Pravin Singh

DELL: Take Your Own Path? January 20, 2009

Some interesting things about Dell’s recent campaign “Take Your Own Path” that itself did not take its own path.

Dell started its first ever campaign in India to attract SMB owners with a tag line: Take Your Own Path. It uses real life SMB owners to endorse Dell products and here these ‘real life heroes’ talk about how Dell transformed their business.

This campaign is a change from traditional celebrity endorsements by its competitors like Lenovo and Acer. SMB owners will definitely have more impact than celebrities (I’m not sure if Saif can tell the difference between an AMD and an Intel, and I’m not sure if Hritik even owns an Acer, so I will naturally trust P. Rejendren and Raman Roy more than Hritik and Saif), but here, rather than the whole campaign and it impact, I want to discuss its tag line – Take Your Own Path:

• I am quite amused at the irony of this ad which asks me to take my own path by pointing me towards the path chosen by some other business people. If they chose Dell, why should I as well? Am not I supposed to “take my own path” and trust my own judgment rather than theirs?
• The strategy of using ‘real life heroes’ is a very old one. Some time back HP also ran a campaign featuring Dilip Chhabaria, Karan Johar etc. highlighting how HP helped them succeed. Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was also on the same lines. So my question is: When the ad agency itself could not “take its own path” and come up with something new to advertise its product, how can it expect me to take my own path?

It looks like Enfatico, the ad agency created to handle only Dell’s marketing service, and much criticized (ridiculed rather) for not coming up with anything creative in 9 months even after guzzling $4.5 Billion, was under immense pressure to do something, anything.

And that’s what they did.