Water and Liril the romance
continues
The girl and the waterfall continued their
association with the brand as different models advertised for the brand in a
different waterfall. Here are a couple of
waterfall commercials.
Future commercials cued the water, the girl even if
it moved away from the waterfall but the freshness, green and lime continued.
Then the agency wondered how they could make the
commercial different given all these constraints. They moved to the desert of
all places and here is a very different commercial. Some people liked the
commercial whilst a few others were critical of it as well, saying that in the
desert where water was so scarce who would waste water? Well take a look at the
commercial and make your own judgement...
Brand goes into variants
Clearly the brand was getting tired as newer,
younger brands were crowding the market place and others like Cinthol were
edging in on the freshness platform with more media weight behind them. So the
brand came up with variants, an icy mint variant.
So here’s the orange variant where the girl dances
in the street with urchins in a scene that reminded South Indian audiences of Ilayaraja
and a Tamil film. Watch this commercial...
Then the brand went the family way as the above
commercial depicts
Time for a remix
Now after nearly four decades and numerous
experiments it is time for the brand to perhaps reinvent itself, having gone
through so many advertising avatars and executions that we have seen in this
column. So what does the brand do? To understand that you must first know what
a remix is and I am sure you are all familiar with remixed songs and movies.
How often have we heard of famous songs of the fifties and sixties being
redone with a fresh music track and the same tune? Some people like it as
they have no attachment with the past or its history and just like the tune
that is set to a much faster pace and beat that is in line with today. The new
Liril commercial is essentially a remix of the commercial of the seventies and here
it is...
What do you think of it? Even if you had not seen
the old commercial you can relate to this whereas for someone like me it is a
reminder of my youth as it might be for several others in their forties and
fifties. Could this be the shape of things to come? Let us wait and watch the future...
So what does the brand’s history
teach us?
Liril is a marketing and advertising case study and
that’s the first thing we must place on record. It is something that people of
my generation liked and admired. It is a
famous brand which is just short of iconic!
The brand had multiple associations some of which
became properties like the girl, waterfall, freshness, the music track, green
and lime. The problem with some of these over a period of time is that as you
have more and more properties that are mandatory almost then there is very
little scope for creativity. In the early years most executions looked like
each other and people felt that they had seen the commercial before. Now the
brand seems to have done a full circle and rather than looking for a fresh
creative, they have redone their forty year old commercial. A remix of the
seventies commercial!
Very often brands are looking towards advertising alone
to provide the difference over the years and yet this can be almost impossible
to achieve over a period of time, if the product remains more or less the same.
The marketplace is getting more and more crowded with newer, sexier offerings
and the solution has to be in the product not merely in the advertising. Is the
brand relying too much on advertising?
Will the new commercial deliver the goods? Only
time will tell. But the lessons that history teaches us are there, as students
of marketing and advertising for us to mull over.
So what’s your key take out from the Liril story?
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