THE 3RD SIDE OF THE COIN

Client : Salem Steel

Brief :

To communicate that Salem Steel has invested Rs. 630 million to give its customers better quality, lower prices and faster delivery.

Medium : Press

Year : 1995

Headline :

We invested Rs. 630 million to give our customers a few ups and downs.

Visual :

A sine wave with High Quality and Fast Delivery marked on the crests. Low Price is marked in the trough (my visual idea)

Idea Trigger :

Minoo had already established two routes for the above brief. With my usual fascination for actual sketching and visualizing of the communication problem, I was playing with the 3 important customer benefits of 'High Quality', 'Faster Delivery' and 'Lower prices'. These fitted perfectly on the crests and troughs of a one and a half cycle sine wave. But only after a while, the phrase 'ups and downs' struck me that went along well with this visual.

Minoo remarked "I thought these were the only two possible routes, but he has found a third." This immediately brought to my mind what Konrad used to say about Beethoven - when other music composers, developing a piece, used to think that a particular tune could only take two possible routes, Beethoven would always come up with a third. No. I am not Beethoven, but I mention the above incident to illustrate my idea that Copywriting is very much like music composition (though I am illiterate about the latter, Konrad can speak volumes about it and whatever little I have understood of it is due to him) filled with ideas. And your copy like a music piece has to be developed creatively, written and rewritten, cut, mixed, edited - very much like creating a musical piece. Maybe all Creative work or idea generation is, only the forms or the medium of expressing the ideas differ.