About Brand Recall

What’s your favourite brand ad?

Let us try:?

Cred? A dancing Kapil Dev or an angry Rahul Dravid?

Fevicol? Random people and things sticking to one another?

For your writer, it is and always will be Vodafone's Zoozoos. Are you thinking about them and smiling right now?

The mark of a good ad is never set by just the production value invested in it or the names involved. You could have Shah Rukh Khan star in an ad and it still might be easily forgotten (Vimal led by example here.)

The mark of a good ad is always, always set by how long it can be remembered (Just Do It does it so well). If you’ve not spent your years living under a big, flat rock, your brain just flashed NIKE in uppercase.?

This concept is called brand recall - when a campaign is so well executed that a set of words, a jingle, a visual or even a colour remind you of a brand and exactly what they did with that campaign. And who they are. It’s the biggest flex a brand can ever have.

Brand recall is more common than you think, and yet it is incredibly complicated to generate.?

For example, not only McDonalds or Dominos, but our very own and dearly loved Jumboking Vadapav has also built amazing brand recall in Mumbai. Execution was very simple - they called themselves vadapav when they were actually burgers. That was the hook to get people to them in the first place.

The second step was simple as well - hyperactive geographic marketing. They set up shop at railway stations and busy junctions; places where people are perennially looking for something to go. Vadapavs, God bless their existence, had gotten way too saturating for a lot of people. McDonalds, while being a global staple, was (and is) considered ‘party food’ and ‘unique’. So taking the best of both of these and then setting up huge billboards exactly where consumers for both would look was a very obvious win-win, so they did exactly that.?

The moral of the story, apart from the fact that sometimes the obvious choice is not the wrong choice, is that knowing where your audience will be watching and leveraging that is GOLD for brand recall.

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to brand recall, but topic saturations and word limits compel us to stop here. However, if you’re too busy to read the 458 words we’ve put together, we’re still here for you (albeit sadly). Here’s us explaining brand recall and the Jumboking example, with an extra nugget or two, in the space of a couple of clips. So until next week, when we talk about one more cool brand, ta ta!