Advertising for Morphy Richards

I spent some time this weekend working on an advertising assignment that was due today. We were asked to prepare a single-page print advertisement for Morphy Richards, for any/all of their products.

So here's how I went thinking about this assignment:

1. Identify the attributes of the current advertising Morphy Richards uses:
1. Clean advertising & simplicity - no garish images
2. Their products don't have any major differentiator, so current advertising doesn't use the "buy this because we're better" tag line. Instead, their advertisements try to instil a positive association of the product.
2. Most of their products are for the homemaker (read the woman in the household) - the ad has to appeal to women, it would influence buying decisions on their entire product range.
   
3. Use creativity to generate emotional appeal - reinforce the feeling of homeliness with Morphy Richards products.
4. Identify which product(s) I want to create the advertisement for. I ended up deciding between sandwich makers and hair dryers.

Once these decisions were done, I went about using a combination of google's image search, my creativity, and my skills at gimp & MS paint to come up with these.


The first one


This one turned out to be really clean with a "can't hurt the eye" white background. But the image was bad - it was a sandwich that wasn't from a sandwich maker! Surely the prof (or anyone else) would see through that. And see through that, my quaddie did. Back to the drawing board...


Another sandwich maker ad



So this one featured an improved tag line. Had gotten rid of the "A sandwich" trailer. But there were three problems with this one:

1. the colours are not uniform throughout - half the ad is in a shade of brown and the other half in a bluish grey
2. the sandwich is ugly - it is a very greasy sandwich that no health-concious homemaker would ever giver her child.
3. In hindsight, the tag line doesn't make any sense. How can a sandwich be the next best thing to sliced bread - a sandwich should be better than sliced bread, shouldn't it? I'd worked on the tag line from the phrase "the greatest invention since sliced bread", but I'd lost the meaning somewhere during the transition.

Time to move over to another product - let's check out the hair dryers.

The first hair dryer ad
So, who would buy a hair dryer? A woman who has a bad hair day. Hmm, more googling and more work on gimp made me come up with this:


All right, now I'm violating the cleanliness principle. Yeah, the colours probably look good, and the format is fairly simple - visual description of the problem, textual description of the problem, visual description of the solution. But the woman is not right - she looks agitated. And people never look agitated in a Morphy Richards ad.

So the challenge is now - come up with a visual description of a bad hair day that would appeal to women, without indicating any agitation.

Well, more googling, and this is what we come up with:

The final one



And did the ad work? I don't know - I submitted this to the prof only today. But a few "oh cho cute" comments from the target segment did make me think it's come out well :-)

Thanks V, I couldn't have done this assignment without your feedback.

Words Worth

ISB is conducting a competition to test your thinking.
The prize, for the 15 best entries, is a trip to ISB.

Check out the competition at http://www.isb.edu/wordsworth/

an afterthought

A few weeks back, we had our annual alumni reunion, Solstice (just realised I'd been misspelling it all along as Solistice). When the alumni introduced themselves, they always tagged their year of graduation to their name. They'd go "I'm R, '04" and "I'm S, '06" and so on.

Next year, I'll able to introduce myself as, "I'm Chiranth, double o' seven".

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Among other things, I managed to write three exams last week, and a 4918 word essay on Outsourcing. Was about to overshoot the limit of 5 grand, but managed to bring it down. Weekend was a good break - watched loads of movies. Did some productive work too, like changing my desktop's wallpaper, contemplating to clear my desk, etc.

Classes start again tomorrow... er, in a few hours. I'd better get some sleep.