All through the 1980s and 1990s, as I grew up in assorted cities like Bhubaneswar, Bhopal, Trichy, Coimbatore, and Salem (since my dad was in a transferable job – a bank), I used to observe a peculiar obsession of my dad – participating in slogan-writing contests!
If you have grown up in the 80s and 90s in India (and perhaps the 2000s too), tons of brands used to advertise in print seeking slogans from readers.
The usual template is that they release an advertisement in a print publication, the ad has a cut-out part in the corner where they start a sentence and leave 2-3 lines empty for us to fill… and we are supposed to cut it out, fill the slogan, add our address, put it in an envelope and send it to the address mentioned. In most cases, proof of purchase too was necessary – you had to attach a part of the product packaging along with your slogan… this is where the brands gained in terms of both attention and conversion.
For instance, I clearly remember the contest my dad participated in for AVT Premium tea. They had sought a slogan in Tamil, with the starting line being, “I enjoy drinking tea because… “. My dad had a 3-sentence slogan in Tamil that we still laugh at because of how labored it sounded. He won a wall clock for his entry!
In fact, he did not win many of the slogan contests he took part in, but he continued to participate with genuine interest, painstakingly cutting them, entering the contests, and even keeping a copy of it for his records, in a file!
One contest he won was for Coffee Bite, where his slogan won the 2nd prize – to and fro tickets to Singapore. My dad wrote back to them seeking the cash equivalent of the prize. Most brands had a clear rule back then that cash-equivalents of prizes would not be entertained, but Coffee Bite did relent and sent us the reward money after deducting tax. That money was how I got my first audio system, while I was in college 🙂
I also remember my cousin brother winning a big slogan contest for Cadbury’s 5-Star where the ask was a question: “How do you make a 5-Star blush?”. His winning entry was, ‘Eat it without dressing’, if my memory serves me right 🙂 He won an all-expense-paid trip to Goa for two people!
He eventually joined the advertising industry and runs a digital marketing agency, now 🙂
His dad (my dad’s brother) was luckier. He won a slogan contest for a car brand and won the first prize – a brand new car!
For my dad, it was a hobby that consumed and engaged him, away from the drudgery of a bank’s work. And because most brands insisted on proof of purchase, our house was littered with more products than we could consume – so multiple bottles of Horlicks, Brooke Bond Red Label tea, Coffee Bite, and so on, much to the consternation of my mom 🙂
My dad also used to hack into the rules which said that only one entry per person (address) was allowed. He used to send multiple slogan entries in the address of other family members, with a ‘C/O’ under each name. Some of these entries have won small rewards here and there.
Just imagine – long before the internet and the mobile era, this was an interactive form of marketing using print media! You were not just engaged by the communication in print, but encouraged to think up something creative, for the brand, buy the product and send it to the brand in order to be eligible to win something!
A variation of this slogan-seeking tactic was general contests. I remember a contest on TV that I bungled 🙂
Flying Machine jeans ran a contest on The World This Week program (Fridays on Doordarshan, by Prannoy Roy, a precursor to NDTV) where they played the new jingle of the brand and asked viewers to write to them (on a postcard or an inland letter) which genre the song belonged to. There were four options to choose from – rap, reggae, rock, and jazz, if my memory serves me right.
I was in school, back then, and had zero idea about musical genres. I sent a postcard to the address guessing the genre to be reggae. My cousin brother (the one who won the 5-Star contest!) told me (after I had sent my entry) that it was rap 🙂
Suffice to say that my dad’s slogan-writing bug ran in our family. To some extent, my interest in advertising probably started with my dad’s obsession with slogan-writing contests, which then morphed into me taking it seriously enough to hunt for the latest issue of A&M Magazine (Advertising & Marketing) in the only shop in R.S.Puram (opposite Annapoorna Hotel, Coimbatore) that used to sell it.
But I do wonder what really happened to the marketing tactic of seeking slogans (or asking people to write in something in response to a question posed in public) from the public, with or without proof of purchase?
Why don’t we see any brand using these tactics in any form of advertising anymore?
