India is famed for its tea.
But in a cluttered commercial market, with hundreds of producers, how does one label make it through the strainer of brand awareness and into the consumer’s cup?
That was the challenge for the team at Fisheye Creative Solutions in Bengaluru.
Their job: to come up with an advertisement to promote the Kolkata tea company, Te-A-Me.
As the deadline approached, the team still didn’t have a solid idea. “It was a moment of sheer panic,” Fisheye’s creative head, Orko Basu said.
Fear spawned inspiration. “We came up with this pretty outrageous idea of sending tea to a US presidential candidate and the minute we suggested it we looked at each other and thought it might be worth a shot,” he said.
First Mr Basu had to pitch the idea to Te-A-Me.
Kolkata tea company, Te-A-Me has sent their green tea to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Source: SBS News
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a client who would have gone ahead with doing something as audacious as this,” he said.
Next came the challenge of shooting the film.
“There were Secret Service crawling all over Trump Tower and we were non-white people rolling this big box down 5th Avenue towards what is probably the most guarded place in New York City at the moment so it really got hairy for a bit,” he said.
In the advertisement, an Indian woman appears on a billboard looking down on the scene as a huge box of tea is being pushed towards Trump Tower.
“Dear Mr Trump, Namaste from India,” she says.
“We’re sending you lots and lots of natural green tea. It fights against harmful free radicals, it helps purify mind and body and regain a healthy balance. It’s also proven to make people smarter.”
The two-minute advertisement has gone viral since it was uploaded in mid-July. Mr Basu says there have been two million views in India and another million in other parts of the world.
The advertisement gently mocks Mr Trump, but what do people in India actually think of the Republican presidential candidate?
Many of the country’s 1.2 billion people have never heard of Mr Trump, but he is being talked about among the educated middle class and he’s recently featured on the cover of two English-language magazines.
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Times of India columnist, Aaker Patel believes the majority of those who know about Mr Trump like what they see.
Mr Patel says India’s majority Hindu population fears Islamist terror and Mr Trump has tapped into that fear with his anti-Muslim rhetoric.
“They would like Mr Trump for his views on keeping Muslims out of the United States, for making terrorism a much bigger issue than it is for the average person and for building walls and fences that keep neighbours out,” he said.
Mr Patel says many Indians also like the ‘strong man’ image that the Republican candidate projects.
“We’ve had a very serious problem with corruption at high levels and the idea that somebody is his own man, has a lot of money and therefore might not indulge in corruption is an idea that many would find favour with,” he said.
But for India’s information technology sector there’s genuine concern about a potential Trump presidency.
India’s big IT companies like Infosys and Wipro depend on special work permits, known as H1-B visas, to send their employees to subsidiary companies in the United States.
There are already politicians in the US who would like to scrap the visas and Mr Trump has indicated he may do just that.
“It’s his mindset that bothers me,” Professor Rupa Chanda from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore said.
“I don’t believe everything he says, but this sort of sentiment that he has, slapping restrictions on immigration, putting up high tariffs, it harks back to the Great Depression days.
“It may not be said that this is being targeted at Indian companies, but Indian companies will feel the heat of these things.”
As the world watches the two US presidential candidates battling it out to be the most powerful person on the planet, one question remains unanswered. Is Mr Trump drinking the green tea?
“I don’t know,” laughs Mr Basu of Fisheye Creative Solutions. “I hope he does, but we have not heard from him or his office.”
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