Marketing Strategy at Ipl

IPL Bonanza We are surrounded by brands throughout the day. Right from getting up in the morning and using our first thing toothpaste to dressing up for the day to driving a car and so on. In such a scenario an event like IPL which wins the hearts of so many people and is viewed by all age groups is mouth-watering for brands to catch attention of perspective customers. This could be the make or break scenario for brands. If you advertise effectively it could help you build your brand name and if your competitor does it before you it might affect your presence in the market.

Thought the opportunity is huge the investment is also big. Let us see how different brands used their television advertisements during this IPL for brand building. To start with the honours I would like to put a brand which is known for its daring image. Yes its Thumps Up which previously had the tagline “Taste the thunder” with Akshay Kumar as an ambassador. Now came up with this amazing new concept of “Aj kuch toofani karte hain”.

It had a very strong message which was in line with the previous image it had made.

Also the innovative thinking and twists in the advertisements were worth watching. Competing with Thumps Up was Mountain Dew which had the tagine “Ab Dar ko mar Dew”. It was a decent advertisement with good eye catchy stunts and good colours used in the advertisements. Nimbooz and 7up came up with an interesting advertisement which had a nice peppy music “I feel Up”.

The one thing which differentiated it from both Thumps Up and Mountain Dew was that instead of focussing on a daring style it focussed on a chill type of lifestyle.

Pepsi on the other hand came up with the tagline “Change the game” which was specifically used to target the next generation with showing the interest of the youth in football. Featuring Dhoni, Harbhajan, Raina and kohli was also a smart move as they are the youth icons. Limca which came up with the advertisement of Kareena Kapoor was effective enough to promote its new tagline “Pyaas Badhao”. It had a new concept which was good. Coca Cola had its amazing advertisement running which had the tagline “Coca Cola pilao aur khusiyan badhao”. It had very attractive and interesting advertisements which were good.

When we think about Vodafone the first thing that comes to our mind is Zoo Zoo. Vodafone had really become popular in the previous IPL’s with its Zoo Zoo advertisements. After having set such high standards I feel that they disappointed us by this times advertisements with the tagline “Internet is Fun”.

The British company dubbed the advertisements featuring foreigners playing games in Hindi and really it failed to inspire the audience. Its competitor Idea had new advertisements floating around with the tagline “An idea can change your after life” featuring Abhishek Bacchan.

The advertisements were good but they really did not explain properly some of their applications like the Sleep application and a few of the application which were hyped like finding your car or maps or Cherokee were already present and nothing different was there. Also the tagline which meant to improve your after like did catch attention initially but did not make sense. The one brand I would like to praise for its efforts was Tata DoCoMo which featured Ranbir Kapoor with the new concept of “If everyone treated you like your mobile operator”.

The advertisements were really eye catchy as well as funny making a good impact on the audience. Also every advertisement had clear messages like “enjoy the best internet”,” Put an end to waiting “,”No cheating on unlimited” etc. and the acting of Ranbir Kapoor was worth watching. Now let’s look at a car company which has really kept innovating and improving their models and that is Volkswagen. It came up with its Vento car with an inbuilt screen which had the feature of screening live IPL matches.

The advertisements were also impressive. Also the Vento signed by the 9 captains of the IPL teams kept for auction got a lot of visibility.

Dairy Milk came up with the advertisements promoting “kuch meetha ho jaye” with really good effect. One of the advertisements featured the innocence of a guy getting ragged and another one where the wife tells her husband she was pregnant. Both the advertisements were really well executed and well shot and also had a very good effect.

Next one more advertisement which was seen getting aired online was Volta’s all weather A/C which promoted funny advertisements where they showed the features of the A/C which keeps the person comfortable in all weathers.

The striking feature of the advertisement was the funny concept around which the advertisement was made. Definitely people enjoyed the advertisements. Mc Donald’s advertisement for spice fest was amazing and got a lot of attention especially for the exciting new flavours which were mouth-watering for the viewers. They were well shot and also were a very good strategy to launch new types of flavours.

Reliance 3G had a very good advertisement running on “Be blue” where it emphasises the features of the android phone with the application of Reliance. Last but not the least the advertisements for the reality show Indian Idol was commendable.

They captured the advertisements giving importance to not only the singers but also the people who help them reach this level. This not only gave importance to the people participating but also gave importance to the people around them thus making an excitement and a feeling of pride among those who play a part in helping the participants become successful. The reason why the advertisements were effective was it made a lot of people feel proud and gave them the feeling that behind a successful person there are a lot of people who deserve that part of success.

Thus different brands in their quest to maintain and build their reputation tried different concepts.

Some concepts work better than the others but the main thing is that each and every brand constantly strives to grow and compete with others by spending huge amounts of money on advertisements. With various other social media channels for advertisements it is a very difficult task for marketers to understand the perfect blend of advertisement money spent on each medium and get the maximum impact possible.

Looking at the effort put in by the various companies for an event like IPL we can understand how hard they work on constantly improvising on their previous best throughout the year. Well for us these giants set examples as a lot of experts work hard for one idea to get executed. All we can do is wish these companies very best for the future and wait to see how they compete and set examples for us to learn something more in the vast field of marketing.