Brands have a responsibility to Amplify themselves. Customers like to consume brands that are big. If there is the Superbowl happening in your town, you do not want to be reading Gone with the Wind at that time. Do you? May be you do. But anyways…
A leading Indian telecom brand Airtel has attempted, I would say successfully, to magnify the brand as having a massive impact on the customer-psyche.
Magnification means showing the brand to be bigger in terms of the impact to the market place. Why do brands want to do this?
- It positions the brand as a default category-leader. Airtel always aspired to be the leader since inception, setting the tone for other brands to emulate this and perennially play the catch up game.
- The brand gets attention, no one can ignore one which is trying to cut loose and move ahead of the pack. The fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) plays a role here.
- These brands seem all-pervasiveness. Suddenly they seem to be all over the place. While ubiquity is a must for a category-leader, their visibility seems much more than it is in reality. This is because the brands have got the all-important share of attention. Everything that is done is registering in customers’ minds.
But achieving this mind share is difficult, given that every brand wants to be “something more”. Here are some qualifiers (necessary but not sufficient) for the brand to be Large:
- Credibility: Volume of business, users/consumers, extent of globalization and consistency in claim to leadership are factors which make the brands credible to stake claims to be larger than life.
- Tenure: They need to have ‘been-there, done-that’. Their birth and sustenance in the market for a significantly long time is proof that they know the consumers, competitors really well.
- Automatic choice: They are the default choice of customers in that category. Competing brands will have to ‘pluck’ customers out of usage from these brands and not the other way around.
Brand like Amul (Taste of India), Hero Honda (Desh Ki Dhadkan meaning the Heartbeat of the Nation) and Raymonds (For the Complete Man) are earlier successful attempts at this magnification.
Watch video of the Airtel commercial here
Airtel is seen challenging a scientific fact Earth is indeed round in shape. It says that the shape of the Earth is that of an Airtel SIM card, because the SIM card can hold enormous quantities of movies, games and music. Magnification indeed!.
