Cream Bell: Appealing to the 'adult child'

For a new entrant in a competitive and crowded category such as ice creams, simply getting noticed can prove to be quite a challenge. And Cream Bell - owned by Universal Dairy Products Ltd (UDPL) - which was launched in Delhi last year, is clearly faced with the uphill task of getting consumers to recall the brand. Which is why the primary objective of Cream Bell's advertising is to break category clutter in as distinct a way as possible.

To that end, the new communication for the ice cream brand has taken a route that is quite different from existing category advertising. Instead of focusing on the sensory appeal of the product (a la Vadilal) or on ‘attitudinal characteristics' (the youthful romance of a Kwality Walls Cornetto, the audacity of a Feast or the bonhomie of an Amul or a Kwality Walls Sundae), Cream Bell advertising is pitched at ‘the child within' - in a cheeky sort of way. Reminiscent of the famous Sil Jam commercials from the late eighties, the Cream Bell campaign comprises two television commercials created by Contract Advertising, Delhi.

The first film opens on a meeting in progress in a boardroom. As executives busily scribble notes, a lady walks in with ice creams as refreshments. At the sight of the ice creams, the visibly bored CEO is suddenly overcome with childlike excitement. In moments, he magically transforms into a child, and true to form, he slips under the conference table and starts crawling towards the tray full of ice creams. When he gets to the tray, he returns to his adult form… which doesn't come in the way of him enjoying the ice creams with childlike abandon. ‘Badey badon ki ghanti baja de,' the voiceover surmises. The second film is about a matronly schoolteacher who undergoes a similar adult-to-child transformation.

Positioning Cream Bell along these lines was dictated by the brief and a modest budget. "Having tasted success in the smaller markets of north India in the very first year of its launch, the brand was ready to take on the big players on their terms, and on their ground - the Delhi market," reveals Uddalak Gupta, creative director, Contract Advertising. "The brief was to give the brand a distinct and appealing positioning to help it get a strong foothold in the most aggressive ice cream market. And the creative challenge was to do it without blowing up budgets as large as Levers' Kwality Walls or those of Amul."

Cream Bell was launched in Delhi in September 2003, and the ice cream market in the city - pegged at approximately Rs 125 crore, growing annually at 15 to 20 per cent - is somewhat sluggish. Naturally, the need of the hour was an insight that could help establish strong brand recall. "Unlike any other consumable, ice cream is loved by everyone - from a six-month-old to a 106-year-old," says Gupta. "And it's a product that uniquely brings out a very childlike behaviour even in adults. We lick the cover before throwing it away, we slurp the drooling orange bar, we take bites off one another's ice creams, we indulge, we enjoy. In essence, for those moments, we are all like children. Surprisingly, no brand so far had zeroed in on what is essentially a category insight. The opportunity, hence, was to take over this positioning."

From this insight, the platform chosen to appropriate the brand proposition was ‘A fun experience that derives from Cream Bell's great taste'. "The creative expression that we've adopted is: Cream Bell Ice Creams - the taste that brings out the child in you. The key personality trait for Cream Bell is defined as ‘cheeky', captured in the brand sign-off, giving it an attitudinal, yet lovable personality dimension," Gupta points out. © 2004 agencyfaqs!