Asian Paints now offers interior design services

A new diversification from the paints major as it looks to encourage consumers to open their purses and homes.

“Har ghar chup chap se yeh kehta hai ke andar isme kaun rehta hai.”

An iconic line from an Asian Paints' ad and true to the boot. A ‘ghar’ will always cast the first impression about you even before you utter a syllable. It seems the paints major has taken the line to its next evolution - a personalised interior design service.

Called ‘Beautiful Homes’, the brand released not one but three ads to illustrate this new offering and its three main features: personalised interior design, home designing, and design visualisation.

In the last few weeks, this is the second ad campaign from Asian Paints. The first one was for its Ace Shyne range of paints that was aimed at the middle class and now the interior design service offering that seems to be aimed more towards a cohort who may have remained largely unaffected by the lockdown.

We got to first understand about this cohort in an interview with CRED’s Kunal Shah who revealed they paid off their credit card bills without availing any moratorium. And we also feel this cohort understands design sensibilities better and are, thus, more likely to choose to redesign their homes than other cohorts.

And with most of us at home, we’ve begun to pay attention - People now want their homes to shine and look good because they’re most probably going to spend most of their time indoors for the considerable future.

The release timing of the ads is opportune. With the Indian Premier League just over a week away and Diwali soon approaching, most people are banking on the festival season to speed up India’s recovery.

Thomas Xavier, founder of Transformer Purpose Branding (former chairman of Leo Burnett Orchard) told us that while Asian Paints is a paint company, “it has always seen itself as a brand that’s more about converting a house into a home” - where a family is able to experience the joy of life and a consumer is able to voice his/her perspective of what’s a good life.

As per Xavier, it (interior design service) is a natural evolution and allows the brand to build on its equity and trust which it has received from its paints offerings.

He remarked that interior design is a category where not everybody has the happiest experience. Everybody walks in with big dreams but we all know from the blueprint to the final product, it is a downward spiral. Thus, for consumers, "it’s a huge confidence booster because Asian Paints is a trusted brand," stated Xavier.

Speaking about consumers, he said, it won’t only be the rich or financially self-sufficient people choosing it. Today’s middle class is willing to invest if it will give their family that little bit of extra happiness and because they don’t want to postpone joy… 30 years ago, it wasn’t the case.

“Interior design is nothing but a laddered offering of paint,” said Xavier, and added, “Tomorrow, I won’t be surprised to see Asian Paints offer furniture.”

About the ad, KV Sridhar 'Pops', global chief creative officer, Nihilent Hypercollective (he was CCO at Leo Burnett and SapientNitro) said, “Somebody has missed the opportunity to make this ad a legendary ad.”

Ruing the missed insight, Pops told us that the ad talks about 1,20,000 people have preferred Indian interiors; it’s a data point and so a fact. “When you’re doing advertising around stating facts, not digging deep inside for insights, then you will have advertising which is very transnational. No emotional at all,” he remarked.

Taking the example of “Har ghar chup chap se yeh kehta hai ki andar isme kaun rehta hai,” of Asian Paints, he stated, “Different creative people, different generation,” and further said that they’ve taken a fact given by the client at face value and didn’t do their homework of understanding human beings and digging little deeper.