The Hindu Business Line : With designs to be cool

Leather products maker Hidesign launches a new campaign to give itself a makeover as a trendy brand which will also appeal more to a female audience.

SOME time last year, soon after it launched an advertising campaign, Hidesign - the brand recognised for its top-drawer range of leather bags and briefcases - did a dipstick poll that threw up some interesting opinions. The most telling of these was, perhaps, the perception that though the brand stood for high quality products, it was not considered `cool' enough.

So, when the company decided to launch a new campaign this year, the brief for its agency - Contract - was clear: The new advertising had to create a sophisticated and suave image for the brand. At the same time the company also decided to focus on how Hidesign products made for useful gifts; again based on a survey which revealed that around 40 per cent of the company's customers bought its products as gifts.

"We wanted a campaign that moved Hidesign away from the image of not being trendy enough and instead want people to think of us as a trendy and fashion-oriented leather brand.

At the same time we also wanted to push Hidesign as a gifting option," declares Dilip Kapur, President, Hidesign.

The result is a two-part print campaign with "attitude". Shot in South Africa by well-known photographer Michael Doran, the series of eight ads feature South African models and are radically different from the brand's earlier advertising. "The tone of the campaign and the visual colours stayed the same as the last campaign, but the message is very different this time," says Kapur.

The earlier campaign focused on product quality, while the new advertising seeks to tell the customer that Hidesign is a `fashion forward' company that customers in any part of the world can relate to, he says.

While Kapur does not say just how much making the ads cost, he does reveal that the sum earmarked for the overall campaign is in the region of Rs 1 crore. Most of this budget will go towards media spends, primarily on magazines such as Femina, Cosmopolitan, Outlook and Outlook Traveller. "We will continue to stick to the print media, though we may look at other media some time in the future," he says and points out that the new ad campaign is also going to be used in the US, South Africa, Malaysia, and other markets in which the brand is available.

The new ads are more `emotional' and also use large dollops of humour; a first of sorts for Hidesign. "The tone of voice is cheeky, but upmarket cheeky," says Meera Sharath Chandra, Vice-President and Branch Head, Contract-Chennai, who worked on the campaign. The objective, she adds, is to put a little attitude into the advertising using sophisticated humour, the sort of humour that appeals to the brand's target audience.

This target audience is another realm in which the brand's advertising has undergone a subtle shift. While the ads have been designed to talk the language of upwardly mobile, educated, internationally minded executives, they are targeted at women executives too. Kapur says the company has felt a need to focus on women, kindled perhaps by the fact that ladies' handbags sales have increased rather sharply in the last one year, especially in the UK.

The company has also chosen to run the campaign in two segments. While the first segment was released in early September, the second part will debut in a couple of weeks to coincide with the festival season and will run till Christmas. "Traditionally, the last three months of the year is the time when gifting is maximum.

So that is the right time to launch the ads that push the gifting option," says Contract's Sharath Chandra. The ads from the first segment of the campaign, the so-called `product' ads, will continue once the `gifting' ads have run their course, she adds.

Both Kapur and Contract's Sharath Chandra are upbeat on the likely impact of the new campaign.

As Kapur puts it: "In the new campaign, the connection to the customer is at an emotional level." Hidesign hopes the consumer will indeed make the connect.

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