to countries beyond our geography.
Brands will realise this imminent creative need and nothing can hold them back then. Not even physical distance.
Maybe it is time for the advertising world to wake up and smell the coffee!
#The views expressed in this column are the authors.
Jd also consults in Consumer Neuroscience and Neuromarketing, both of which are integral to his brand interventions.
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