Advertising Appeals in Action: Case Studies from Amul and Cadbury

Theory only goes so far in advertising. The real test of any advertising appeal is how it performs in the marketplace – over years, even decades. Two Indian campaigns stand out as exceptional, real-world demonstrations of how different appeals can be layered together to create enduring brand love: Amul’s iconic cartoon hoardings, running continuously since 1966, and Cadbury Dairy Milk’s Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye campaign. Both are Indian, both are beloved, yet they work through very different strategies. Analysing them reveals exactly how advertising appeals function in practice – not as isolated techniques, but as carefully combined tools of persuasion.

Amul’s long-running ad campaign: a masterclass in multi-appeal advertising 🔗

Few advertising campaigns in the world can claim the kind of longevity Amul has achieved. Since 1966, the brand has produced thousands of topical ads, making it arguably the longest-running outdoor advertising campaign in the world. The campaign was the brainchild of Sylvester daCunha, managing director of the advertising agency ASP, and illustrator Eustace Fernandes. Their goal was simple but ambitious: give a dairy brand a dynamic, memorable identity in a market dominated by competitors.

The result was the Amul Moppet – a cheerful, blue-haired girl in a polka-dotted dress who became one of India’s most recognisable brand mascots. Her first appearance, in March 1966, showed her riding a horse with the tagline “Thoroughbread, Utterly Butterly Delicious” – a pun that set the tone for everything that followed. What began as a product-focused campaign quickly evolved into something far more culturally significant.

Humour appeal: wit as the primary hook 🔗

Humour appeal uses comedy to capture attention and make a brand memorable – and Amul has used this more consistently than almost any other Indian brand. Every Amul ad is built around a pun or piece of wordplay that connects a current event to the product. After India’s 1983 Cricket World Cup victory, the ad read “Kapi Kapil ki!” – a play on the word “kapil” referring to the captain Kapil Dev while also alluding to butter. When the film Sholay released, the hoarding read “Sholay, Utterly Butterly Delicious!” The humour is never crude or forced; it’s clever, bilingual wordplay that rewards the audience for getting the joke. The ads take a topical approach, commenting humorously on current events using wordplay, parody, and allusion – a formula that has never gone stale because the events keep changing even as the style remains the same.

Topical appeal: staying perpetually relevant 🔗

Topical appeal means anchoring an advertisement to current events, news, or trends so that it feels timely and relevant to the audience. Amul pioneered this in India. The Amul Topicals have covered a vast range of subjects – politics, sports, entertainment, and social issues – and are known for appearing in newspapers just days after a particular event occurs. This speed of response is central to the campaign’s appeal. When something happens in India or the world, audiences have come to expect Amul’s take on it. Every Indian knows and anticipates Amul’s take on topical events – a level of audience expectation that most brands can only dream of building.

Emotional appeal and the nostalgia factor 🔗

Emotional appeal advertising stimulates feelings that encourage consumers to engage with and remember a brand. For Amul, this emotional connection is built primarily through nostalgia. The Amul girl has been part of Indian life for nearly six decades. Generations of Indians have grown up seeing her on hoardings, in newspapers, and now on social media. She is a familiar, comforting presence – one that carries personal memories of childhood, family, and national events. The mascot has achieved cult status not only in India but across Asia, precisely because she feels personal rather than corporate.

Patriotic appeal: celebrating India’s story 🔗

Patriotic appeal works by stirring national pride and linking a brand to a shared sense of identity. Amul does this not through flag-waving slogans but through consistent cultural participation. Every time the Amul girl comments on an Indian achievement – a cricket victory, a space mission, a cultural milestone – the brand positions itself as a witness to and participant in India’s national story. Amul pioneered real-time advertising in India by turning daily news into relatable humour, and many of those news moments are intrinsically national moments. The result is a brand that feels genuinely Indian – not because it claims to be, but because it has been present for every chapter of modern Indian life.

Why the Amul campaign works 🔗

The success of the Amul campaign is not the result of any single appeal – it’s the combination of all four, delivered with remarkable consistency over nearly 60 years. Amul’s advertising strategy uses umbrella branding and indirect action advertising to build long-term relationships with customers without aggressive selling. The brand spends less than 1% of its revenue on advertising yet maintains extraordinary recall. This is possible because the Amul girl doesn’t promote butter so much as she participates in public life. The product is always present – the packet of butter, the tagline – but it’s never the loudest element. The commentary is. This subtle product integration means audiences engage with the ad for its wit and topicality, not just as a commercial message, which dramatically reduces resistance to the advertising itself.

The campaign also demonstrates how consistency builds cultural equity. Any single Amul ad, taken alone, is a clever joke. All of them together, spanning decades, constitute a running commentary on Indian life – and that makes the brand feel like a cultural institution rather than a commercial entity.

