Advertising Opinions

Ad History is a new feature I started in this blog last month and this is the second installment. I would like to share some old ads which I have been able to lay my hands on and as I mentioned in my earlier post ( Ad History -1 ) the ads featured here are not necessarily memorable but are pretty interesting. This Cinthol Soap ad was scanned from a magazine called Star and Style published by Indian Express, if I remember right; it appeared in many other publications in the 1970s. The above ad features young film director and actor Shakher Kapur, if you wish to know more about him please click here . Year:1963 Year: 1981 Television was introduced in Bombay on October 2, 1972; TV at that time was black & white. If I remember right Weston TV was launched sometime in the late 1970s. Television ads those days usually talked about the basic features like good sound and picture quality. None of the television brands of that time exist today. I do not recall the year of the above Wills pre

I always believe that if you have something to sell you must be able to answer a simple question – Why should my target customer spend his hard earned money to buy my product? – The question appears simple but the answer may not always be so; the marketer must give the target customer a good reason to buy if his ad campaign has to work. In a highly competitive situation there are several players making similar claims and all or most competing brands are capable of satisfying the needs of the target consumer equally well because there might be no significant differences in the physical and functional attributes of products of competing brands. In such a situation marketers go beyond the physically characteristics or functional aspects of the product in question and position the brand/product on entirely different platforms – lifestyle, aspiration, pride, fear and many more or in other words take the emotional or psychological route. In this post I would like to discuss the advertising