“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
-Gore Vidal
It seems safe to say that the team behind the Tata Nano, the “cheapest car in the world,” had until recently been unacquainted with Vidal’s inspirational epigram.
Certainly Tata Motors’ failure, in a country of 1.2 billion, to sell more than a couple thousand Nanos a month—let alone come anywhere near their avowed goal of ‘Nanolutionising‘ personal transport in the developing world—can be blamed on a lot of things. They welded shut the trunk. They only included one side mirror. The cars keep catching on fire.
But a more fundamental reason for sluggish sales may have nothing to do with the rank dread of immolation—or indeed anything related to the actual vehicle. As Foreign Policy points out:
“The biggest blunder made by a company with as much experience with Indian consumers as any may well have been the most elementary, and confounding: the hype about the Nano’s low cost ended up making it less attractive to its target audience—people seeking to climb a rung up the social ladder from two wheels to four. ‘In communications, it’s gone out as the world’s cheapest car,” says Hormazd Sorabjee, the Mumbai-based editor of Autocar India. ‘There’s a kind of stigma attached to it, as though you can’t afford anything else.’”
Academics often say advertising is no longer as important as down-the-line branding. Maybe so. But there’s one thing it’s great at: damage control.
Cue the latest Nano ad campaign.
We can paraphrase the emotion expressed in 0:14 as something along the lines of:
“Hey look: poor people slowly dying from exhaust poisoning and shame. Yea verily, am I pleased not to be on the ‘dirtbag serfdom’ side of this window.”
Vidal predicts healthy sales from now on.
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Christopher Michael is a regular contributor to Toronto Standard and a writer for The Guardian newspaper.
Cross-posted on Hawkblocker — a website of unbiased advertising reviews for men and women and other demographics. Hawkblocker.com: Ad reviews by the prey.
