“CORONA” – the word till some time back spelt only – ‘great’ ambience, ‘super like’ type of music, company of ‘awesome’ friends and yes, a highly chilled pint of – “CORONA”!
How things changed – as legends over centuries have claimed – in a wink!
The guys behind this beer brand maybe now are having an issue with the brand name selected earlier with pride, literally inconceivable a few days back … things were going hunky-dory for the brand, with millennials keenly posting all over Social Media particularly the ‘hep and happening IG’ about the transformation of Brand ‘Good Times’ from “Kingfisher” to “CORONA” …
It begets the question for psychologists and brand experts to meditate whether “CORONA as a name will evoke a melancholy of awesome times or the dark shadow of an unprecedented lock down, the fear of death lurking around the corner and for some unfortunate ones the pain of losing a loved one? Should it give way to a makeover of the brand name and with incessant advertisements will the clienteles’ intellect to believe that the new brand is still capable of evoking the spirit of ‘chilled times’ and has moved on from “CORONA” times of yore? Would love to be in the same room where this issue would be thrashed out just to observe human behaviour and cryptic analysis … Brand recall is a Science for sure!
Drawing your attention, 180 degrees, is one more example I would like to narrate. Interestingly, a section of the citizenry who pride themselves to do a ‘Carl Lewis’ “first-off-the-blocks” the moment our Hon’ble Prime Minister addresses the Nation (there have been two telecasts and one video address so far) have exhibited a repetitive yet not-unknown penchant to come up with memes, bombard Twitter timelines and fill my ‘WhatsApp’ wonder box, (as Mr Anand Mahindra calls it) with Gigabytes of videos deriding the call for action as he seeks it. With abundant time at hand, a person like me gets to read diverse views on this somewhat extremely touchy aspect of human behaviour. Mr Shekhar Gupta (for once) wrote an interesting piece recently which further accentuated my thoughts on this aspect. Rather than the run-of-the-mill person in politics, each time he came on screen he ‘sought’ countrymen to do something for themselves yet exactly as ‘he’ advocated. One could have sat down just before such an address to mentally debate what sops would be on offer, how an extension of the Financial Year (which fortunately never came about) would positively impact one’s tax returns and the like.
However, what one got to see were the abject simplistic actions he sought his countrymen to do on his call, in these unprecedented times. His passionate appeal for the “Janta” Curfew and requirement to remain indoors, the ‘Thaalis’ and the ‘Taalis’ as also the ‘Diya on the balcony’ are all aspects of Brand Recall. Imagine a few months and years down the line when the country goes for polls he just has to recollect these seemingly innocuous actions, that even the homeless woman in a rag pickers colony was able to execute and therefore relate herself to the Man and his mission, against this unseen enemy of the country. It is these seemingly small actions called for by him which certainly have no precedence or as some would say ‘basis in modern-day science’, yet, the mass connect it would evoke amongst the ‘junta’ in months & years ahead are immense.
Moreover, what did it cost the common man (the Ram Lubhaya and his family) in some abstract village of Himachal or Uttar Pradesh or Karnataka to effectively execute these suggested actions? Brand Modi sought you to do something easy which you could have done based on this appeal & now three years later with those recollections – the target audience relives the present uncertain times and the good fight our countrymen put up against the almost invisible enemy. This, to my mind, is a grade of ‘personal branding and recall’ not used in Indian politics hitherto fore.
These actions are like the quintessential “Amul” advertisements, which with a catchy two- or three-words tagline conveys it all, and take the subject matter to an altogether different plane!
Are there some lessons for the business world to learn from?
I leave that to the reader to decide …