An analysis of the Liril debacle confirms the fact that creativity and constant innovation is the only safe

bet in the advertising industry. While the Tara Sharma advertisement did ruin the reputation of a brand that previously had tried out a lot of out of the box thinking, with this advertisement, they reached a dead end. Liril had given India the exotic girl under the waterfall, a bold yet fresh idea that was a huge success. However Karen Lunnel, the first Liril girl was the only one who could weave this magic over the audience- it was a fresh and previously unexploited idea. The many Liril girls that came after her were uninteresting in comparison as they followed the same theme however they failed the hold the magic of the original waterfall girl. The Liril ad with Tara Sharma was the result of a new campaign which was launching a new fragrance for Liril- Icy Mint along with the regular Lime fragrance. The tag line for this new campaign was Taazgi meri marzi and still followed the original freshness theme. However post the bad press for the desert ad lead to them pulling out this particular ad from television. It did not affect the other leg of the campaign as they just increased the focus on the ad with the new mint fragrance. The consequence of the ad was a minute increase in sales which cannot be directly attributed to the negative publicity associated with the ad. However in some cases some publicity can be a lot better than no publicity at all. The company did not change the campaign at all apart from pulling out this particular ad. For the rest of it they changed the tagline to focus on the icy mint fragrance calling it, Icy Mint, Taazgi meri marzi. Liril has constantly attempted to build on its fresh image, a tactic that they employed till they realised a shift as their user base started getting older. The previous promise of freshness was something that appealed to a younger audience and so did not hold the attention of the customer base which was increasingly familial. This led to the change in their offering and finally resulted in the Liril 2000 campaign which focussed on hygiene and skin care a lot more than freshness. This was based on the idea that an increasingly family oriented customer base would be more interested in providing skin care and improved hygiene and was a more sound promise over the earlier proposition of just freshness. The Tara Sharma Liril fiasco was followed by an equally unsuccessful campaign with Deepika Padukone which was on the same lines. This was followed by another change in image with an ad that showed a new sensual side to the brand. While this ad did improve the image from the previous dipping campaigns, it was not until the completely new image of Liril 2000 touch points which promoted it as a family soap that Liril picked up its brand in the market. Another interesting thing to note is that the Liril campaign which was the product of Lowe Lintas was moved over to McCann in a bid to renew its brand. However post a series of unsuccessful campaigns, HLL is back to its faithful Lintas, the brand that gave Liril its first identity.