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Largest Indian cafe brand Cafe Coffee Day's first campaign starts a new trend
ET Bureau Dec 12, 2012, 04.58AM IST

Movements and the attendant activism/slacktivism are at an all time high. Besides causes noble and just like corruption and internet censorship, brands too have been galvanizing people via campaigns like Tata Tea's Jaago Re and Idea's ongoing social endeavours. In this stand-up for anything scenario, the country's largest cafe brand Cafe Coffee Day has opted to take a contrarian stance many say a risky proposition and chosen to 'sit down' in its first ever TV commercial in 16 years. Shares Sajan Raj Kurup, Founder, Creativeland Asia (the agency behind the campaign), "We were brainstorming on various thoughts when a young copywriter at the agency blurted out how there is just too much of standing up (on issues and non-issues) happening all around and whether it's really helping. Instead we should just sit down and look for solutions." That sounded like the perfect missing link to the campaign premise and became its big idea. Cafe brands globally have not been known to be big advertisers. Against such a backdrop a full-fledged brand campaign acquires even greater significance, underlining the potential of the cafe culture in India. It's at a take-off stage as brands like Lavazza, Costa, Gloria Jeans, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Bru World Cafe and the recently launched Starbucks, try to find their place under the sun. For those who may confuse this with a feel-good generic campaign it is definitively more purposeful and does have specific tasks at hand. According to research conducted by the cafe brand in the top cities, it was clear that less than 50% of the addressable audience has ever been to a cafe, which also meant that there is something inhibiting the remaining half. And if this is the case in India's top cities, there should be so much more potential waiting to be unleashed in the smaller towns, points out K Ramakrishnan (Ramki), president -marketing, Cafe Coffee Day. Thus, the brand's task is to grow the market at an accelerated pace, by getting more and more people to the cafes and also to increase spends by popularising the food menu, he adds. The campaign could be the pivot in reaching that goal. To the buzz, that the campaign has been launched as a reaction to the impending spread of the world's largest cafe brand Starbucks in India, Ramki shrugs it off saying that their advertising plans have been on the anvil for the last 8-10 months. He adds that currently they have covered about 80% of the cafes with the new food menu, and therefore "we believed there is a need for us to communicate nationally." The timing is only based on the availability of the food menu, he adds. The brand campaign will be taking the 360-degree route while TV is the anchor initially it will dovetail with the social media playing a huge role. Plans are afoot to create a Wikipedia page on 'sitdownism' as well as blogger activity that aims at defining the concept. People will be asked to record and share their own sitdown moments. Says Kurup, "The entire campaign has a very user-generated feel to reflect the prevalent culture where offline and online mediums keep interplaying all the time." According to Ram Madhvani, director at Equinox Films who shot the film, "The vision was to make it more believable and candid and so accordingly it has been gift-wrapped with a digital feel." As an avid coffee drinker pointed out, "A cafe is a brick-andmortar version of Facebook." Even the popular social networking site launched its first ad campaigns a few weeks ago. And so it should come as no surprise that after a decade and a half of purely experiential brand building, the largest cafe in India with over 1,400 outlets across the country is opting for a slightly more traditional marketing mix. Raghu Bhat, founder-director, Scarecrow Communications feels that the film has been branded very smartly with products interwoven seamlessly into the narrative. He feels, that being a long format ad and that in a category that is not a traditional ATL spender, the campaign needs to work harder in creating buzz, without depending on the expensive medium of TV alone. Raj Kamble, managing partner of StrawberryFrog, the cultural-movement agency likes the campaign idea, which, in his view, has greater creative possibilities in the future. He adds though that the execution is overreliant on a jingle and also that it has a slightly familiar feel in terms of the treatment. Global Flavour Not too many cafe brands have resorted to advertising to create the buzz. They have relied mostly on their store as the best marketing tool and catchment promotion for brand building. In such a scenario, Costa's campaigns in the UK "Monkeys and Typewriters" (2010) and "Coffee Heads" (2012) created by the British independent advertising agency Karmarama have stood out and managed to turn many heads. While both the campaigns are very different, they are linked by a similar ambition: to create emotional rather than rational expressions of the brand philosophy, shares Joe De Souza, creative director of the London based agency. While in "Monkeys" the quality of Costa coffee was reiterated by unleashing dozens of monkeys on a room full of espresso-making machines, in the more recent "Coffee Heads" people are buried up to their necks in coffee beans while singing, to show (literally) the human face of the brand. In both cases, shares De Souza, the need is to communicate the message in a bold, unexpected, likable and memorable way that it surprises even the competition.