Vodafone: A ‘firang’ pug this time

The famous Vodafone pug is back after seven months, this time in an ad for Vodafone’s Customer Care. The pug idea was last used in the Hutch-Vodafone transition

Like all companies aspiring towards globalisation, Vodafone India, too, has touched global shores – quite literally. In an ad for Vodafone’s customer care service, Vodafone India has used the picturesque Cape Town in South Africa as the setting, while even its brand embodiment – the pug – has been imported from Cape Town.

According to Harit Nagpal, chief marketing officer, Vodafone India, this ad is the first instance of a customer care service being advertised in the telecom category in India. Why now? “Actually, we were waiting for a huge infrastructure to fall into place post the rebranding of Hutch into Vodafone,” says Nagpal. With Vodafone stores and mini-stores, mobile vans, self-service kiosks and thousands of customer service personnel in place, the timing is right, Nagpal asserts.

O&M, Vodafone’s agency in India, has created a 60 second TV commercial which carries four vignettes, which have further been broken down into individual ads (30 seconders, extensions of the 60 second one).

The 60 seconder
opens on a day in the life of a little girl, as she wakes up and gets ready for school. Just as she looks around for her missing sock, her faithful pug runs across the house with the sock in his mouth, and puts it before her. In another shot, the little girl is sitting along a river bank, trying to fish something out of the water. Her pug comes trotting along, a net in its mouth, for her to use in her endeavours. The next vignette is that of the girl dutifully sticking stamps on some envelopes; methodically, she holds out each stamp before the pug, he licks it, and she pastes it on the envelope. Lastly, the girl is seen in a school bus, staring out. Suddenly, her hand flies to her throat – she has forgotten to wear her tie. Cut to the shot of the pug with the tie hanging out of his mouth, chasing the bus as it speeds away. The ad ends on the super: ‘Happy to Help. Vodafone Customer Care’.
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Each of the vignettes (Sock, Stamp, Fishing Rod and Tie) is running as a separate ad on television (with particular visibility in the DLF IPL cricket matches).

The Vodafone pug resurfaces after seven months (it was last leveraged in the Hutch-Vodafone transition ads in September 2007). The gap is smaller this time, as the pug is usually resurrected once in a year. As is known, the pug is used in the case of thematic brand communication, and generally not for individual products and services. Then why make an exception in an explicitly service based ad?

Nagpal explains, “Customer care is the face of our brand, so in a sense, this aspect of Vodafone encompasses the entire brand.” Therefore, the pug.

Rajiv Rao, group creative director, Ogilvy & Mather Mumbai, says the brief was simple: letting customers know that Vodafone is always ready and ‘happy to help’. “The ad is a metaphorical story of the brand and our customer,” he says.

According to Nagpal, “This ad aims to urge customers to come to us.” This is because Vodafone launches new services from time to time, and in different subscriber cycles, and subscribers need to be made aware of these. “They need to know which services are useful to them, and a helping hand – our customer care – can do that,” he explains.

The TVC has been directed by Prakash Varma of Nirvana Films (who was also behind the original network ad featuring the pug, more than five years ago; Varma has shot several films for the brand since).

Varma doesn’t cite any particular reason for using a Cape Town pug instead of Spikey (the pug who took to the Vodafone throne after the earlier one, Chika, grew older with time). A dog trainer at the set trained the animal to do as told. In fact, pugs usually tend to keep their pink tongues hanging out, but this particular one refused to do so. “The stamp sequence was quite an adventure,” Varma grins. Once the stamp was put before him, however, he started licking it.

The background music score has been given by Anand.

The TVC has been supported with other media, including outdoor, print, radio, below-the-line and the Internet.