Two competing mango juice brands, Maaza and Slice have upped their visibility on media. Both the brands continue to invest behind their respective platforms -Maaza being equated with ‘as good as real mango’ and Slice for ‘pure mango pleasure’. In the Maaza TVC, the insight is that people look forward to the mango season so much so that they hear ‘aam’ (mango) even in everyday conversations. Katrina Kaif sizzles in the Slice TVC, rife with sexual innuendo. So, in a way the Maaza ad is slice of life and the Slice ad is about the ‘mazaa’ of mango. The PepsiCo India website does not have a dedicated brand page on Slice, by the way.
While mango mania is a national thing in India, will the pun on ‘aam‘ (as in the Maaza TVC) work beyond Hindi? In Tamil, for example, the word for mango is mambazham. I can imagine the Tamil translator tearing his hair out to come up equivalent dialogue when our guy wakes up startled hearing a politician talk about ‘aam aadmi’. And I noticed that last year too, Aamsutra was used even in the Tamil version of Slice. While Kamasutra would be understood and the connection made, it doesn’t have the same zing as the Hindi one. Ah, the travails of getting through in 21 languages. That’s the aam problem in India.
2 Comments
I like the way they have started investing heavily on non fizzy stuff in the last 2-3 years. Earlier there was a conscious effort to dissociate the “sissy” juices from the “manly” colas. Do I read it as a direct consequence of the fizz going out of the colas?
Nice observation. Globally, companies like Pepsi are consciously moving to the do-good platform in terms of product portfolio.