Red Alert!
To the advertising cynic who insists that words don’t sell anything, how about this: Three little words that ended up selling lakhs upon lakhs of product units!
Rewind to 1991. The winds of consumer change were very slowly, but with equal certainty, gathering across the country. The consumer, especially of the younger variety, was getting a taste of what technology could do even at the individual level. Walkmans, cameras, electronic toys, hand-held video games, cable TV… Gadgets were beginning to influence his daily existence. Life had never been better; the consumer was beginning to feel empowered and entitled.
There was just the one problem. Gadgets mostly ran on batteries and, as such, were power-vampires – greedily or stealthily sucking away power. Life couldn’t run without batteries; unfortunately, these little power sources had the irritating habit of draining fast.
Market Grip Slipping
Into this scenario landed advanced Zinc Chloride technology. Its promise: Longer life, smoother power-drainage gradient, and negligible leakage issues. Red Eveready thought it was a winning proposition in a changing consumer environment. Except that its aggressive rival, Novino Gold, already had a few years’ head-start in Zinc Chloride, and its grip especially on the urban market was fast tightening.
Eveready still enjoyed leadership status – primarily driven by the rural market with its infinite and insatiable need for torchlight. Even in the cities, it retained the loyal patronage of the older age bracket. But as any marketing handbook will tell you: The youth are the future for any brand. And, for Eveready, this target audience was quickly slipping away in the cities.
The agency, Rediffusion, was brought on board and up to speed. Technology – tick, features – tick, everything about the product – tick. Now go out there and engage the target audience and bring them home in droves.
Lose-Lose Situation
Easier said than done. All the great brand promises were kind of futile in a low-involvement category like batteries. Once he dunked the cells into his little gadget – Walkman, camera, TV remote – the young end user didn’t care about it anymore… Until it started to die on him – right in the middle of his favourite song; while desperately changing channels on his remote to catch his favourite TV show or sports event; or when about to shoot that perfect picture.
At that point, he had sudden recall of the brand, and the expletives raged against it for ruining his special moments. Basically, a brand that was a blind spot at the time of purchase, forgotten while it efficiently did its job, but remembered with generous dollops of anger when it failed – or in fact, ran its course!
How do you engage such a complex beast? A consumer who wasn’t interested in any avant garde technology or product feature while making the purchase; yet railed against the perceived failure of the very same at the inflective moment. Worse, even if you could engage them, the fact that Novino Gold had long been there made it futile.
Battery advertising, if it even existed, had hitherto been defensive. Longer life, no leakage – pick me up because I won’t die on you too fast, and won’t damage your devices.
Shift in Focus
The agency brainstormed and came to this conclusion: Don’t focus on the end-use, rather on the end-user. Don’t sell them a product, sell them an attitude. Remove the customer’s instinctive engagement from the endpoint and failure, and take it to the beginning – the moment of purchase. Yet, without boring them with conventional product promises and features. Rather let him feel empowered, energised and engaged in a different way.
The creative team came up with one of the most memorable taglines in Indian advertising history: Give Me Red! It had attitude, energy, aggression and power all blended into it. In-your-face, too! It drastically shifted the brand salience from defensive to aggressive. Conjuring up images of an ultra-confident consumer slamming his fists on the store counter and demanding what he wanted.
Oozing with Attitude
The TV campaign reflected exactly such an attitude. No real storyline, no product promise, no rationale or logic – just oozing with attitude and imagery. The protagonists were given a cult and rebellious streak – something that the youth of the day secretly aspired for.
The tagline carried the entire communication. Around it was built the imagery and delivery. Give Me Red became a kind of urban youth war cry – surprisingly percolating down to the rural beyond as well. A perfect tagline – over and out in three syllables! Succinct and crisp. Three innocuous words that, strung together, conjured up oodles of attitude, conveyed an endless craving for power, captured the very essence of youthful energy.
This was no more about just a battery. It literally defined an entire generation and the direction in which it was headed. Reflecting attitude, adrenaline, aspiration – the next level of youth power. Best of all, it cut across geographical, linguistic and socio-economic boundaries. If ever there was a perfect tagline, this was it! It also transcended time.
The beauty of the campaign was that even before Eveready launched its heavy-duty Zinc Chloride battery, sales of its existing variants started to spike.
In the end, it was three little words that did the trick. Nothing more needed to be said. It proved that words can sell. As long as they can hit the audience straight between the eyes or straight at the heart. Three decades later, Give Me Red still resonates.
