How Onida’s Devil Sold Envy To A Country That Had To Wait
Onida sold a television by not talking about the television. The campaign from Advertising Avenues gave the brand a green-faced devil and the line “Neighbours’ envy, owner’s pride”, which described the neighbours rather than the set.
Agency: Advertising Avenues, founded in 1982 by Gopi Kukde with Gautam Rakshit and Ashok Roy
Kukde worked on the campaign
The line: “Neighbours’ envy, owner’s pride”
Built around a horned devil character rather than a product demonstration
The Economy Onida Was Advertising Into
A colour television in India then was not a purchase decision so much as an event. Supply was restricted, prices were high relative to income, and ownership was visible to an entire building.
In that context, the competitive claims every other brand was making, about picture tubes and imported components, were solving the wrong problem. The buyer was not choosing between sets. They were deciding whether to become the household that had one.
Why A Devil
Envy is not a flattering thing to name, and brands generally avoid it. Onida made it the entire proposition, and used a devil to say the unsayable part out loud without the owner having to admit to it.
The character also solved a practical problem. A television set is visually inert, so a brand with no product story needs something else for the viewer to remember, and a face does that better than a feature list.
What The Record Does Not Settle
The campaign is far better remembered than it is documented. The year of the first film, its director and the performer behind the devil are reported inconsistently and we could not verify any of them against a contemporaneous source, so this piece does not assert them.
What is verifiable is the agency and the argument, and the argument is the part worth borrowing. It is still the clearest Indian example of a brand selling social consequence instead of product benefit.
More on Ad Tribe Campaigns That Built India.
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