Case Study of a specific Advertising Campaign Essay

Case Study of a specific Advertising Campaign - Essay Example Following this, the company launched its ‘Happy to Help’ campaign, featuring the popular Hutch mascot (a Pug) and offering excellent customer service to its subscribers. This too was an effort in vain as people still connected the pug to the old brand, counteracting the company’s efforts to establish their presence in the country. This left Vodafone in a difficult situation where they needed to bring out their own mascot which would win over the hearts of the people while simultaneously communicating their USPs to their target audience. As explained by Harit Nagpal, the then Chief Marketing Officer of Vodafone India in an interview to afaqs (2009), Vodafone was acquiring customers at a very fast pace, but a large number of them were unaware of the value added services offered by their telecom service provider. Some of these services, like phone backup, had been available for over two years without being used much. Thus, the marketing team at the organisation felt a need to showcase their array of products and services, build an emotional bond with their customers and still be positioned as a market leader. It was this need that led to the creation of India’s most loved brand mascot in a decade. Conceptualizing the Campaign When in trouble, you turn to your best friend. If Vodafone India had a best friend, it was their multi award-winning ad agency Ogilvy and Mather, which was tasked with coming up with a new mascot and ad campaign to accomplish these goals. According to an interview with Rajiv Rao, Executive Creative Director, South Asia, Ogilvy India, the only brief given to the agency about the desired mascot was that the character had to be ‘simple to a stupefying level’ (afaqs 2009). After much experimentation, the agency came up with characters with humungous ellipsoid heads (with dots for eyes and the mouth) and disproportionately thin bodies clad in white. These ‘Zoozoos’ were simple living characters who spoke a language of their own (quite akin to the tongue of gibberish) and expressed emotions in a manner similar to the emoticons one came across on chat engines and forums. The idea behind using these characters was to portray slightly comical and endearing scenes featuring these Zoozoos where each scene or advertisement was used to portray one value added service to the customer. Each film was shot against a grey background, showing these characters interacting with each other with the product story weaved in. The Beginning of the Campaign Once they were done creating a mascot for an extremely ambitious purpose and shooting advertisements with extremely high expectations, the agency had the unenviable task of deciding when, where and how to launch this campaign. The company’s investment in the previous year’s ‘Indian Premier League’ cricket tournament had failed to make much of an impact on the target audience despite the series shattering the countr y’s television rating records for the past half decade. Therefore, it came as a surprise to most that the agency recommended investing an entire quarter’s advertising budget into the 47 day tournament and that the client complied (4Ps Business and Marketing, 2007). While the company took a huge risk choosing to invest in a venture that had already failed them in the recent past, they incorporated one significant change in their advertising strategy. The idea now was to