CASE STUDY OF ONIDA INDIA – HOW THE DEVIL MADE

HIS RETURN
During the 1980s, if someone owned a television, the person was assumed to be belonging to
an upper-class family. Owing to this reason, Onida India, a well-known television brand
launched its brand mascot on the platform of envy as ‘The Onida Devil – a green-horned
devil with a long-pointed tail’ with a punch-line “Neighbour’s Envy Owner’s Pride”. This
campaign helped the brand to gain substantial market share and become one of the top three
television brands in the country in the 1990s.

After this, foreign players like Sony, Samsung, Philips, LG, and domestic players like BPL
and Videocon started penetrating the market with aggressive marketing strategies. And,
owing to the fading of brand connection with the customers, Mirc Electronics (Owner of
Onida) abandoned the mascot. The market share of 20% in 1992 came down to a mere 8% in
1998.

Since the company ventured into various new products like DVD players, washing machines
and air-conditioners, there was a lack of common underlying theme this proved challenging
for the customers to associate their individual propositions in each of these sub-brands with
one common brand image.

The advertising agency was changed from Advertising Avenues (the earlier one that
developed the “Onida Devil” campaign) to the new one O&M. This new agency dropped the
devil association of the brand and developed new ad campaigns with a humorous appeal. This
helped the company a bit to improve its margins – but this wasn’t enough. Due to the
dangling brand associations of the brand, the customers weren’t really able to connect with
the brand!

In 2003, to know their customers better, the company started conducting focus group studies
among the target customers to understand their views and perceptions about the brand. They
concluded that the customers still associated Onida with the envy proposition and that “envy”
as a proposition wasn’t really hyped for their customers during this time!

On the basis of these findings, Onida launched a new ad campaign in 2003 – “May cause
envy”, by bringing its earlier theme ‘envy’ back BUT in a subtle and sophisticated way for
example: In an advertisement, a dog was shown scratching a DVD to prevent the owner from
watching the DVD but the Onida DVD player was still able to play the DVD. This put
forward the message that Onida DVD players supported even the scratched DVDs. This
subtle but positive association of the emotion was picked up by customers which helped
Onida regain the market share of 11.5% and become third-largest seller from fifth in the late
1990s.

In September 2004, the Onida devil made his return! Only this time he was in a black suit,
which was different from the earlier green which signified envy. The objective here was to
make Onida look different from the clutter of competitors.  The advertising agency was
switched from O&M to Rediffusion DY&R. The agency developed different ad campaigns
with a tagline “Ab badlega Zamana”, “Expect the Unexpected” in different regional
languages. This helped the consumers connect more with the brand and the right association
of Devil helped Onida gain the market share again!
During the month of October 2004, a 54% increase in sales was seen as compared to sales in
October 2003. Other products including washing machines and air conditioners were
launched using the new campaign.

Question

Ques 1: Explain the importance of market research in advertising with respect to the Onida
Case Study.