For a while now, big brands have been using the new model of advertising known as "selling without selling". This is the process where you advertise a product to your customer but you do not push forth the product but the emotions and feelings in which the client gets if they happen to use the product.

Have you ever bought a product not because you really need it but because of the feeling you will have while using it? If yes, did you ever think of what really made you buy it? If you're thinking about it that means the advertiser used an emotional aspect of the product that grabbed your attention. 

About a week ago, Les Brasseries du Cameroun :: SABC released a poster of the Tangui brand where we had the famous Coco Emilia. 

It made some noise online and people were like no "the ad isn't appropriate" or "it promotes selling piment (pepper)" and lots of comments that seemed bizzard. Well, that was their opinion about it and I can't stop them from saying what they like, but what they were looking at was just the photograph.

Let's break it down.

Look at the photograph again, what do you see?

for me, I see an elegant woman filled with lots of grandeur and energy, and what's that word... bold and different. It's true her dress has some kind of opening but it's the style.

Connecting it to the communication, it matches with their tag line "Votre Source Vous Distingue". The "source" here isn't the source of Tangui but rather means "PERSONALITY". We all know the story of Coco Emilia in Cameroon. The person whose bride price was the talk in town, the same person whom CANAL+ did an entire documentary of her wedding, and the same person Mama Chantou gave her a wedding present.

Coco Emilia being the talk in town for a while was the perfect personality for the brand, her personality had distinguished her from every other person in the country. Now rephrasing the tag line, we see it makes a lot of sense. "Votre Personnalité Vous Distingue".

Tangui didn't do this campaign to actually sell, they did it for people to talk about their product. If you look at the poster, you don't see the bottle immediately and might even say the bottle was photoshopped. 

For a while now, Tangui wasn't present in the market, what I mean is, they existed but people weren't seeing them no more and they had lost their name in the market, people like Supermont had taken over the market so they needed to do something to bring back the name and this campaign was the best way to bring back the "Tangui" into peoples mouth and they did it perfectly well.

Now, when people will keep talking about the poster, they will definitely talk about Tangui and that's how the name gets back into the market and that's how the name stays in our subconscious mind.

When next you go to buy pure water, if you were not seeing Tangui, I bet, you will now see it and miraculously, you will want to buy it and even go to the extend of buying it, not because that's what you wanted to buy but because you want to see if something has changed about the water and that's how Les Brasseries du Cameroun :: SABC just sold a bottle.

That's the power of Advertising, small brands won't understand this, but the big brands master this. Small brands will think the best way to sell is by bringing the product and put in front of people's faces and forget to answer the question of what do they gain if they buy it. 

So when next you're running your campaign, don't too much focus on putting that product in front but rather focus on the emotions you want your customers to feel when they consume your product.

I know you'll ask what's the emotions in it, if you're thinking about it then it means they got your attention somehow.  

Thanks for reading.