Marketing & Advertising spends have always been in the limelight, mostly on a critical front. Fortune 500’s & Unicorns have been treated alike on this agenda. However, the motives for the two, vary for each marketing campaign.
Most companies have Identified their point of strength in positioning the display ads a certain way, e.g.
- Amul does it in its typical animated way
2. Dove challenges the social stereotypes & focuses on the ‘Be you’ Mantra
3. Pears emphasizes the Mother-Baby bond
Akin to these, there is a unique marketing strategy underway for CRED. The recently turned unicorn valued at $2.2B had come up with a highly captive ad featuring Rahul Dravid acting completely antithetic to his conception
Please watch the ad here to get a better understanding of the article
It’s pretty evident that CRED’s Ad strategy defies the following established marketing Axioms
- being clear & concise in the proposition
- lesser deviations from the value prop
- shorter ad durations create more appeal due to higher primacy & latency effects
- Using current Fad/trend/celebrity to establish more relation with the viewers
Nevertheless, it has gone viral & has compounded numbers of eyeballs via multiple organic sources
To delineate the framework, CRED has been dynamic on the following three fronts in its ads campaign strategy
- Cast: the Brand Value vs Brand Recall
CRED tends to prefer celebrities who have relatively less current market value but with a high brand recall.
The following are the positives of including a Govinda/Madhuri (actors at their prime 20 years ago) vs Ranveer or Deepika (trending actors)
- Reduces investments by looping in celebs of the not-so-recent times
- Eliminates the risk of connecting with the audience since the viewers already associate these celebs with the performance during their peaks
- Elicit significant traction from the demographic target segment of the users since the Gen-X & Millenials have had massive exposure to these celebs & are the ones with the highest credit card usage
2. Advertisement positioning: Extremities
After looping in the celebrities, the next decision is how to use their presence. CRED has leveraged the talking points of these celebs & used these to create an element of appeal or shock.
This strategy has aided in the following manner:
- Highly associative ads to engage the audience & occupying the top of the mind space (Madhuri’s dance, Alka’s & Udit’s typical singing style are renowned among people)
- Created a startling effect by using a contrasting proposition to the general conceived notion ( Rahul Dravid Losing his Calm)
3. Advertisement Segmentation:
Following an eccentric two-segment approach, CRED bifurcates the ad into two parts
- One half to entertain the users & garner eyeballs thus creating virality on Social media
- Another half to communicate the intended message of using CRED’s services
What’s surprising is CRED tries to generate a correlation between two seemingly dichotomous instances, which may turn out to be a double-edged sword: Probably the jury is still out on this one!
The Caveat
It’s perplexing to observe that CRED’s Ads are not explicitly comprehended by many viewers, at least in the first go. It may seem like the ads are merely a source of entertainment for the viewers & serve as a medium of virality in the internet space. If I wouldn’t know any better I would infer that the team may have missed this one.
But a paradoxical explanation that may exhibit the intent of the team would be on the following terms:
The viewers who are intrigued about the product but are still unable to derive the message from the ad may either choose to
- watch it again for better comprehension
- download the app & explore for themselves
- reach out to their social connections ( for positive or negative criticism)
Either way, it leads to higher impressions & slightly increased conversions for CRED.
It’s safe to say that the change from the established norms of strategy will be needed to create a dent in the viewers’ minds to imprint the brand name.
Having said that, It won’t be surprising to see Dhoni losing his cool or Virat calming him down in one of CRED’s ads after his retirement :)
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A Btech-MBA, a former national basketball player & a fledgling founder of the strategy community www.4sight250.com, Prathmesh intends to create a strategy community (not-for-profit)of like-minded people & contribute to their intellectual growth by sharing his learnings via this platform. Subscribe here for your fortnightly 2 min strategy newsletter & become a contributing member of the international community
