Jaguar XJ ad features Kareena Kapoor Khan - Misfired?

Recently the new commercial for Jaguar XJ was aired. The ad features the beautiful Kareena Kapoor Khan.

While the ad tries to demonstrate the killer looks and astonishing features that the Jaguar sports, the effort fell way short in creating the magic one would expected from a Jaguar ad (Given their pleasant track record in ad intelligence, especially in last couple of years). The reason could be attributed to a series of loopholes that found place in this ad.

The ad starts very much like the Jaguar ads made for foreign markets but very quickly gives away the protagonist baton to the actress. The subsequent screens take their own sweet time while admiring the beauty of the actress while squeezing the frames which had the car and its features as focus.

• Emotion mismatch - Elegance mixed with confidence would have been the right emotion for presenting a product which is an icon in itself. It would also have complimented the global image of the brand, hence keeping consistency for the brand communication across poles and hemisphere. But for some strange reasons, the ad-makers and the script writers chose to unleash the good actress, which she is  instead of the product being the center piece of communication.

          The gestures and the emotions displayed by the actress are more suitable for a furniture or bathroom fitting advertisement. For example, multiple glides of fingers on the car fixtures. Also an interesting expression spawned over multiple frames, that of an overjoyed kid sitting first time in a 'big' car

              

• Choice of Brand ambassador - Well, this may be a contentious one, but Kareena Kapoor Khan may not be the best choice as a brand ambassador for the Jaguar. The power and iconic status the brand should look for itself in India, does not resonate with the actress brand image. 

More so when the actress is also doing ads for many mass products like cold drink(limca) and cosmetics products (boroplus). To add, she has been doing these ads for quite some time now. Long enough for the audience to have created a perception of brands associated with her. So when she promotes a low cost mobile phone(iball) or a sachet for boroplus that costs 5 rs, the audience bolsters a perception about her association with price sensitive product (barring Sony Vaio).

Not to forget she hasn't had any 'iconic'performance, critically or commercially, for a long time now in            movies either. Bad time to form an association!

• Adjectives chosen to define brand traits - Elegance and Sophistication are the right words we would want to associate with the brand Jaguar. But liveliness and inner beauty are misplaced. Somehow there is a lousy attempt to associate the actress' personality traits to the Jaguar. This not only is irrelevant but also puts the idea of wow-ing the audience with the product in the back seat. (Is Kareena Kapoor Khan the benchmark for Jaguar?). 

The tagline "How alive are you" may come out as a good one in a different situation and a different ad but wrt this advertisement, it comes out to be completely out of place, not leading the audience anywhere.

              

• Brand personification - The conversation in the ad's background by the actress, tries to personify the brand, quite forcefully with someone who understands her. An easy innuendo to her partner in real life. This trick kind of takes away the focus from the car to the actress' personal liking and life. Always remember - Indians lose focus of everything when placed against the Bollywood tit-bits. Bad move.

• Bollywod-yfying - While we love our bollywood, It is no secret that we love international brands to remain "international". It adds a perceived benefit to the product emotionally, socially and financially for us. Hence, though bollywood-yfying a product may look like reaching out to the newer pastures in terms of TG, it might hit back if the brand is too "Indianzied" in the effort. The term "Iconic British Brand" would yield more for Jaguar than the "Indianized" version of it.

While it can be agreed that having Kareena Kapoor Khan in the ad will connect with a bigger audience in the country and will create awareness about this iconic brand, but the real question is -

• Is the TG focused through this advertisement right for Jaguar XJ?

Before signing out, Check out this ad for Jaguar for UK market.

          

Cheers,

Amazon - An Innovation Powerhouse!

An annoying interstitial ad forced me to post it on my facebook page as a sign of protest. It is funny how social network makes you feel as if you are actually powerful. I will save a detailed note on this psychological e-phenomenon for future, but I must say that the ad did what it was supposed to do. Discounting the fact that I didn’t end up buying the colourful bagpacks, the ad did manage to attract my attention. It also made me promote it (unwittingly!) to my 500+ internet buddies on facebook.

