Onida: The devil's end

power moves

It is time to say goodbye to the Onida devil and his popular quip, “Neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride”. Another long-running campaign has thus come to an end. “The figure of the Onida devil has been so strongly associated with our brand that its popularity owes itself to those campaigns to a large extent,” says Onida Vice-president (marketing, sales and services) Sriram Krishnamurthy.

Isn’t phasing out such a popular mascot, especially at a time when Onida needs to highlight its expanded portfolio of durables, marketing harakiri? According to Krishnamurthy, it is something Onida had to do. “The Onida devil had served the brand well in the past two decades when one’s neighbours were the benchmark for one’s lifestyle. But now it is not so, because people have become a lot more individualistic. They don’t aspire for what their neighbours own but mostly go by what they like.”

To be sure, this is not the first time that Onida has though about laying the devil to rest. It first did that in 1998 but brought it back in 2004 to coincide with its widened range of products that included microwaves, refrigerators and air-conditioners.

However, over time, Onida had to accept that the devil had lost its association with envy, its original trait. “It became just a mascot and lost its fundamental association. With the meaning lost, a lot of viewers we surveyed just referred to it as the seenghwala (man with horns),” says Krishnamurthy.

This time round, Onida is sure it won’t look back. It is ready with a new master campaign that has cost Rs 120 crore and will be unveiled in late September. This time it is all about Onida helping young India with the transition between traditional roles and its aspirations. “For example, gender-based roles are blurring with women balancing work and home and men doing housework. The transition to such neutral role-play is not yet complete and we want to help in that with our various products,” says Krishnamurthy. After Videocon, which has gone for a complete makeover of its corporate identity, Onida too wants to give a contemporary feel to its brand.

To talk to the audience between 20 and 30 years, Onida will depict a newly-married couple and weave in its products facilitating the setting up of their first home. “The protagonists will be the same in the various product ads,” adds Krishnamurthy. This will present Onida as a cross-category player, rather than its earlier image of a television company.

The new campaign is also aimed to bring its range of mobile phones into mass focus. Onida had released its range of phones to distributors in a soft launch to test the markets and gauge feedback last year. Apart from television, print and outdoor, Onida is also re-engineering its website for interactivity. Surfers can upload photos of their living room and see how an Onida LCD television fits in. Onida expects the campaign to up its share in the non-LCD television market from 11 to 13 per cent and in DVD players from 10 to 15 per cent by the end of the year.