This ad has been making rounds of the TV since some days.
The first three times I heard it in the background, I couldn’t understand what it was trying to convey by saying ‘sadha wire load nahi lega, lekin standard wire lega.’ Then I realised Standard is actually the brand name of the wire. I wonder whether Standard is a right word to choose as a brand name. It’s got a meaning of its own, does not convey superiority or inferiority. In Hinglish, it has actually come to mean normal or sadha. Two of its meanings in the Oxford dictionary are indeed average and normal. Should the company have chosen another brand name?
Note that Standard is coming from Havells, which has already created a positioning as ‘wires that don’t catch fire’. I feel this ad also tries to convey the same thing by showing the burnt switchboard. How do wires catch fire otherwise? So in a way, oversteps into the Havells territory.
Standard brand existed for sometime before Havells acquired the company that owned it. But now that it is advertising the brand on TV for the first time, should the company have killed the brand name and gone for something else? Other brands of Havells are neutral words and don’t carry a dictionary meaning, except for one whose meaning is related to its field; Crabtree, Sylvania, Concord, Luminance and Linolite.