Mktg - A pinch of patriotism

There’s no hard sell of its health benefits, no talk of taste, or even boasting of its market share. Tata Salt’s latest ad campaign, which aptly broke on August 15, has instead taken a nationalistic approach.

Consider this: people in a locality are celebrating the festival of holi, playing with colours and dancing to the beats of a dhol. A south Indian man walks past and is pulled into the celebration. Meanwhile, a chaat-wala sprinkles Tata salt on a plate of chaat for the revellers who thank him by splashing colour on his face.

Cut to Onam festivities where amongst a score of Malayalees is a Muslim man and his family savouring a quintessential Kerala meal on a banana leaf. A pinch of salt is served and the man cautiously takes a bite. No sooner, his eyes light up, indicating a much-satisfied palate.

The scene shifts to a young Sikh boy and his uber cool friend wearing a cap. The boys push open a door that opens into a huge house where a family is celebrating Baisakhi with friends and relatives. The two boys greet the elders in the family by touching their feet, and then begin matching footsteps with the dancing family members. A woman in the kitchen adds some salt to a glass of water. The salt dissolves completely and all that remains in the glass is unadulterated water to which she squeezes some lime and the youngster wearing the cap blissfully drinks it.

All this while a voiceover conveys the leitmotif: Jaise desh waasi aapas mein ghul-mil jaate hain waise hi paani mein poora ghul-mil jaata hai desk ka namak. Yehi hai shudhta ki pehchaan (like people in a country mingle with one another, salt mixes in water. This is the proof of purity). “We wanted to play on the earlier established positioning of desk ka namak while attaching it to the country in some way, and this ad was the perfect fit,” says Sukumar Menon, executive creative director of Leo Burnett, the agency which made the ad.

The brief to Leo Burnett, which has been associated with Tata Salt for three years now, was to bring in the connect with purity. “The way Tata salt dissolves completely in water, we Indians dissolve in our culture and diversity,” Menon elucidates.

Surprisingly, Tata Salt already has an ad on air, still it felt the need to communicate to consumers. “Tata Salt’s positioning of desh ka namak is linked to the freedom movement (Gandhi’s salt march to Dandi), so there could not have been a better time to come out with this brand film,” says Ashvini Hiran, COO, consumer products business, Tata Chemicals.

More important though, it is an effort to change direction. Once in two years, the company conducts a brand workshop that involves consumer visits and feedback. Consequently, the results of this research purport that while Tata Salt is a trustworthy brand, it is seen as traditional and lacking in modernity. Aware that in the face of changing demographics in India, which favours younger consumers particularly those under 25 years, like its old-world contemporary Godrej, Tata, too, decided to jump on the youth bandwagon.

Indeed, that very feeling is highlighted in the last reels of the ad where the uber cool cap-wearing dude dances with the turbaned folk on the occasion of Baisakhi. “Yet at the same time, the campaign shows how the youth of the country still believe in tradition and we hope this will convert non-users to users while reinforcing credibility with loyalists,” adds Hiran.

In line with the same move, Tata Chemicals made its foray into the low-sodium salt category with Tata Salt Lite, which is 15 per cent lower on sodium content. All this, the company hopes, will culminate in higher volumes and market share.

It took about a month to shoot the 40-second ad (much more than it usually takes to shoot one), as the production crew had to battle the Mumbai monsoon, which they hadn’t accounted for. Shot by production company Future East, the ad has 40-, 20- and 10-second edits that will run across all general entertainment channels.

In addition to that, there will be radio and point-of-sale promotions as well. At the same time, the company is also conducting tactical “purity campaigns”, demonstrating to consumers how a spoon of Tata salt dissolves in water leaving behind no residue.

Among some other ideas for the campaign that Leo Burnett had suggested, there were ones that harped on the idea of the purity of different traditions in the country. “But the ghul-mil campaign won hands down as it’s not a force fit. Many brands have done country-related campaigns, but most of them ended up looking like a force fit. In this case, it’s a perfect fit,” clarifies Menon.

Interestingly, while most salt ads focus on food, Tata’s latest campaign uses water to deliver the message. “Since our product is so superior we didn’t want it to be functional and hence went for an emotional appeal. But with our message of purity, we subtly brought in the functional element as well,” explains Hiran. If market share is anything to go by, then superior is the word. According to research firm Nielsen, Tata leads the salt space with a gratifying 44 per cent of the market.