GLOBAL — Symphony, a world leader in evaporative air coolers has always believed in giving its customers the best in class, pocket friendly products suiting everyone’s need.
This summer, Symphony and DDB Mudra West have attempted to give a solution to the heat in a humorous way with their latest campaign- “PANKHE, WHAT IS THIS?”
Crammed between fans on one hand and air conditioners on the other, Symphony has been trying to expand ‘Coolers’ as a category. Strategically, it has always spoken to a mindset that longed for an AC but hesitated to make the purchase for economic reasons. Symphony seemed to offer the right sized solution to them – comfort cooling, great looks, great value and versatility of usage (outdoor, inverter etc.). This approach has worked well. It has delivered consistent growth and opened up new markets.
While this strategy worked well, it addressed a rather limited audience who had to be convinced logically. The brand needed a more provocative, aggressive approach to expand their footprint and hence it was imperative that the agency looked at an alternative; a larger source of business – the fan market.
The campaign aims to provoke the ‘fans only’ households to upgrade to Symphony air coolers.
“Symphony has been growing at a CAGR of about 30% for the past five years and in order to maintain that we needed to look beyond our regular TG and decided to broaden our base. There are 160 million+ households in India that have only fans and no other cooling devices. The obvious upgrade for them is air coolers to beat the scorching Indian summers and to make sense to this large consumer group, we needed a strong proposition. Our R&D team had been working on making our coolers more energy efficient and now we have coolers that work on an operating cost of a fan. We feel that coolers running on electricity cost same as a fan is a great proposition and decided to focus on this key USP. So, we briefed the agency to have a communication that looked relevant to the fan users and to highlight our Key USP. While the campaign will be focused on Television, it will be suitably supported by print, digital, radio and also through local activation,” said Rajesh Mishra, Associate Vice President, Marketing, Symphony Limited.
Symphony as a brand had always wanted to be seen as ‘white good’; wanted to be equated with ACs. The brand has stuck to this stance since its origins through the entire journey. In order to provoke ‘fans only’ households to upgrade, Symphony ran the risk of being boxed with fans, distancing itself from ACs. The challenge was to keep the brand (and the category) aspirational, while we urged consumers to upgrade from fans.
The idea was to leverage on the expectations that the fan users have from their appliances, the agency showcased the brand as the preferred and useful choice for upgradation.
“While the campaign was to urge fan-only households to upgrade, the fan is not the enemy in our campaign. It’s actually the victim. It’s not physically, or mechanically in this case, possible for a fan to combat the harshness of summers. But still one considers the presence of heat as the incompetence of fans. Our campaign urges them to stop pointing fingers at the fan and get home Symphony air coolers to take on the scorching summer,” commented Rahul Mathew, Creative Head, DDB Mudra West.
The 40 seconds ad film starts with two heavily sweated, tired men sitting on a sofa, grumbling about the unbearable heat and looking at their ceiling fan with expectant eyes. The scene rolls into a catchy jingle highlighting the helplessness of fans, albeit sarcastically. In tandem, the film captures a montage of various situations of a family spending horrible summer days indoors, fighting the heat while desperately trying to extract more out of the fans. Towards the end, a voice over introduces Symphony air coolers as the much sensible option to fight the adverse summer heat.
The ad film is the first phase of the integrated marketing campaign which is scheduled to have print, radio, digital and outdoor phases to it.
