Amul Brand - The true Indian

 Few brands command recollect and respect like Amul. 

Interview of R S Sodhi (Managing Director of Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation and owner of the Amul brand) to WARC is worth reading. I enjoyed reading it and learned new things about Amul which i will share here by reproducing some sections of the interview:

• HORECA -
• HORECA is Hotel / Resturant / Cafe industry
• Smart advertising - 
• Because of increased adspend during lockdown, they struck lottery in Ramayana and Mahabharat serials. Sodhi stated that We got 10 times more viewership than the Indian Premier League (IPL) finals match, at one tenth of the cost – we never anticipated such a response.
• Freedom given to brand building partners
• About Amul Girl - 
  • This campaign was created by our brand building partner daCunha Communications, who have been doing this for 50 years. It started with Sylvester daCunha and now his son Rahul runs it. They conceive it, create it and put it on social media or the press.
  • We see the topical ads when the world sees it – that creative doesn’t come to us for approval, we just pay the bill.
  • For what purpose do you hire a creative agency? You hire for their competence. So why would you hire them if you don’t have confidence in them?
• On Digintal footprint -
• As of mid-September, we have reached 870 million accounts on Facebook with an average daily reach of almost 7-8 million Facebook users. The total viewership of our content on Facebook has been 124 million minutes over the last 150 days. So, on an average 1 million minutes of Amul recipe content is being viewed on Facebook daily. At an average duration of 45-50 minutes per recipe, we have created more than 60,000 minutes of original content.
• On Brand image projection - 
• So, we are trying to project that image of a local brand, we have communications that showcase that. If you’re buying milk in Calcutta, you’re getting it from local farmers and it has been processed and sold in Calcutta – they should not think that the milk is coming from the other side of India. It’s fresh.
• Nobody wants to have imported food products these days. I remember when I joined the industry 30 years ago, all the attention and demand was for imported brands. Then the preference for national brands came and now it’s local – local to your city or state.
• On importance of use of local language in advertisements -
• We’re trying to project this in all our communications, down to our website being available in all the local languages of every state – that’s the first point of contact and that it extends to commercials as well. For example, for Tamil Nadu in South India, the work must be conceived by our office there and not in Mumbai in the West, because they know what the local preferences are. And we use local partners, actors, language and music for creatives. That’s what needs to be done, for every state, and India has 28 states and 8 territories.

The interview is worth reading. The questions in the interview was very simple and clean.

Interview reference: Radhika Gupta