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E-commerce companies are borrowing some old marketing tricks to reach out to their target customers. Using desi ad taglines is one example. Remember, Pepsi’s catchy tagline Yehi hai right choice baby, and Coca Cola’s Thanda matlab Coca Cola. Many MNCs and Indian companies were quick to latch on to the cola companies’ idea, shifting from English to the easy-to-understand desi language, Hindi, in their advertisements.
Today OLX’s Bech de, IndiaMART’s Kaam yahin banta hai to CarTrade.com’s Car hai lena, CarTrade haina, e-commerce companies are adding spice to their advertisement taglines through these ‘ambush marketing’ campaigns.
Giving a desi and quirky touch to their brands, these firms are increasingly trying to reach out to new customers with Indianised taglines.
E-commerce companies are even using vernacular languages in their marketing campaigns. “We use both written and voice-over formats in local languages to reach out to different linguistic groups,” says a top adman.
“Everywhere we changed the tagline in the local language. These are state-specific, in the local vernacular language, with only a changed voice-over,” Raj Nair, Chief Creative Officer, Madison India, which unveiled CarTrade’s tagline, told BusinessLine.
“Before writing the tagline, we studied the colloquial our target audience used and understands, especially the youth. We wanted to plant the thought in them. We felt the question-answer format of Car hai lena, CarTrade haina was easy to understand,” he added.
Bharath Sastry, Business Head-Consumer, CarTrade, said the ad campaign, launched in December 2014, made the tagline memorable with added recall value. “It increased awareness about our brand two to three times.”
Quirky ads have, thus, come into the picture in a big way. A short quirky slogan, interesting, even bizarre, with unusual taglines in Hindi and other languages, these companies believe, would resonate well with their business models. This conveys their value proposition to the target audience in one, short sentence, in a local language.
“In the clutter of e-commerce advertising, the challenge for us was to differentiate IndiaMART as a business destination — a one-stop sourcing and selling exchange. We had to take care not to alienate the casual shopper. That’s why we came up with the line Kaam Yahin Banta Hai, a tagline that conveys no-nonsense dhandha to the business owner, and also conveys the ease of finding things a casual shopper may want,” Prateek Bhardwaj, Creative Head of McCann, which came up with the IndiaMART tagline, says.
“For phase 2 of the campaign, we drove the frequency with short films that captured the range of products available on the site. Actor Irrfan Khan gave us instant cut-through and while the scripts were celeb-neutral, he helped ensure audience engagement through the story.”