An era of Commercials

Doing business without advertisement is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but no one else does.
The above expression lucidly shows how relevant an advertisement is for any business entity. This is one such tool of marketing (one of the 4 Ps’) which, I believe, pervades the life of every Tom, Dick and Harry. We all use it, consciously & unconsciously, in our daily course of lives. Quoting from my personal experience when I started this blog a couple of weeks ago, no one noticed it until I put the link on the various social networking sites. I don’t say that it has worked wonders for me and neither do I expect it in the near future but it did not have a negligent impact either.

We must all have heard of the “Cola Wars” which sparked off way back in 1980s between the two soft drink giants (Pepsi and Coke) and we still see them at loggerheads. Though not in terms of products anymore but in advertising. If Pepsi alludes to Akshay kumar’s act of hopping from one building to another, just to grab a bottle of Thumbs Up (Cola). Sprite (Cola) too doesn’t leave a chance of making an allusion to the slogan (punch line, you may call) of Mountain Dew “dar ke aage jeet hain” (Pepsi) with its counter back slogan of Sprite (Pepsi) “Bujhaye sirf pyaas, baki sab bakwaas”.

But, are we to face a similar kind of war between Cadbury and Nestle too? The reason I’m made to think in this particular direction is born of an advertisement which I happened to watch a little more than a week ago. It was on Nestle ‘Munch’ which showed a ‘thin’ ‘lean’ guy beholding the nestle bar with longing eyes but is not able to devour it. Suddenly another squeamish guy enters the scene (Man!! the agency should have spent a little more on hiring better models [:P] Both of them sucks) and after knowing the reason says “Dude, you can have it on any day of the month”. Again an indirect reference to the recent ad of Cadbury saying “Meetha hain khana, aaj pehle tarikh hain”. What is to become of all this? I know Cadbury enjoys relatively a major portion of the market share (75% approx) and Nestle is too small a company to give it a competition (in the chocolate realm, that is). Besides, they both do not deal in the same industry. Nestle involves many other products which its counterpart doesn’t. Having said that, my prophesying of seeing a choco war is surely far from being true. However, I can infer one thing looking at this maze of Ad world that finding faults with the competitor’s idea seems to have become an important strategy in promoting one’s own product. Unlike the normal trend when the ad agency would come up with some innovative ideas bringing forth its features. Whatever be the reason, the youth doesn’t mind so long as it enjoys savouring the sweet delicacies.


And yes, next time you wink at a girl, make sure it is day time :D