Maruti Suzuki! How could you miss this? The diwali bonanza!

Maruti Suzuki Corporate

Everyone for sure remembers the corporate ad that was made for Maruti Suzuki by Rajeev Menon which ended with the tagline – “India comes home in a Maruti Suzuki”. Moreover it had a brilliant emotional connect, when you saw the youngster asking for a lift after his bus broke down and in his HELP signcard, it was written -  Need to be home for Diwali.

Brilliant ad. Hats off to Rajeev Menon and the people involved in it.

I don’t know how many of us know that today there was a news in which it was reported how around 50 passengers were stranded in the Vizag airport due to technical snag in the plane and were suffering from an emotional snag by the lack of empathy of the Air India officials too who didnt even bother to serve a glass of water and were passing on the buck.

What does Maruti Suzuki have to with Air India?

Air India - Going down..coming?

Imagine this hypothetical condition: If Maruti Suzuki officials had  came to know about it and arranged a private jet or a chartered flight to transport them to Delhi. And while they were on flight they advertise their corporate ad that they had made. Imagine the news spreading like wildfire among the news channels and you have Maruti Suzuki’s ads being shown. Imagine how many people would be in awe of the company. Imagine how many people would spread the news through word of mouth. Imagine the number of blogs written and a few awards in its name too. Imagine the magazine articles written on it and the chat room talks about it. Imagine the coverage on advertising websites. Imagine the whole range of possibilities. How they could have leveraged this to tailor future communications. Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant!

creating happy customers

The cost would have been far lesser to promote you brand in a cricket match that people would just skip as soon as the ads came in. What a chance to increase their brand awareness and brand recall and etch themselves permanently in the minds of the people. What an opportunity to leverage yourself on your competitors service failure. The same thing could have been done by other brands like Deccan or jet or kingfisher too. Imagine the image that would have been made. That is the power of what Competitive Service Recovery (Hey I just made a word. Sounds good too. How do you trademark that?) would have done. Maruti Suzuki still has time . Approximately three to four hours, but unfortunately my blog is not that famous as Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki to spread like wildfire even if they are irrelevant.

Probably this is what Al Ries called as the power of PR. Publicity creates brands and advertising maintains it – The 22 immutable laws of branding.

I think it is Capital advertising that handles Maruti Suzuki’s corporate account. I am surprised how something so obvious did not strike them. Even I tried calling them and even the Maruti Suzuki headoffice but none of the numbers were in use or none was picking it up. Shame.

I still believe that they can make a really strong ad from this incident  and that too at the cost of Air India with whom it is not even competing. Although, the previous option would have been a goldmine any day.