Choco-tella reveals the Inside story

A fool, who thinks he is being very clever, always makes for a good laugh. And that’s what the Choco-tella campaign wants the consumers to do. Forget being politically correct or morally right. Just have a good laugh at the antics of characters who look straight out of a low-budget '70s Bollywood flick.

In one of the TVCs, a man steps out of his home for office, when his wife calls out. She reminds him of some things he has left behind, to which he asks her to throw them down. First, his spectacles come flying down, but before he can catch those, they crash. His watch too meets the same fate. When the wife is about to throw a handkerchief next, our ‘wise man’ yells back at her, “Rumaal bhi todega kya?” (Do you want to break the handkerchief as well?) And, he is about to go back into the house.

The frame freezes on his oh-I-am-so-clever expression, as two animated hands pop up around his head. “Iske andar kuchh nahin hain,” (there is nothing inside this) says the MVO. (Don’t miss the nuts and bolts that fall off his head in the meantime).

Next, a Choco-tella candy makes an appearance. The MVO continues: “Choco-tella, iske andar choco hai” (There is chocolate inside this). The sound track, in keeping with the visual, features a bleating lamb and the unmistakeable sound of a cycle-rickshaw hooter.

Of the two other TVCs, one features an elderly man, calling out to the ice-cream vendor who just passed by. Unable to grab his attention, he looks through a pair of binoculars and starts whispering his order to the figure that appears closer through the lenses.

Unsophisticated, at times bordering on the kitschy, the commercials stake no claim to classiness. The core idea of the campaign, as always with most Perfetti communication, came from the product itself, says Abhijit Awasthi, senior creative director, O&M. “What has always worked for Perfetti is an idea that relates to the basic promise of the brand,” he says.

For almost all its brands, Perfetti campaigns have talked about the peculiar effects of consumption. A Center Shock, for instance, literally makes your hair stand on its roots, Center Fresh Ice makes a fire-breather spew ice, while a Chatar Patar loosens up the tongue. Choco-tella, unlike its more live-wire predecessors, does not really boast of any dramatic after-effects.

“The candy comes in two varieties of chocolate filling, mint and caramel, with a layer of chocolate around it. But what's common is the chocolate bit, and we decided to play that up with a lot of disruptive humour.”

In other words, the idea was to draw attention to the fillings in the candy by talking about what's not inside in someone’s head. Sounds bizarre? Well, that is disruptive humour for you.

“For a low-involvement, impulse-driven category, one has to use humour to create top-of mind-recall,” defends Sameer Suneja, head, marketing Perfetti Van Melle. “But it's not as if the humour is been layered around nothing,” he says. The story has emanated from the core proposition of the brand itself, he insists.

On the surface, there seems to be nothing remarkable about the product. It is a regular éclair with a chocolate filling. But Perfetti obviously knew the stakes when it stepped into the 15,000-piece per annum chocolate éclair market. So the idea was to bring the choco-filling in the limelight. “We wanted to encourage the consumer into discovering for himself what actually lies under the layers of chocolate,” says Suneja.

“We have used humour extensively and it has worked for us so far. Disruptive humour has been used for a few Perfetti brands. In the case of Alpenliebe candy, the creative was warm and fuzzy with a humorous rendition,” he explains. And for disruptive humour, it always pays to have more than one joke in the campaign to keep the interest alive, he adds.

The creative team featured Jignesh Maniar, Sachin Ambekar and Abhijit Awasthi. The film has been shot by Prashant Issar of Corcoise Films.

© 2005 agencyfaqs!