Hunger Ki Bajao… a brand of instant soup screams, with weird, absolutely artificial and contrived expressions on the faces of the models, in the advertisements and on the packs of the soup, showing their excitement.
Even though it is a very vocal and noisy campaign, appearing on the pages of prominent metro newspapers and billboards, the campaign is missing out on the opportunity to connect with the customer group it is targeting the brand to.
1) The advertisements assume that the target customer group, the busy people who don’t have time to go for an alternative to satisfy their hunger, will have all the time to read their elaborate copy of situations where their instant soup can be a ready alternative… This is counter intuitive, if not foolish. Some primary study on the lifestyle and habits of the target group can help avoiding such mistakes.
2) Many of the situations mentioned in the advertisements assume that even when you don’t have access to any other food items or cooking apparatus, you WILL have access to boil water, a necessity to use this soup. At least some realistic thought on the scenarios in which it can be used, could have avoided such silly presumption.
3) For most of the people in this country, hunger is a stark, obstinate and undesirable reality, which cannot be beaten away by mimicking the open mouths of those overzealous models. If it was so easy to Bajao of hunger, so many governments of our country should abandon all other poverty alleviation programmes and distribute instant soup packs to all and sundry who are hungry. There cannot be a more cruel example of making fun of the dirty realities of the lives of people who may not be our target group, but nonetheless who see our campaigns and feel even more isolated from the mainstream of life.
A brand fails to connect when it fails to communicate responsibly. We have to pay the price for irresponsibility.
