Amul Company Case Study

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Introduction

The report is about the use of satire by one of the prominent Indian companies as a part of their customer engagement strategy, we derived results based on the likes, comments and other reaction on the ads which uses current affairs and satire.

The report talk about Amul and its campaign, Amul was founded in 1946 by Verghese Kurien, it played a very important role in white revolution and inspired several other prominent dairies, it made India the largest milk producer in the world. Amul’s basket is full of dairy based products like milk, butter, cheese, etc. It is cooperative which started in Anand, Gujarat.

The marketing campaign of Amul which involves a little girl was started in 1966 by Sylvester DaCunha, managing director of then AS advertisings. The Amul girl was created by Eustace Fernandes, the art director of DaCunha Communications in 1966, the same year the simple yet catchy phrase “Utterly Butterly” was coined by Sylvester’s wife, Nisha DaCunha. It was very popular and was rewarded by a Guinness world record for the longest running ad campaign in the world besides being customer’s darling. In the 1985s, cartoon artist Kumar Morey and script writer Bharat Dabholkar had been consulted with sketching the Amul ads; the latter rejected the trend of using celebrities in advertisement campaigns.

There were several controversies involved with Amul girl, despite of the pressure they never backed out. The controversies include comments on naxalism in Bengal, Amul girl wearing a Gandhi cap or the Indian airlines employee strike. They were accused of making money from the miseries of others. They were heavily criticized for the use of satire on such burning topics. Humour did help in improving the value of an Ad, but at times it can backfire and malign the name of the brand. It was always argued that Amul survived the wrath of such criticism because it was a huge company, there were no competitors who could directly affect the sales of Amul.

Having worked for so many years, they gauge the public perception very well and choose the correct topics, while most of the Ads revolves around the current topics. They place their ads at the right place and time, which impacts the most. They use social media to assess the mood of the public on a particular topic.

When everyone around was roping a celebrity for endorsing their brands, Amul used its campaign, which brought simplicity and freshness to the campaign, Even half a decade later, Amuls’s ads hit around 6000 billboards around the country. TO celebrate the golden Jubilee of Amul girl they came out with a coffee table book titled Amul’s India which collects all the ads of Amul. The Ads also featured megastar Amitabh Bachchan, film stars Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone, cricketers Sunil Gavaskar and Rahul Dravid, commentator Harsha Bhogle, tennis star Sania Mirza, veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal etc.

Research Questions

 Following are the two research questions which we tried to address,

• On its official Facebook page, how do the Amul cartoons use satire & humour pertaining to contemporary issues to connect with its potential consumer base?

Reason: Amul Girl, a hand-drawn cartoon of a young Indian girl is the advertising mascot used to identify its brand by Amul. The idea was conceived in 1967 and is often regarded as one of the best humour advertising concepts. The success of this campaign is mainly due to its ability to connect with the public through commenting on ongoing issues in politics, films, sports, scams etc.,

• When any particular advertisement generates controversies, how does Amul address them?

Reason: Even when some of the Amul cartoon ads received some of the negative reactions from the audience, they have made the policy of not to play safe. According to Rahul daCunha,

 ‘We had the option of being sweet and playing it safe, or making an impact. A fine balance had to be struck. We have a campaign that is strong enough to make a statement. I didn't want the hoardings to be pleasant or tame. They have to say something’.

Research Data

Amul as the product is likened and consumed by all segments of customer and hence their marketing efforts should reach all segments.  They are doing this by advertising Amul cartoon Ads in hoardings, newspapers and in their social media page. Since our research is focused on the effect of satire and humour ads in the engagement of potential customers, we chose to analyse the recent Facebook posts of Amul. Unlike conventional marketing channels, Social Media page will help us to analyse the customer response for each and every print ad through the Facebook post. This can done through analysing the no of views, reactions, likes dislikes and no of positive/negative comments received by a particular cartoon post. The above method will work well for our research since Amul Facebook fans are very vocal and not reticent in expressing their feelings about the brand and the slogan.

We have used Convenience sampling method in which most recent fifty Facebook posts of Amul Girl print ads were selected for further analysis. We believe these samples have enough ads covering different categories namely religious, cultural, entertainments, socio political etc., which will bring out how humour and satire in the ads is working well for Amul.

In the recent past, Amul ads have created a furore among the segments of population through print ads referring to Indian Airlines strike, Gandhi Cap, Ganapati festival, Jallikattu etc., which received negative criticism. Additionally, the ads from the above sample will have to enough data to find out whether any of those ads received negative criticism through the count of dislikes and negative reactions and comments from the target audience. To find out how Amul addresses these problems, we referred to newspaper articles, interviews given by   Sylvester daCunha and Rahul daCunha, son and father duo of DaCunha Communications and Leadership team of Amul.

Methods of Analyses

In order to establish a background and further analyse how Amul connects with its potential customer through satire and humorous cartoons on contentious issues, research data obtained from the Facebook page of Amul would be categorized into Satire/ Humour. Next level of categorization would be done type of issue portrayed in Amul cartoon (Socio-Cultural, Sports, Entertainment, and Political). Moving to next level, the number of 'likes', 'ha ha', etc. and number of shares for each of the advertisements in the data under study would be counted. This data would be used to make a quantitative comparison for better understanding of the effect of satire and humour used in each of the advertisements. To better understand the impact of Amul cartoons on its potential viewers, a qualitative study would be done on the comments posted on the advertisement. All the comments would be categorized into Positive, Negative, Mixed and others based on the following guidelines: