Symphony air coolers ask “Pankhe, what is this?” in latest campaign via DDB Mudra West India

Symphony, a leader in evaporative air coolers has always believed in giving its customers the best in class, pocket friendly products suiting everyone’s need. This summer, Symphony and DDB Mudra West have attempted to find a solution to the heat in a humorous way with their latest campaign – “Pankhe, What Is This?’

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Crammed between fans on one hand and air conditioners on the other, Symphony has been trying to expand ‘coolers’ as a category. Strategically, it has always spoken to a mindset that longed for an AC but hesitated to make the purchase for economic reasons. Symphony seemed to offer the right sized solution to them – comfort cooling, great looks, great value and versatility of usage (outdoor, inverter etc.). This approach has worked well. It has delivered consistent growth and opened up new markets.

While this strategy worked well, it addressed a rather limited audience who had to be convinced logically. The brand needed a more provocative, aggressive approach to expand their footprint and hence it was imperative that DDB Mudra West India looked at an alternative; a larger source of business – the fan market and persuade holders to upgrade to an air cooler.

DDB Mudra West created a 40 second film which starts with two heavily sweated, tired men sitting on a sofa, grumbling about the unbearable heat and looking at their ceiling fan with expectant eyes. The scene rolls into a catchy jingle highlighting the helplessness of fans, albeit sarcastically. In tandem, the film captures a montage of various situations of a family spending horrible summer days indoors, fighting the heat while desperately trying to extract more out of the fans. Towards the end, a voice over introduces Symphony air coolers as the much sensible option to fight the adverse summer heat.

Quoting on the campaign, Rajesh Mishra, Associate Vice President, Marketing, Symphony Limited said, “Symphony has been growing at a CAGR of about 30% for the past five years and in order to maintain that we needed to look beyond our regular TG and decided to broaden our base. There are 160 million+ households in India that have only fans and no other cooling devices. The obvious upgrade for them is air coolers to beat the scorching Indian summers and to make sense to this large consumer group, we needed a strong proposition. Our R&D team had been working on making our coolers more energy efficient and now we have coolers that work on an operating cost of a fan. We feel that coolers running on electricity cost same as a fan is a great proposition and decided to focus on this key USP. So, we briefed the agency to have a communication that looked relevant to the fan users and to highlight our Key USP. While the campaign will be focused on Television, it will be suitably supported by print, digital, radio and also through local activation.”

Talking about the campaign, Rahul Mathew, Creative Head, DDB Mudra West (pictured left) said, “While the campaign was to urge fan-only households to upgrade, the fan is not the enemy in our campaign. It’s actually the victim. It’s not physically, or mechanically in this case, possible for a fan to combat the harshness of summers. But still one considers the presence of heat as the incompetence of fans. Our campaign urges them to stop pointing fingers at the fan and get home Symphony air coolers to take on the scorching summer.

Credits –

Films Dept: Vishal Sane, Vishal Agarwala