Campaign: The Beach Campaign
Brand: HCL
Company: HCL
Agency: Draft FCB ULKA
The Campaign
The film opens on the close-up of a boat which has run aground on the shore and then moves to show a man ? Mr Banker ? in a bright floral shirt relaxing on a beach. Mr Banker says, ?I?d go to the juice bar for a fruit cocktail…if we weren’t stranded in the middle of nowhere.? The other man, Mr HCL, sits up and looks at the banker: ?Mr Banker! In this age of technology it?s criminal to worry about getting lost!? The banker walks around fiddling with his phone desperately trying to catch a signal. ?So much for your technology everywhere!? he fumes.
Mr HCL gets up and starts rummaging around in the defunct motorboat, even as he goes on intoning, ?Technology is so versatile that we can take arbitrary articles and devices to create our very own geo-positional location systems.? Mr Banker is confused and replies ?Geo what??
Mr HCL now returns with a pile of stuff and takes the cellphone from the banker to take out the battery. He breaks off a piece of the Brillo pad, rolls it into a slim long piece, finds the negative and positive terminals of the cellphone battery and places the rolled pad on them. Sparks fly off as a small fire is ignited and Mr Banker touches this to dry grass to start a fire and create a smoke signal. Mr Banker looks on, first in amusement and then in awe. As a search helicopter hovers above, comes the voice-over: ?HCL?s innovative approach to technology that helps empower our clients across the world?.
The banker slaps Mr HCL on the back, saying ?You?re always on fire Mr HCL!? Mr. HCL looks down and replies, ?Er?um ? Mr Banker, I’m afraid, this time you are?.? The banker realises that his shirt is on fire. He yells and hastily douses the fire. The ad ends with the tagline, ‘Technology that touches lives, HCL’.
Our Take:
HCL has run multiple campaigns since 2005 with the tagline ?Technology that touches lives?, highlighting the kind of services and products it offers with the help of the two characters ? Mr HCL and Mr Banker. The new TV ad brings a strategic shift in the brand positioning with HCL being now portrayed as an innovative IT solutions partner, not just an IT services provider, while retaining its core value proposition with the ?Technology That Touches Lives? tagline. The latest campaign aims to position HCL as an innovative, out-of-the-box technology solutions organisation, with Mr HCL embodying the ?HCL way of thinking?. Through this brand campaign, HCL now transitions from telling the consumer about who they are (and their scale of business) to how they do things at HCL.
While the two central characters ?Mr HCL and Mr Banker ? do have an immediate connect with the viewers, this time the message ? the shift in brand positioning?does not come out loud and clear exactly. Mr. HCL using gadgets to ignite a fire is interesting, literally a bright spark, but not that impressive. In that sense, the earlier ads of HCL were much better as they very clearly conveyed that HCL handled customer relationships with empathy. This latest ad portrays HCL as an ‘IT services provider’ but it could have had a more convincing script to establish HCL as an ‘innovative IT solutions partner’ and portray the shift in the brand positioning.
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