Skip to main content

HUL's Lifebuoy on Roti at Kumbh Mela - Yuck!

Hindustan Unilevel, India's largest consumer products firm, along with Ogilvy, has partnered with more than 100 dhabas and hotels at the Kumbh mela site to serve rotis that are stamped with "Lifebuoy se haath dhoye kya?"




 Economic Times reports that the company has made special heat stamps to make an impression of its message on rotis and hired 100 promoters to stand in 100 kitchens across the mela. The campaign started on February 1 and will run for 30 days. The company hopes to put the hand wash reminder on 2.5 million rotis.

The campaign surely has grabbed a lot of eyeballs and a lot of positive word of mouth on the internet. The highly positive online sentiment depicts that netizens have appreciated and embraced this creative idea.

But is it great? I don't think so! Imagine a soap's name appearing on the food you eat. It is if not ridiculous  completely abhorrent.

From a pure marketing perspective why would you like to remind a person who is about to eat something which is kept in the toilet and completely unrelated to eating. A toothpaste advising you to rinse your mouth after eating is ok since it is somehow related to internal use and not external use.

Imagine the feelings aroused by Lifebuoy, considered a stinky soap (earlier) reaching onto our rotis. It's like the Harpic ad (cleaning toilets) being shown when you are at the dinner table watching TV.

Agree with this? Join this discussion and give your feedback below.

Popular posts from this blog

Social Networking on Mobile - The Big opportunity for marketers

Facebook has been the dominant social network for quite a while and has an active user base of more than 1.3 billion. Its proliferation in the 18-35 years of age group (52%) makes it ideal for most advertisers. An interesting statistic to observe is the number of people accessing Facebook through Mobile. One of the biggest shifts in social media behavior has been its greater usage through mobile devices (in particular smartphones).  According to a report , the internet traffic on mobile accounts for one forth the total internet traffic. Even more important is its growth, which is over 1.5 times per year and according to analysts would stay the same way in the years to come. This shift is even more significant for emerging economies where in a sector such as e-commerce organizations are witnessing close to 65% sales through mobile.

7 easy Instagram Marketing tips for beginners

Instagram started as a iOS only application and quickly became a huge social networking website with a presence on Android and the web. An active and rapidly growing user base has made marketing on Instagram important for brands, small businesses and startups. Instagram has more than 75 million daily active users, with a total user base of over 400 million. Instagram users in 2015 were sharing over 70 million photos per day.  Given its growing importance we'll explore some easy tips that can help you with Instagram marketing.

Mediocrity to Greatness

I always felt the difference while I sat in an interesting class that prompted me to do the assignments to a boring class, which was like taking sleeping pills and fighting the enemy on border. Anyways Peter principle elaborated it. Just going through the first chapter of "Why Things Go Wrong" gave me a sense of why mostly people crib about their jobs, work place and then go for a higher degree ( like an MBA,M-Tech,Msc etc. or diploma) to get into a job that would probably satisfy them (finally). But does it satisfy them? That's another debatable topic. Coming to mediocrity, chapter one of "Why Things go wrong" made me bump into a quote by William Arthur Ward and I am splitting and spilling it below. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. Inspiration to perform and outdo is what drives out the pending sleep and lethargy to make us perform. The same goes for work. But whatif a mediocre...