 

The brand that was advertising vociferously on my daily news website was Amazon. Huh.

Amazon is everywhere these days. It has slowly and steadily, and with a lot of patience and innovation, built a strong-fundamental based business model in India. Many were wondering for the first few months after Amazon made its way into India about Amazon's quiet game plan. The firework that one would expect from the big daddy of online retail was far from visible.

All this while, Amazon was investing in the foundation stone of this to-be e-tailing giant of India. This has helped Amazon India to build for itself an environment and capability to roll out mind-boggling innovative ideas that has kept its customers delighted and rivals on toes so far.

Amazon demonstrated aptly the approach to build a business in a new market by challenging set rivals and even beat them on their own turf. The long experience in its home country and deep pockets though adds to its advantage, none should be taken away from Amazon for being super agile and incessantly innovative.

I wrote some time back on Amazon’s bipolar approach on improving its delivery performance to enhance customer delight. At one end, Amazon had started experimenting parcel deliveries through drones while on other hand, in India it sealed an alliance with India Post to help it deliver parcels in far-flung areas.

Very recently, Amazon introduced a fresh gust of innovative ideas that varies from category expansion to new services and from vendor empanelment to channel expansion.

Back in US, Amazon turned heads last week by inking a $ 300mn-three years deal with HBO to let Amazon Prime members watch old HBO shows. Within no time after giving its customer the HBO delight, it announced launch of the prima-pantry service for its prime members. The service allowed the prime members to shop from more than 2,000 products to fill a four-cubic foot box with up to 45 pounds of goods. The package can then be shipped at very nominal cost to the customers.

These simple innovations have not only added to the product lines it can sell but have also created benchmark for serviceability and customer responsiveness in this rapidly growing industry.

Here in India, Amazon has opened up a bottle of innovations which, with the gush these innovations are ejecting, seems to have been there ‘under-construction’ for some time now.

After collaborating with India post to deliver its parcels in 19,000 pin-codes across country through its Colosseum -like network of 140,000 Post-offices, Amazon has put into action its plan to make it easy for sellers.

Amazon, this week launched two initiatives for sellers to facilitate an accelerated and hassle-free experience. The US-based firm launched the Self Service Registration (SSR) and Amazon Easy Ship for sellers. Amazon SSR enables sellers irrespective of their size, location and size of catalogue, to self-register on the Amazon marketplace and start selling within a day without any third party intervention, making the process quick, easy and transparent.

With Amazon Easy Ship, the seller has to pack the shipment and confirm to Amazon that they are ready to ship. Amazon Logistics collects the shipment and ensures that the product is delivered to customers in 2-4 days.

Jeff Bezos is known to be the driving force of Amazon's
customer first culture and a true admirer of innovation at work

These two services have taken the e-commerce game to a different level in India. A response from the bigger rivals(so far!) Flipkart and Snapdeal is soon expected as the e-commerce industry matures in terms of technology and operational set-up.

The big question is, how Amazon has been able to pop-out one innovation after other, even faster than the TV soaps’ episode run?

The answer is fairly simple – Getting the basic rights and employing Long-term thinking in a new market.

Amazon didn’t rush to lure customers as soon as it entered in Indian market. Instead, it took its time in getting the fundamentals right. It built the logistics network, warehouses and built up a large selection of products that is now bringing in customers for them.

In a recent interview, Amit Deshpande GM of Amazon India said that its strong back-end infrastructure is helping it scale up fast. He further added on that when they decide on areas of focus, they always work backwards from the customer. Selection, delivery experience, logistics, payments and website experience are areas they are super-focused on.

Amazon has been scintillating in terms of its growth, and more importantly in its systematic business approach in terms of all modules of a business organization – Strategy, Marketing, Supply chain, Human Resource development and above all, Innovation.

Truely, Amazon is an innovation powerhouse!

