In 20 seconds, Paper Boat’s new advertisement manages to create a lump in your throat. Gulzar’s lilting, earthy voice paints sepia-tinted pictures of memories — an empty glass of aam panna, the bowl it’s been poured out of, and the suggestion of carefree afternoons spent in carefree play on the street outside.
Nostalgia isn’t really a new buzzword. It’s always been difficult to resist the pull of the past, its charms growing with distance and time. And the sweetness of childhood never really goes out of fashion. And that’s the idea around which Paper Boat (owned by Hector Beverages) has centred its ‘Drinks & Memories’ campaign.
According to Neeraj Kakkar, chief executive officer, Hector Beverages, “Nostalgia is actually a small abstract of a much bigger idea. We don’t want to make people yearn for the past in a sad way. We want to show them that life is still beautiful, but it would be nice to recapture the innocence of childhood.”
Paper Boat isn’t the only one taking advantage of nostalgia. Nestlé’s campaign, titled ‘A part of India’s life for 100 years’, stitches together in a video film, glimpses from the nation’s past (freedom struggle, first World Cup victory, maiden space mission and more), while weaving in Nestlé’s own presence unobtrusively. After the controversy it found itself in, Nestlé chose this route to quietly place the brand within the past while asserting its own connection to the country and its rootedness in it.
Fortune Oil’s TV commercial, ‘Ghar ka Khana’, threaded together the very personal touch of home-cooked food with a grandmother’s resilient, unwavering love for her grandchild to reinforce the brand’s timeless appeal.
While each brand chooses a different approach and each campaign works with different storylines to make the connection they aim for, they need to dig deep into the nation’s shared ‘Indian’ past, identifying common experiences and moments that will appeal to the largest cross-section of the target audience. “If we work with very specific moments, memories that are personal to one or two people, it won’t work. So we pare down to the very basics, the experiences that we have all had, in our own different ways,” says Kakkar.
Paper Boat’s social media pages on both Facebook and Instagram reflect this decision, covered with illustrations in its now recognisably distinct style. Each image works with a single, simple moment — Holi’s strategic planning, bus rides to school picnics, kite-flying battles, salt water and soft peanuts, monkey caps and hand-knitted sweaters — endless prompts that pull at the more personal and half-forgotten memories from our lives.
For the product, evoking such memories makes a lot of sense. It’s tough to stand out in a crowd of unique messages, products and claims. And when our brain is overwhelmed by sensations, we instinctively turn to the heart, and this is where creating an emotional link with the consumer comes in handy for the brand.
“Earlier, products worked with distinctive messages that let them stand out. Now, with so many brands, so much clutter, the messages almost don’t matter. Well, it’s fantastic if your product does have it, but even with it, brands find it difficult to stand out. Now, people remember things that make them feel, and it is all about how beautifully you can make them feel what you want them to feel,” says Rajesh Ramaswamy, Group Creative Director of Lowe Lintas, the agency behind the Paper Boat commercials.
To ensure this emotional link, more and more ads are trying to strike as close to home as possible. One way of doing it is to keep the interference between memory and audience to the minimum. Ramaswamy explains the approach.
“In the earlier videos, there was a protagonist. It was his memories the audience saw and related to. Now, with the three new videos, the audience is watching a story that can be their own. We haven’t committed to faces and we’ve used minimum props. This way, there is nothing and no one between you and the images on the screen. It’s a direct connection, and you can claim the memory for your own.”
It is difficult, though, to make simple, straightforward nostalgia work. More often than not, people carry an idealised view of the past, which in turn casts a jaundiced eye on the present.
To sell a new product with old memories, brands need to go a step further. This is what Kakkar calls “contemporising the past”. The idea is to package these old memories in a new way, bringing the product of today under the ambit of yesterday.
“We don’t want nostalgic ads to become laments. We want people to remember the past with fondness, not dismay,” adds Ramaswamy. Sometimes, this means reviving old traditions in the present. The Diwali commercial of Tanishq, also created by Lowe Lintas, does this, featuring Deepika Padukone celebrating the festival with her parents.
As Ajay Gahlaut, Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy India, points out, the idea of nostalgia advertising is not new but a part of how it is used today is. In commercials today what we see is the past being reclaimed with a sense of pride. “In the middle, we had started looking to the West, hankering for it, and feeling a slight sense of embarrassment about who we are. Being Indian was not ‘cool’. Now, young people are claiming their Indian identity with pride, and are more comfortable in their skin.”
Paper Boat, for instance, would like to extend the nostalgia beyond just the advertising. It is using a unique throw-away paper packaging for its drinks. “We are trying to bring back things going out of fashion,” says Kakkar. And the country is feeling nostalgic for just these old-fashioned things.
