Pidilite’s flagship adhesive brand Fevicol recently released a new campaign, ‘Kursi Pe Nazar’, which incidentally is built on a script by the late advertising genius Piyush Pandey. The ad turns an everyday object like a chair into a witty reflection on ambition and power play in Indian life, making it a quintessential Fevicol-Pandey production.
Together, Ogilvy’s Pandey and Fevicol have, over the decades, created exaggerated, amusing takes on everyday Indian life — from the egg that would refuse to break to the bus packed with passengers stuck to each other — building salience in a low-involvement category. The humour turned Fevicol into a household name, says Sandeep Tanwani, chief marketing officer, Pidilite Industries.
The latest film is a continuation of the Fevicol journey, leveraging uniquely Indian cultural insights and stories, with the brand’s core message of ‘unbreakable bonds’. “Our endeavour has always been to take our storytelling beyond just functionality. Fevicol is a people’s brand and we’ve tried to humanise it as much as possible, allowing consumers to feel a sense of ownership towards it,” Tanwani adds.
Launched in 1959, Fevicol is a key driver for Pidilite’s consumer business, alongside specialist products such as Dr. Fixit, Fevikwik and M-Seal, among others. As per industry estimates, the company now controls over 50% of India’s $3.2 billion adhesive market. In these years Fevicol communication has been less about wood and furniture, and more about the rub-off that the brand’s stickiness has had on people and objects around it.
What do experts say?
Experts note that the challenge for a legacy brand like Fevicol is in balancing its rich advertising history with contemporary sensibilities that are relevant to younger consumer cohorts. There is a remarkable difference in the consumer landscape today with fragmented attention spans, digitally dispersed audience, and participative brand communication.
This differs from the television-dominated era in which Fevicol’s legendary campaigns were built. “ The metamorphosis of media ecosystems, changing definitions of socialising among Gen Z and interpretations of cultural practice are the biggest challenges for Fevicol in the attention economy,” says Krupa Rai, associate professor for marketing & international business, KJ Somaiya Institute of Management.
Fevicol managed to do something rare with its advertising. It sold an industrial product that is low-involvement by transcending the category itself, selling stories of social life and Indian culture with humour. “In many ways, Fevicol became a classic example of how a consistent advertising message transforms a commodity-like product into a cultural institution,” she says.
Creating new relevance
The continued success of brands like Amul and Santoor demonstrates that there is no need to reinvent the wheel when a brand occupies a strong emotional and cultural space, points out Nisha Sampath, managing partner, Bright Angles Consulting, adding that the creative territory for Fevicol has already been strongly established.
“Fevicol’s task now is to continue identifying relevant human and cultural truths that can serve as fresh contexts for expressing the same brand promise,” she says.
This means that the brand will need to adapt its tone, format and storytelling for contemporary media environments where humour is increasingly consumed through memes, short-form video and internet-native formats, she says.
With Fevicol already occupying a distinct place in cultural parlance, whether in political situations or Bollywood films (such as Dabangg 2’s famous ‘Fevicol Se’ hit), the brand’s objective now is to continue its journey using unique cultural insights, says Tanwani.
“We have identified multiple media channels for our new campaign and are exploring high impact properties. In fact, we recently leveraged the election results counting day for this campaign with select news channels, websites and publications since the kursi premise is a perfect fit for politics,” says Tanwani, noting that in the coming days, the brand will also announce integrations with Bollywood and sports properties.
Speaking about Pandey’s final script, Tanwani says, “At the core of this campaign, much like with most of Piyush’s previous Fevicol films, is a fundamental Indian human insight. The use of kursi goes beyond furniture to symbolise aspiration and progress in an upwardly mobile nation.”
Rise of competition and evolving consumer demands is an opportunity to unlock new areas of growth, says the company. “We put a lot of importance on listening to consumer feedback across divisions from R&D to marketing.
The home improvement space has evolved and become more personalised, so our efforts are rooted in creating solutions and messaging that address diverse consumer needs,” he says. The brand now has over 55 product variants.
For Fevicol’s creative agency, Ogilvy, the task now is to balance consistency with evolution beyond Pandey’s towering legacy. Sampath opines that while the agency has the creative talent to carry the brand forward, the real challenge lies in transferring the intuitive understanding of the brand’s essence and Indian culture to the next generation of creative leadership.