MUMBAI: That Bollywood & Cricket reign supreme over Indians’ hearts and minds has never been doubted - in fact it’s a tie between both! In the annual IPL ad recall research of the Indian Institute of Human Brands (IIHB) conducted ten days after the start of the League this year both- Captain Cool Dhoni and the effervescent Ranveer Singh have come up tops with both seeming to have done equally well. This is the second consecutive year that the cricketer was at No. 1, in 2019 Shah Rukh Khan had topped the report.
The research polled 879 respondents in the age-group of 18-35 years (M=481, F=398) across India with the survey being conducted telephonically.
Dream 11 was the most spontaneously recalled brand in this year’s survey, which possibly also helped enhance both the brand equity and recall of MS Dhoni who anchored the 12-ad series for the brand as its ambassador and protagonist.
Jio Fiber, with multiple IPL teams featuring an ever-enthusiastic Ranveer Singh gyrating to a sing-song brand message came in second on recall in the research. This also helped the celebrity endorser to considerably strengthen his personal recall. This was in sync with the ultra-high recall of the brands they respectively endorse. It may be noted however, that on the IPL last year Byju’s being the most spontaneously recalled brand did not help the cause of its celebrity endorser. Shah Rukh Khan trailed behind other celebrities.
The study bases the celeb score on Celebrity Brand Association & Recognition to assign a metric score to each celebrity and associated brand. While Dhoni scored a high CELEBAR of 87, Ranveer achieved a score of 86, empirically almost equal to the former’s.
Virat Kohli, expectedly did well on recall too and came third in the recall rankings. Salman Khan did surprisingly well in this year’s survey coming in at No. 4, ahead of Rishabh Pant, Rahul Dravid, Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt and Saurav Ganguly who followed in that sequence.
Despite featuring heavy media weights, Ajay Devgn and Shah Rukh Khan the Vimal elaichi ad had only an eight per cent recall.
Interestingly, brands without celebrities like Phone Pe, Byju’s and several others performed far better, establishing that sans celebrities good advertising still works, especially wherever media investments are heavy.
On the ads without celebrities, the most remembered were Phone Pe, Byju’s, Vivo, One Plus, Groww, Upstox, Kia and MPL.
Seventeen per cent of respondents spontaneously recalled Rahul Dravid's association with CRED ad, but only two per cent could recollect that Jackie Shroff and Kumar Sanu were also a part of the campaign.
