Differentiating the cow from the herd of cattle!

When you welcome the festive season in India, you are bound to welcome a couple of other more strings attached to it. The gifts, the freebies, the discounts. Be it the automobile brands, the apparel brands, the technology driven brands or even the FMCG brands, everyone has something more to offer to its consumers. Said so, this definitely calls for a place for brands to advertise their offers and make it visible to their consumers. Newspapers are one such medium of reaching out to the consumers and having a presence felt in the market. But with minimum time that each consumer devotes to reading newspapers these days, how does a brand make sure that the consumer catches up on their advertisement? With nearly 40+ brands advertising every single day on the newspaper, how does one make sure ‘their cow is differentiated from the herd of cattle’?

Volkswagen (VW) answers this question. VW is one such brand that has explored the creative ways of breaking the clutter in the newspaper medium. It has had people blog, tweet, and talk, simply put; go gaga over its newspaper advertisements since its inception in the Indian market last November.

It all started with the ‘Roadblock’. A strategy used by the VW brand for its foray into the Indian market. On Nov 11th last year, VW took the lime light by running as many as 20+ advertisements each on all the big national newspaper dailies, thus blocking other competitive brands from advertising on that day. Every sheet that the reader turned over had an advertisement of the VW brand, ensuring even a minute spent on the newspaper would have the reader catch a glimpse of the brand. In a nation, where there was low brand awareness about the VW brand & with an umpteen number of automobile brands already having made a mark in India, the strategy easily proved to be a winner in announcing a new brand had arrived in India. A strategy that had the automobile fanatic market to take register of the brand & sign up for test drives. “Only a blind eye could miss it!”

A quarter later, they had another campaign on the newspapers which launched the hatch back Polo onto the roads of the Indian market. This time they had the shape of the Polo cut on all the sheets of the newspaper from the first sheet to the last sheet. The last sheet had the line, ‘‘we’ve put a lot into it. You'll get even more out of it'’. A brilliant execution of driving the inquisitiveness & curiosity of the reader to find out the final message of the brand communication. “Even a blind eye couldn’t miss it!”

The 21st of Sep 2010 was an unusual day for the newspaper readers. For decades, a medium of communication which was considered to be visual turned audio for a day. ‘A talking Newspaper’, as the media termed it. An audio piece attached to the last page of the newspaper had the brand communication of the newly launched Vento when the reader opened the newspaper. While some termed it as a dangerous campaign, for many it brought cheers. It had them flipping the newspaper up & down to listen to it over and over again. It had them sharing the audios on the internet. It had people set it as their status message on fb. It had people blog & tweet. An idea which created buzz around everyone. “It was not meant to be missed!”

Thanks to the creative agencies, DDB Mudra & Mediacom to have explored the creative ways of connecting to the consumers in more than one creative way. A hefty brand communication idea worth every penny for the VW brand. These have ensured the brand get maximum visibility in the market & more so create an opportunity for people to market the brand ‘word- of – mouth’; the biggest marketing medium of communication.

The idea of coming up with this as my write up came from the nearly 50 pages of advertisements running in on the newspapers today. Not a brand has intended on catching people’s attention. At least not mine. Just a herd of cattle!