Withholding information - A classic tool for creating impactful & award-winning campaigns

Our minds are used to reading and recognising familiar patterns of information. Anything amiss from the regular pattern makes us look for the missing information. It catches our attention, drives curiosity and looks for an answer. It is effective? Results say yes. Am sharing three campaigns where information was withheld to create an impactful.

Knorr Confused Bhook: Mirchi Brewery, the creative solutions wing of Mirchi, erstwhile Radio Mirchi, created a product positioning solution for HUL’s Knorr Soup.  

Mirchi Brewery was tasked with positioning Knorr as a healthier alternate to regular evening snacks. Brewery came up with the suggestion of, Knorr Soup for the Sham ki Confused Bhook, based on consumer observation that while breakfast, lunch and dinner are well-defined meals, there is a confusion when it comes to evening hunger. People are confused about what to eat, tasty hai to healthy nahi and healthy hai to boring hai.

With Knorr, we answered the call of evening hunger starting from 4 PM. To bring alive the message of Confused Hunger and to create an impact about the people eat anything when confused, we at Mirchi ‘ate’ up our ads, song and even RJ content. The campaign was also carried out in print by the media partners where Confused Bhook ate up evening news.

The Missing I: TOI & Tata Salt ran an ad on 21st Oct. about the importance of iodine in our nutrition. To drive the message TOI removed the letter I from its newspaper. For some it may have been difficult to read but then how difficult it is for our minds to fill in the missing I e.g. 'T MES OF NDIA'.

The missing I piqued the question, why is I missing? Thus, creating awareness & registering the message of Iodine Deficiency.

Missing Mirchi:  This was a campaign Mirchi Brewery did for Maggi when they were launching Maggi HotHeads. Hotheads, as the name suggests is a spicy variant of Maggi. The marketing team of Maggi wanted Mirchi to create an impactful product launch and we did!

The Mirchi of Radio Mirchi went missing. A multi-media campaign, #FindingMirchi was launched engaging consumers in the fun hunt for missing Mirchi. After two days of action, the Mirchi of Radio Mirchi was brought back with Maggi HotHeads with the #HotHeadsMeinMirchi.

In all the three campaigns, the pattern of creating impact & engagement remained same i.e. removing information to arouse curiosity, pulling consumers in to become a part of the campaign.

Rishikar Krishna.

AVP Brand Solutions, Mirchi