Brand Update : Onida

The summer is on and air-conditioner ads have started to peep in. Surprisingly one of the ads that caught my eye was that of Onida.

Onida and the devil is having a tough time . The main reason for this is the fight between the brothers : Gulu and Sonu Mirchandani and their brother -in- law Vijay Mansukhani over the control of the group.
The fight had severely eroded the share of the brand and even the marketing of Onida. Onida was staging a recovery after the successful relaunch of the brand and the return of the Devil. But the family feud made things difficult for the brand .

What is interesting about Onida this time is the branding . According to reports in Livemint.com, the creative duties of the brand has partly moved from Rediffusion to McCann Erickson.

But as usual, when the agency changes, the entire brand elements changes. For Onida, the change is always for the worse. When O&M took the brand from Avenues, the famous tagline " Neighbor's Envy, Owner's Pride " and the Devil was taken off. The brand suffered for almost 10 years and has never recovered since .The change of agency from O&M to Rediffusion again changed things and Devil returned in a new avatar and a new tagline " Nothing but the truth" came into existence.

The new arrangement is not making things better. In 2007, Onida launched a new campaign for its A/C and with a new tagline " It can change your life ".
Now the new campaign for the air conditioner features a new Devil and the tagline has again changed to " Experience the desire " .

Onida is proving to be a case study about " How to Mess up a wonderful brand ".

As a marketer, I believe that the ownership of the brand should be with the Company and not the agency. But what is seen is that the brand managers 'outsource' the strategy to the ad- agency. Things are consistent till the agency handles the account. But when the agency moves on , the new agency resist continuing the existing strategy since it was crafted by the competitor.

So whatever be the quality of the existing branding strategy, the new agency will try to change it. This has resulted in many brands drifting from time-tested successful themes to uncharted territory and often sink in confusion.
Onida which already is in deep trouble is moving on to further confusion with an unnecessary change in the positioning strategy. The brand has not been able to consolidate the earlier theme based on 'truth'. Even before establishing it, the brand has repositioned again.

Can anyone explain the logic ?

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Onida