India, as a country, should be a massive market for agarbathis (incense stick) given that every temple small and big uses them by the droves day in and day out.
But when you think about famous agarbathi brands that are pan-Indian, I can think of only one – Cycle. Cycle Agarbathis have used advertisements over a long period of time, including those featuring Amitabh Bachchan, consistently, to build themselves as a national-level agarbathi brand.
So, when I came across this new campaign for another brand – ITC’s Mangaldeep, I liked the fact that another national-level brand is pitching itself in this unique space dominated by local, smaller brands.
The context for the ad, by Ogilvy, is quite fascinating – it involves invoking memories associated with something specific.
Scientifically, it makes perfect sense: “Scents bypass the thalamus and go straight to the brain’s smell center, known as the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, which might explain why the smell of something can so immediately trigger a detailed memory or even intense emotion.” (Source: Discovery)
For example, a few years ago, I was making something in the kitchen and my head hit the chimney while I was keenly looking into the kadai. I was so close to the chimney and I could smell the oily, grimy, smoky fragrance of a much-used chimney hob. That specific smell, for a few seconds, instantly took me to a very different place in time! I grew up in Srirangam, near Trichy and one of the temples we used to visit very often (almost every week) was the Jambukeswarar Temple at Thiruvaanaikkaaval. The sanctum sanctorum of this temple’s deity used to be inside a cavernous depression in the ground that was always wet and brimming with water. Since I was a kid when we went to this temple often, I recall this being a thrilling experience every single time… a very exotic setting for a temple’s innermost part.
That sanctum sanctorum used to smell exactly the way I experienced with my chimney hob – deeply smoky, grimy, and emanating out of the oil used for the lamps!
My kitchen smell led me to travel in time albeit in my memory.
The other senses have this power too – a specific scene, a specific taste… all these could transport us to another time when we had experienced that earlier.
The new Mangaldeep ad uses this insight to great effect.
The young boy is in a world of his own when he is offered prasad the first two times by Bhumika Chawla (Mangaldeep’s brand ambassador), he treats it merely as a sweet. The third time, she lights up the agarbathi (it, helpfully, comes in two fragrances – camphor-tulsi and panchamrit) and that brings the association of prayer, God, and prasad, in the boy’s mind, from the memory of making that connection through the fragrance earlier. And that changes his demeanor towards the prasad this time!
The fragrance of the agarbathi (in this case – panchamrit variant) is something that the boy has perhaps experienced as symbolizing piety in an earlier part of his life (perhaps when he was young). Now, his other senses are preoccupied (eyes on the gadget, sound is blocked into the game). But his sense of smell is open for outside influence and when the panchamrit smell wafts in, he realizes the significance of what Bhumika is offering him, triggering the appropriate piety needed for that situation.
I looked up quite a few other agarbathi ads from India. They have all uniformly used temples and Gods as the main backdrop but none has used this triggering memory angle as the crux.
The Mangaldeep ad uses the narrative of scent triggering the memory of a specific surrounding and action.
However, I do remember two other product categories based on fragrance using this memory trigger crux really well.
The first is closely related to incense sticks/agarbathis – scented candles.
IKEA launched a new range of scented candles last year called OSYNLIG. It was a range of 13 scents specifically intended to trigger memories of ‘home’ – ‘complex scents that spark memories of childhood’, as they put it!
You could ask – how can my childhood from a small town in Tamil Nadu be captured by a Swedish brand’s scented candle? Obviously, the way we describe ‘home’ differs from region to region, and smells of home too differ wildly based on individual experiences.
To some extent, that’s what Mangaldeep was trying to go after as a theme – the smell of an agarbathi invoking the memory of a state of piety.
Any fragrance may not invoke this – for instance, there are lavender scented agarbathis too but that may not perhaps invoke the mindset of God/piety. And there are sandal scented agarbathis too (even under the Mangaldeep brand) and this may possibly invoke memories of Mysore Sandal soap being used by someone in the family!
IKEA’s launch ad for OSYNLIG was by the Swedish agency PJADAD. It starts with a young girl’s heartbreak and moves to her reminiscing about growing up with her mother (that there was no father around was a refreshing detail!), and ends with her invoking the memory of her earlier home in her current home through the scented candle.
The IKEA ad uses the narrative of scent invoking the memory of a place.
Similarly, Air Wick’s 2014 campaign by Droga5 used the same insight to evoke the memories of home for a soldier stationed away from his home! (Hat tip: Snigdha Bose)
The last one in this series is the most unlikely, in comparison to the other two. But this is also the category that is most popularly associated with fragrances – deo!
One Indian brand that used the insight of scents triggering memories was Wild Stone, via the agency Soho Square.
The brand’s Kunal series uses the same narrative, but this time, the scent triggers a memory of a specific individual, to hilariously naughty effect 🙂
The first ad:
The sequels: