The very purpose of advertising and marketing is to influence people’s perception and behavior. With a major objective of attracting and engaging the customer, every ad strategy is formed. Thus, the importance of listening to these very people cannot be stressed enough. Every human being out there is a customer to one or other brand; and being a marketer, keeping ears open to all of them is immensely important.
The ad campaign of Coca Cola which was crafted by Prasoon Joshi is one of the best examples. Amir khan starring ‘Thanda matlab coca-cola’ ad campaign made a rural world a national catchphrase. ‘Thanda’ –a word that was ingrained in our culture as just another word for ‘cool drink’ was cleverly twisted to link with the product. The result is known to all. This campaign alone expanded the coke TG from youth to masses. It represented a cool drink which was for everyone. That, our dear readers, is the power of listening to the masses.
We, at Litmus, are all ears for people out there. We literally listen to everyone. A recent brand promotional campaign of ours was also formed on the same line.
One of our clients, SHOTT, Gujarat’s popular gaming and entertainment center, wanted us to take forth their OOH promotion. Since we had already established the brand in the market through a range of peppy and vibrant campaigns, this assignment demanded something new without breaking the already established brand tone and identity.
Our project managers and creative experts conducted numerous meetings with the client for the same. During one such meeting, when they were taking a walk around the gaming area they heard a conversation of a group of young boys who were discussing about how they wanted to spend their weekends partying or having fun with friends like this; with one of them precisely saying ‘dil hi nahi kar raha jaane ka’. That’s when the creative bells rang. The TG was the youngsters and they wanted a relaxed and enjoyable time. We decided to talk about the enjoyable experience with the TG in their own language. Their favorite songs will be our medium to communicate about the unique product offering. We came up with an idea of creating a communication strategy using the popular songs and twisting its lyrics to highlight the product offering. Taking only the party songs which had famous one-liners we created a series of creatives. For example, Karting is one of the many games they offer and ironically they alone offer this entertaining game in the whole of Gujarat—we took the product offering and integrated it with the popular song and our communication statement was “Abhi to Karting shuru hui hai”. Merging the brand offering with these lines nailed our objective.
We made people sing the songs they already loved but with a small twist. We expected it to perform good, but little did we knew, it performed great! The campaign received an amazing response from the TG and the client achieving its business objective was our greatest win.
Observation is the key—as repeatedly said by our Creative Director and religiously followed by our team, we keep tabs on everyone and everything. We have successfully completed so many such projects where the idea originated from a simple happening or hearing a common term by a commoner. In fact the greatest ads of all time were created following the same simple rule.
Ignoring, pretend listening and select listening is not ideal for us or for any agency. We take listening extremely seriously. We follow this plain and simple rule of listening even for our content marketing strategy. It helps us find topics most relevant to people. Listening to people yields results. Sometimes when we are not sure about something we conduct a teeny tiny public survey to understand the insights and opinion of the people on the same. It helps us understand whether we are on the right track or not. Like we said before, listening is a great asset. We adhere to it and recommend everyone out there who is in the domain of marketing to do the same.
We have listened to many and we are here to listen to you as well! All you have to do is to pick up the phone. We are closer than you think and extremely easier to talk to. Plus, our coffee is great as well, so we can chat up over one.