I had a marathon tweet debate over the weekend with Lakshmipathy Bhat and Karthik Sridhar, with occasional pokes by Nikhil Pahwa and Sudarshan Banerjee. Before getting into what it was about, here are two exhibits and a minor point I should add – I thoroughly enjoyed the debate, regardless of where we stand…continue to stand, with our opinions.
Exhibit #1.
“There are quite a few decisions that I took in this game…if we were not on the winning side, you know…first question, why Sreeshant, not Ashwin. Second question, Yuvraj Singh in form, why he didn’t at at no.4. There are plenty of questions…it’s good to win” – Mahendra Singh Dhoni, just after winning the 2011 Cricket World Cup, answering Ravi Shastri’s poignant question that went, ‘How do you feel?’.
Exhibit #2.
I’m eating Revital for breakfast tomorrow, washed down by Pepsi, under Orient PSPO, powered by Luminous inverters. – Tweet from Yours Truly, shortly after India won, on Saturday night!
Now, here’s the crux of my argument that started shortly after I finished reading Bhat’s blog post on Nike’s Bleed Blue campaign – Nike does not deserve credit for the ‘success’ of its Bleed Blue campaign.
Why? A few reasons.
1. Campaign nuances aside (creatives, tag line, media strategy etc.), it was very, very tightly associated with Indian team’s performance. If India succeeds, the campaign succeeds. If India fails, the campaign fails.
2. Pepsi’s Hoo Haa India anthem (part of the ‘Blue Billion’ campaign) was created prior to the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy tournament. India crashed out of this tournament at an early stage and now, all of Pepsi laborious efforts are seen in negative light! Had India won the tournament, we should (ideally) be praising the vision of Pepsi’s marketing team.
3. That exhibit #2 is just to show how we react when things are going wonderfully well. I’ll of course not buy ‘Revital’ ever (well, perhaps). I don’t drink fizzy drinks barring very, very occasional sips of Diet Coke…so no Pepsi for me either. I have no idea what brand of fan have in my home…I don’t intend to change it either. And I don’t need a inverter for my home…my apartment’s generator works adequately. So there, that’s the point. In the euphoria of massive success, we tend to see everything going right – Revital yanked its ads briefly when Yuvraj Singh was not doing all that well, but upped the media spend BIG TIME (full page ads!) when he was doing spectacularly well, despite annoying interference from his paunch.
4. Bleed Blue was, however well it was phrased and used, supporting the Indian cricket team. It wanted people to support the team. People were and are using the phrase in their daily lingo now…only because India won.
5. In a follow-up post by Bhat, based on our discussion yesterday, he adds,
With Nikeâ??s Bleed Blue campaign, sure the impact would not have been this great if India had not won the Cup. If we had not even made it to the Quarter Finals, then perhaps the TVCâ??s would have back fired. The new TVC, Yards, was showcased first during the India-Pak semi finals. So perhaps that would have been aired later perhaps. In my view, the campaign centered around two things: (a) garner support for Team India from the common man and (b) portray a positive, confident attitude about Team India (at many levels) and Brand Nike. It did not rely solely on portraying a cricketer as a super-hero or convey a â??We Will Win The Cupâ?? kind of definitive message. It is maha irritating to see an ad featuring a cricketer being portrayed as a super hero especially after a dismal performance from either the individual or the team. That leads to â??these guys are only good for adsâ?? kind of reaction from viewers.
So to come back to the subject â?? if India had not made it to the Quarter Finals, it would have been a blow to the Nike campaign effort. But a softer blow. What say?
Completely valid. But here’s my point – that ‘garner support for Team India from the common man‘ and ‘portray a positive, confident attitude about Team India (at many levels) and Brand Nike‘ are being uttered with the benefit of the hindsight that India won. Definitive messages or soft, team centric messages, all those nuances really do not matter at all, in my opinion. What matters is the basic purpose of the campaign and that is plain and simple – tie the campaign with Indian team’s performance – the wordings may be different, the imagery may be better, but at the end of it, it is the team’s performance that matters…to the campaign!
6. If the failure of a marketing campaign that hinges on an external occurrence (India’s performance) is not tagged to the brand and is reasoned out as a ‘calculated risk gone wrong’, why should the success of a campaign be tagged to the brand? Were Pepsi’s brand managers (who planned the ‘Hoo Haa India’ campaign) fired after it ran out of fizz (pun intended) because India did not make it to the semi-finals.
7. In a way, I could also take this argument beyond cricket (or sports). Brands do look for tie-ups with under-production big-budget films. They look at cross-promotion, merchandising options etc. That effort too hinges on the film’s performance. If the film fails, the brand will have no option but quietly withdraw its material and media inventory. If it succeeds, the brand goes ballistic on the association. So, the same question – if the film fails (an external event), the brand is not blamed for poor marketing tie-up decision; after all some smart man at the brand’s marketing team took an informed decision after speaking to the film’s production team and director, I assume. The failure of the campaign is brushed aside as the film’s failure that washed everything away in its course. But…if the film succeeds, we start making case studies on how the brand’s marketing team thought smartly, much ahead!
If there were blog posts praising Bleed Blue campaign shortly after it was launched, I wouldn’t be writing this blog at all. But praising the campaign after India won seems a little too convenient, to me. As they say, nothing succeeds like success!
Karthik Sridhar tweeted late last night, ‘Bleeding blue being used in MSM. Its a part of the folklore now’. Well of course! People would be using ‘Hoo Haa India’ too in their daily lingo and mainstream media would be going ga-ga over it too…had India won the trophy in 2006!