'Ambush marketing' your competitors: Hyderabad billboard wars

Care Hospitals opened one of their biggest branches in Gachibowli, Hyderabad a few months back. In the midst of hundreds of ads and billboards put up by Care Hospitals all over Hyderabad, I was alarmed to see the below billboard put up by a competitor, right next to the new Care Hospitals campus.

Continental Hospitals had taken a brazen approach to rent out a prominent billboard right next to the location and has put in this tongue-in-cheek hoarding. This is unmissable for anyone taking the highway, and is all the more prominent in the night, with use of right brand colors of 'Care Hospitals' just as seen in the neon lights right behind the billboard! A classic case of ambush marketing at its unsavory best!

Hardly a few weeks later, I stumbled upon this billboard by Oakridge International school, again in the Hitech city area in Hyderabad.

I saw variants of this board in other places where ‘Pilani -or- Princeton’ was replaced by ‘Symbiosis -or- Stanford’. Seems to be a case of an 'International' school glorifying Ivy league universities abroad, while belittling their Indian ones with a similar rhyme to the name. I wonder whether they’ve also used a ‘IIT -or- MIT’ comparison somewhere!

Clearly another variant of ambush marketing that could degenerate into an ugly spat. When I googled for these, I couldn’t find any local news or mentions, and I wonder how the affected parties have reacted to these.

But if the intent of these boards was to grab attention and be talked about, they sure achieved their 'intended' purpose.

2-Minutes to Notoriety!

Its been over a month and enough news-feed bytes have been transferred on how Nestle's Maggi got it all wrong, and ended up serving an unsavoury snack in India. This post is not about that. Maggi has also been the butt of a billion jokes over the past month. I do not intend to go into that either.

My brand association with Maggi is over 2 decades old, soon after the Swiss giant entered India. With their innovative promotion campaigns especially targeted at kids, they caught us young. The Maggi club with a catchy caption "'Maggi clubbers are fun lovers'", was the in-thing in those days when computers weren't around. Enrollment into this elite club was by sending empty wrappers of Maggi. Apart from continuously pestering parents for the 2-minute snack, primarily for the wrappers, we used to hang around the friendly neighborhood families collecting empty wrappers! Maggi captivated our attention with exciting goodies like board games, comics and several other gifts that had to be claimed by sending more wrappers. There was heightened competition amongst cousins and friends to get them all, and many a summer vacation was spent with these games. I've treasured this membership and the souvenirs, and still do, until recently.

Such are the fond memories I carry of Maggi. Association with the brand continued through my college days with a late-night companionship. Having the Maggi snack at midnight was pretty a routine thing in the campus. Apprehensions about ready-to-cook food and preservatives notwithstanding, I've been maintaining the connect through my working years, albeit at lower levels of consumption.

This is what pains me with the recent episode, while there is a deep sense of disappointment at the callous disregard for food safety standards. Its almost certain that Nestle being the global giant that it is, will muscle its way back into the country from the ban, and will spare no expense to erase this black episode. There are enough noises already questioning and cornering the FSSAI food-safety authority that tested the samples, which led to Maggi's ban. After all, the Indian consumer's memory is short-lived and we've forgotten several cola pesticide controversies and worm-filled chocolate episodes.

However, I wonder how many such long-time associations have been shattered, and would Maggi ever rise up to the same stature, to receive the warmth and trust from a generation that it grew up with?