Cadbury Dairy Milk’s Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye campaign 🔗

Where Amul’s strength lies in wit and topicality, Cadbury Dairy Milk’s approach has always been deeply emotional. The brand entered India in 1948 and spent decades building a unique cultural position – associating chocolate not just with celebration but with the very fabric of Indian emotional life. The Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye, Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye (Let something good happen, let something sweet happen) campaign, launched in 2017 and conceptualised by Ogilvy India, represents the most sophisticated expression of this positioning to date.

The campaign aimed to reframe chocolate from a sweet treat or personal indulgence to a feeling worth spreading to others, celebrating the generous spirit in everyday human interactions. It marked a deliberate shift in brand positioning – from “celebrate with sweet” to “make sweet moments” for others.

Emotional appeal: kindness as the core message 🔗

The campaign’s emotional appeal is its backbone. One of the key TVCs shows two brothers at home: one is praying desperately for a Cadbury while the other is studying. In a quiet act of generosity, the studying brother leaves his own chocolate for the praying one and takes the empty wrapper. It’s a small, wordless act – and entirely relatable. The film ends with the mother noticing and appreciating the kindness. There is no dramatic music, no celebrity, no grand gesture. Reaching consumers by appealing to their emotions is one of the most effective and persuasive advertising techniques, and Cadbury executes this by grounding the emotion in ordinary, domestic life. The audience doesn’t just watch the ad – they recognise themselves in it.

Social responsibility appeal: advertising that stands for something 🔗

Beyond individual emotion, the Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye campaign carries a social message. Later iterations of the campaign spotlighted social asymmetry and the importance of bridging the gap between different sections of society – such as an employer joining his employee’s wedding procession and dancing joyfully, breaking class barriers through a simple act of participation. Each ad asks the audience to consider how they can be part of someone else’s happiness. This is a social responsibility appeal – the brand is not merely selling chocolate; it is advocating for a more generous, connected society. The campaign communicates that Cadbury is also about values, not just taste – and that strengthens the brand in people’s hearts, not just their shopping carts.

Why the Cadbury campaign works 🔗

The genius of Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye lies in how deeply it is rooted in Indian cultural logic. The tagline tapped into a cultural habit of consuming something sweet before or during good events – making Cadbury a participant in rituals, not just a product on the shelf. In India, mithai (sweets) are deeply embedded in social customs – you share them at celebrations, you offer them before important endeavours, you give them as tokens of goodwill. By aligning chocolate with this existing cultural behaviour, Cadbury made its product feel less like a foreign confection and more like an extension of a tradition that Indians already lived.

Across all their campaigns, Cadbury India has maintained a consistent theme of happiness, sharing, and love – which has built a strong brand identity that transcends product categories. The Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye campaign deepened this further by shifting from passive celebration (eating sweet during happy moments) to active generosity (creating sweet moments for others). This is a subtle but powerful evolution: it made the consumer an agent of goodness, not just a recipient of joy. The universal message of kindness, delivered through culturally specific, relatable scenarios, is what gives the campaign its enduring resonance.

Comparing the two campaigns: different appeals, same outcome 🔗

Put these two campaigns side by side and the contrast is instructive. Amul uses humour, topicality, nostalgia, and patriotism to stay perpetually relevant – it earns attention by being timely and witty. Cadbury uses emotional depth and social responsibility to build lasting affection – it earns trust by being warm and purposeful. Amul’s ads are reactive, commenting on the world as it changes. Cadbury’s ads are reflective, exploring who we want to be as people.

Yet both achieve the same fundamental goal of effective advertising: they make consumers feel something positive about the brand that goes beyond the product itself. Reaching consumers on an emotional level is one of the most effective persuasive techniques – and both Amul and Cadbury demonstrate that this doesn’t require a single formula. Humour can be emotional. Social commentary can be emotional. What matters is that the appeal is authentic to the brand’s identity and relevant to the audience’s lived experience.

Both campaigns also share another quality that is easy to overlook: long-term consistency. Neither brand reinvents itself with every ad. Amul’s style – the cartoon, the pun, the topical hook – has remained stable for nearly 60 years. Cadbury’s emotional positioning, from Asli Swaad Zindagi Ka to Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye to Kuch Accha Ho Jaaye, has been a continuous evolution of the same core idea. Consistency, creativity, and cultural connection prove that timeless storytelling can thrive across every medium and generation. For anyone studying persuasive communication, that is perhaps the most important lesson these two campaigns offer.

What do you think? Both Amul and Cadbury have built brand loyalty not by talking about their products but by tapping into larger cultural and emotional truths. Can you think of another Indian or global brand that uses a similarly multi-layered approach to advertising appeals? And between humour-led topicality and emotion-led storytelling, which approach do you believe builds stronger long-term brand equity – and why?

References

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