Tugging at the heartstrings…
Brand marketers go to great lengths to ensure consumers have the associations they would like them to have. Admittedly, it’s never a perfect art. For some segments you might have to hammer the brand message ad nauseum and for the rest it is analogous to flipping an internal mental switch. You come up with one memorable ad, one memorable tagline and boom! You have them converted for life. I like to think of the former as rational consumers and the latter as the irrational but a fiercely loyal segment – the “fan boys”.
My switch was flipped when I first saw this ad by adidas in the mid nineties. I have tried to introspect and figure out why it had the influence on me which it did. Was it the sight of the smile that slowly spreads across the old woman’s face towards the end – highlighting the sports sans age barriers credo? Was it the fact that we as a nation finally had our sports icon who could complement the new generation? To this day, I still can’t figure out what it was which resonated with me (as a highly impressionable youth at that that time) but fair enough to say it was a powerful pull. It sure would be an interesting exercise to see how brand equity varies with the proportion of rational/irrational adherents the brand might have.