India Post had even launched something called the Competition Postcard on the back of the extraordinary interactivity spurred by the TV program on Doordarshan, Surabhi!
The competition postcard then became very popular as a mode of interactivity for multiple TV programs that used to pose a question at the end of each show and reward select entries in the subsequent show.
I assume there could be multiple ways to look at the demise of the slogan-seeking/interactive form of marketing.
1. Internet
One obvious answer is the speed of interactivity between users/viewers and brands. Postal communication is long dead and the internet has upended the kind of interactivity possible.
India Post phased out competition postcards in 2005.
Imagine Flying Machine asking the same question on an Instagram post, or a Twitter poll – seems perfectly plausible. And brands do that all the time, in the name of spurring interactivity.
Another twist to the tactic that is so very common nowadays is to ask the question in a print ad and ask people to write to the brands via social media handles using hashtags.
Rarely do brands ask people to write to them via email, in response to a contest. The choice of media is almost always many-to-many (that is, social media). This means that people become vehicles of advertising for the brand, and hence there is no need to hold direct communication with them anymore using one-to-one media channels like email (the current version of a postcard/inland letter).
Brands don’t assume that something can be gained by asking entries to be sent in private, collating them, and finding a winner. Social media platforms have made direct communication with brands almost redundant within the contest/interactivity context. The rule now is, “If you want to say something to us, just shout it out where others can listen too!”… and this goes for complaints too. Both good linen and dirty linen is being washed in the public now 🙂
2. Creativity
With regard to seeking slogans, specifically, this has been democratized too, because of the internet. ‘Caption this’ is something we see very often online, from brands and from people.
On another plane, there are a LOT more advertising (and digital marketing) agencies than in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s. Advertising, as a profession, has been mainstreamed, far removed from the niche profession it used to be back in those days. Seeking slogans from people was all the following: marketing interactivity, increase trials/sales, crowdsourcing creativity.
Now, brands do not need to crowdsource creativity at all. There are way too many agencies available to get the same job done with a lot more structure.
3. Quantity, more than quality
The slogan-seeking marketing tactic was aimed at getting the most interesting/appropriate slogan/caption for the brand. It was less about getting a LOT of responses – and this was obvious when there was proof of purchase required. Only the truly serious people would buy the product for the sake of entering the contest.
With TV shows seeking reactions and responses, the quality of contests went down significantly. I recall many contests from MTV and Channel V asking a really dumb question and offer 4 choices that were equally dumb. You could easily notice that the idea was not to get quality responses but maximize participation.
Using social media to get people to react is similar – the aim is to get more and more people to participate and pick one person at random for a reward. More the participation, more the visibility through their networks online, because of the nature of the medium.
4. Effort vs. outcome
When you entered a contest by seeing the call in print media (or TV), bought an old-world communication media like postcard or inland letter, posted it through a post box, waited for days to hear from the brand… you perhaps put more thought and effort into the process given the sheer amount of time involved overall.
The same thing online happens in an instant. It seems effortless, and perhaps because of that, mentally, you may also put limited effort into the thinking (if at all some brand is asking!).
Given the many, many things calling for our attention on the internet, I presume brands have boxed the contest-based interactivity as a niche activity.
But I do believe that a well-conceived/well-managed contest that appeals to the intellect and makes your audiences think is a good marketing tactic regardless of how you ask them to participate. The kind of people that such interactivity could engage would matter to brands that value such an audience.
It would be relatively smaller than what they can gain from posing a lowest-common-denominator question on social media (even this generates replies/comments only based on how many followers the brands have, and what the reward is!), but there may be deeper engagement.
When social media was new in India and I had the opportunity to use it for branded marketing back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we had a list of ‘contest hunters’ to avoid engaging with for our clients in the form of contest winners. Many of them have now become ‘influencers’ and continue to work with many of the same brands, promoting them on their personal feeds, but for a fee 🙂
PS: One sector that has not given up on slogan writing contests is the Indian Government! I see tons of contests from the Indian Government, posted on MyGov and many other Government websites very regularly!