Point of view: A masterclass in brand building

Anvar Alikhan
Source: Admap, April 2017
Downloaded from WARC

This article looks at one of India's most enduring brands, Amul Butter - a brand that consistently
outranks global brands in the country, and can call itself 'The Taste of India' without eliciting any
disagreement.

The brand's ad campaign is one of the world's longest-running campaigns, and its cartoon-based
advertising is no longer seen as advertising at all.
Begun in 1966 with a billboard at the Mumbai Derby, the campaign features a brand mascot of a
chubby moppet and a humorous tagline that in some way usually comments on whatever is top of
mind in the Indian consciousness.
This strategy has brought Amul to a place where it is beyond any apparent commercial agenda -
instead, it is seen as pure entertainment - which has given it brand equity that others can only
dream of.

In the rankings of India's best-loved brands, one brand that is a regular fixture is Amul Butter. In fact, in a 2016
study, Amul clearly outranked global brands like Coke, Pepsi and Nestlé. Little wonder, then, that when Amul
calls itself 'The Taste of India', this overt claim doesn't seem to elicit any disagreement.

Amul is a masterclass in brand building. Its ad campaign is one of the world's longest-running campaigns,
unchanged for over half a century. And Amul has achieved the Holy Grail of ads: its advertising is not seen as
advertising at all, but rather as a kind of much-loved cartoon series on whatever is currently top of mind in the
Indian consciousness. People look forward to the next Amul ad just as they'd look forward to the next cartoon of
a favourite cartoonist, and Amul's ad agency was referred to by the The Wall Street Journal recently as 'India's
cartoon factory'.

Amul was launched in the 1950s to replace Anchor Butter, whose imports had stopped. Amul's butter was a
revolutionary product, being made from buffalo milk, and it pioneered a unique, salted flavour, fine-tuned to suit
the Indian palate. It's a flavour that every subsequent brand of Indian butter has had to replicate to gain
consumer acceptance. As a result, in blind tests today it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between one
Indian butter and another – and yet Amul is differentiated in terms of emotional appeal.

So how did Amul create this unique brand equity? It all began in 1966 when the account was taken over by a
very talented copywriter named Sylvester daCunha. He positioned the butter as a fun product (ignoring the
pundits, who maintained that in India, food is a serious category, and that you couldn't make light of a food
product). daCunha began by coining the tagline 'Utterly butterly delicious', and conceiving the brand mascot of a
chubby moppet with an endearing fringe and impish grin. Both of those elements have been at the heart of the
Amul brand ever since.

Early ads were cartoons, accompanied by playful puns about butter; but, by chance, daCunha once did a
billboard to coincide with the Mumbai Derby, which showed the little moppet astride a racehorse, eating a slice
of buttered bread. Accompanying this was the headline, 'Thoroughbread'. The billboard immediately became a
topic of conversation.

As a result, the campaign took a topical turn, and began to comment on events in India: headlines, sporting
events, movies, and elements of popular culture, but always with some connection to the product. A typical
example was when a James Bond film was released, and Amul ran an ad showing the moppet holding up a
finger smeared with butter, with the headline 'Goldfinger'.

Over the decades, the Amul brand has managed to transcend its commercial agenda and position itself, instead,
as a commentator on Indian life in general. Its ads typically make irreverent observations on politics, cricket and
Bollywood – the three great passions of the Indian middle class – although they are not shy of making cheeky
pronouncements, as they see fit, on everything from the latest international headlines to celebrity gossip.

Amul's ad agency begins its day, therefore, by scanning the headlines to determine which news stories provide
an opportunity for the brand's mischievous sense of humour. The creative team then proceeds to create up to
twenty ads a week, customised to appeal to various consumer niches, and delivered through a clever, low-cost
mix of out-of-home, social media and button print ads.

For example, when Meryl Streep criticised Donald Trump at the Golden Globe Awards, Amul released an ad
headlined 'Meryl lynches Trump', followed by the punned baseline 'Amul – Golden Glob' (today the ads make
only an elliptical reference to the product – if any at all). English puns like these, however, are becoming a rarity
in Amul's advertising; in today's democratised India, the puns are more likely to be in regional Indian languages,
or in hybridised dialects like Hinglish or Tamlish. Thus, after more than fifty years, the Amul advertising seems
more popular and emotionally resonant than ever before.

Advertising guru John Hegarty, speaking of the future of advertising, said he foresees it evolving into
'infotainment'. Amul would seem to go beyond this, having evolved into pure entertainment, with no apparent
commercial agenda. Could this, with respect to Hegarty, be the true future of advertising?

About the author

Anvar Alikhan
Senior VP & strategy consultant, JWT, India
anvar.alikhan@jwt.com

Anvar Alikhan is Senior VP & strategy consultant at JWT, India. He is also a columnist and guest faculty at the
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
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