And here comes the change of heart!   

Of late there has been one TV commercial that has made me scratch my head a few times and think hard over its purpose and relevance. Now, having watched this commercial over and over again for past few weeks I have been able to firm my reasoning behind it.

I am talking about the unexpected come back of Bollywood’s first superstar Rajesh Khanna in Havells TV commercial on fans where fans is carrying both the connotations – of the admirers of a film star and of the revolving  blades that provide us air.

The first time I saw Mr. Khanna in the commercial I was literally taken aback and felt pity on his deteriorating health and skeletal frame.  It was hard to place him as we fondly remember his cheerful and elegant personality of yesteryears. The second thought that crossed my mind was how desperate he would have been to make his presence felt that he chose to appear in this commercial where the meaning of fans is being mocked at and confused with those of ceiling and table fans.

I did not care to go back to reconfirm my perception and went about telling everyone how awful that the  commercial is and that to what levels celebrities can stoop down to. As the days passed by, the commercial kept coming back to me and I could feel a sense of seeing it again from a marketers’ point of view. And guess what, switching gears caused a change of heart in me and I ended up appreciating the idea of putting the message across to increasingly distracted consumers of advertisements in a whacky yet an effective manner.

The fact that fans, aah! after this commercial I cannot afford to leave this term to readers’ imagination, here I mean blades that give us air, as a category must be losing its acquired space from consumers’ mind. Naturally, it is summers and fans have been replaced by air conditioners and nobody is going to pay any attention to them for coming few months. If this were the brief, then the task in hand for creative team would have been to keep this category alive in consumers’ mind. Had this been the scenario, then kudos to whoever came up with this idea and was able to convince Mr. Khanna to register his comeback in such a fashion.

Notwithstanding the dent/uplift in Mr. Khanna’s imagery among his fans that this commercial would have caused, but definitely a win-win for the brand.