When the Actor Doesn’t Make Me Believe in the Advertisement

We’re on-boarding a new client in the maternity care segment and during my research I came across this ad by Horlicks for their Mother’s Horlicks product; this is their latest advert and understandably they’re pushing it out on Digital/Social. The ad itself is nice, no complaints there but I stopped connecting with the ad as soon as I saw the actor— Sayani Gupta playing the part of a new mother here.

The brand’s message simply fell flat after I saw her because I know for a fact that this is an actor/model who isn’t pregnant so she’s essentially pretending to be pregnant and happy and conscious of what’s she consuming for a healthy pregnancy etc.

Would it have made more of an impact for me if it was a different model/actor who I’ve never seen on screen before? Certainly, yes, I might not have paid attention to the person so much. Here though my first thought is I know this lady and she’s not pregnant yet she’s playacting a mother-to-be!

Do brands really have to use well known faces to push their products? Can’t Horlicks have roped in a real mother to be instead? How am I, as a new mom-to-be, expected to buy a product where the model isn’t actually expecting a baby? For example, when Aishwarya Rai started endorsing the Life Cell brand that encourages umbilical cord stem cell banking soon after she delivered a baby, I connected with her endorsement and didn’t feel she was doing it for the money or the brand was using her for how good she was at endorsements in general. For me, this is a marketing miss. Yes, we all consume products that are probably not even used by the brand ambassadors or actors/models who are roped in for the ads, but in this case I felt marketers could pay heed to the target audience a little more in the case of products that are more personal.