Killer Greenfold - Killing Competition

Think of any denim-wear brand ads and two expressions that will instantaneously hit your brains will be two phonetically close words – Sexuality and Sensuality.

Historically, denim brands have been very innovative about the execution of their 'assigned' branding themes, but they can be very much held guilty of innovation paralysis as far as their central themes are concerned.

This can be easily established on looking at campaigns for some of the major brands in denim wear.

Wrangler is one of the biggest denim-wear brand of the country and has had a long association with John Abraham. John Abraham brings youthfulness and macho image to the brand which works in its favour. This brand image has been a tried and tested platform for many players and not many venture outside this ‘safe’ zone.

These ads while promote the clean finish jeans, there is higher focus on the brand ambassador and hence it is difficult to decipher the key message in isolation.

Levis did something very similar in its campaign for button-fly jeans. The brand ambassador was Akshay Kumar and Levis didn’t leave any stone un-turned to capitalize on his uber-macho image. The campaigns showed him doing stunts and flaunting the product in the process. Though the makers can claim ‘freedom’ do be the central them due to the key message –“live unbuttoned”, it was not apparent. Apart from a different brand ambassador and a louder message on macho-ism, there was nothing new to offer.

Another campaign from Levis for the cling fit jeans featured Kangana Ranaut in some “clingy” shots. Again the idea was so tightly bonded with sensuality, the key message was lost. The use of celebrity brand ambassador took a major portion of focus away from the campaign in this case. 

The “stupid” campaign by Diesel was a lot more thoughtful and did reap benefits in creating excitement for the brand as these ads started even before diesel opened its first outlet in India.

However, One campaign that stands out of all for multiple reasons was the ”Green fold” campaign by Killer jeans. Killer jeans was launching a new range of jeans wear and needed a clutter breaking thought that would stand out among its competitors .

The campaign was designed on the fact that each of these jeans consumed 100 liters less water then any other jeans, while being manufactured. The thought was simple and was picked up from a manufacturing innovation aspect.

This point was very tactfully converted into a marketing aspect by putting across the acceptance and usage of these jeans as an environmentally conscious decision. Also, the campaign stressed on the fact that the buyers should be proud of themselves to have bought a product that helps in ecological preservation. The campaign was divided into multiple print ads which showed the models using the saved water in a more responsible way like watering the plants and storing water for birds. Some of the high points for the campaign were as follows -

• The campaign hit the right note as the jeans-wear projected itself as a conscious brand among the sensuality and sexuality driven brands.

•  The campaign put the killer branded jeans on a different table than all others as it did not blow the  “be sexy and look gorgeous” trumpet like its competitors

• The campaign very smartly labelled Killer jeans as an environmental crusader urging youth to participate in this “holy” mission of saving water by doing their little bit - Buying this jeans over others

• The campaign also ensured that the focus is only on the message, hence no celebrity brand ambassadors were used

• A very interesting aspect of this campaign was that there were no pointers on the product itself leaving this aspect untouched. This helped the campaign in keeping focus on the key message

• The campaign however, used the tried and tested technique of using foreign models conforming to this trend in the denim wear industry

The idea of green-fold was a very exciting one.  This idea stemmed out of the human psychological behaviour which was intelligently picked up by Killer Jeans. More than doing good things,  people want others to know that they are doing good things. Since these jeans looked the same, Killer wanted to differentiate them from others which will also give its owner a sense of proud and “ecologically aware” status

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      The jeans were dyed green inside, so a fold at the bottom showed the green colour unlike the traditional blue. This not only gave the denim a stark different look from other jeans but also labeled its owner of being environmentally conscious. The choice of green as the colour for this fold was apt.

The overall communication stands at making “being ecologically concerned and aware” as the new "cool" for its TG. The campaign also give Killer jeans the first mover advantage for being a conscious youthful denim brand, a notch above being just sensual and sexual.

Truly, a Green-fold campaign!

 Cheers,