Friday, August 15, 2008

Real hair in a shampoo ad?

I recently wrote a post in my other blog about my troubles with dandruff. When I wrote it I did not have my advertising hat on. I wrote that as a mere consumer.

Looking at the post with my advertising hat on, I realize that the post reflects on a need gap.

The need for a shampoo brand that seems honest when it speaks.

I may not be the only one turning cynical. What with all that synthetic hair and exaggerations.

Sure, it had worked in the beginning. We had fallen for the lure and brought the brands - sachet or bottle. But now, I feel they know for a fact that what they see in the ad is but a bold distortion of the truth.

I feel that people are now (or will soon start) looking for something they can hope to trust. They are no longer going to believe anything that you say, simply because you have a 'pro vitamin B5' or 'RDF" reducing factors or 'micro fruit extracts'

My guess is that all the artificial advertising is making them look at shampoo ads on a whole as a farce.

Not everyone can afford LUSH.

What if an affordable, accessible shampoo brand made a more real claim?

More important than the wonders it would do for the brand is the boost it will give the poor confused, cynical consumer…My guess is that the consumer will automatically respect you.

What's your view on this?

3 comments:

meraj said...

what could be this real claim which can be demonstrated through a TVC and yet make it appealing....mmmmm, i cant think of any.

even if it comes across as a real claim, cynics will say that its all engineered.

Pooja Nair said...

All i am saying is that it is time to see something different.

A breath of fresh air.

Something like the "baaki sab bakwas" attitude.

Advertissing was never for the cynics...it was for the rest of us... :)

Ofcourse advertisements could make us cynical for sometime but that can be cured if advertisers think and work hard enough...

Anbuchezhian said...

Hi Pooja

Actually a bold thought. But we are the ones who need to drive it. There must be some client and agency to have the courage to do this.

Sometime back I remember reading an article on how we need to show real people instead of models on the ads. This is something similar. But we have not shown any progression on that front....

We need to start looking atways to being Creatively Truthful and perhaps it will not be tough for us to answer the cliched question " How do we make this beleivable or how do we build credibility :)