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" A still from 'Taste The Thunder' ad campaignMany years back ad man Ashok Kurien had just started out on his own. His agency, Ambience Advertising, was just a few months old. They had only one account. And no track record. A chance meeting with the legendary founder of Parle, Ramesh Chauhan on a flight changed the course of the agency.“Come by the office and give me some advice,” Chauhan supposedly told Kurien in mid-air.Despite no pitch, no creative work, no employees, Chauhan asked Kurien to handle Thums Up – one of the largest advertising accounts at that time. “I almost fainted! It took me weeks for the reality to sink in of the enormity of his decision, and the responsibility that went with it,” recalls Kurien.A few weeks later, Kurien alongwith Elsie Nanji, his partner in the agency, presented ‘Taste the Thunder’ and the Hindi ‘Toofani Thanda’ tagline to the company.There were echoes of objection all around. Comments like “How can you ‘Taste’ the thunder. It makes no sense” to “It’s not English, Why not taste the Thums Up?” came flooding in. Ashok Kurien and Elsie NanjiAmidst all the criticism, there was one man who told Kurien, “Let me sleep over it”. The next morning, Kurien got a call from Chauhan saying, “Let’s go for it!” Nanji added that the credit of this tagline goes to Bhargava Krishna (Bugs). “When we launched ‘Taste the Thunder’, we did a series of ads which celebrated the sign of ‘thumbs up’. We wanted to bring in the idea of the ‘taste the feeling of success’ with this tagline.”However, like many of the stories in the advertising business, Bugs had initially created ‘Taste The Thunder’ tagline for a totally different campaign. The ad showed rowdy men fighting. Kurien hated this concept but Nanji and Kurien together decided to use the tagline as it was catchy. The background music with an international rock feel to it was composed by Hossi Nanji, Elsie’s husband.“Thums Up always had a more strong and fizzy taste than Pepsi or Coke. So we wanted to express that feeling with the word ‘Thunder’,” she added.Most of the ads that Kurien and Nanji conceptualised thereafter depicted simple everyday lives of people from various walks of life with stories attached to them. Whether it was a photographer or boxer, everyone tasted roaring success with a sip of Thums Up.Around the 1990s, the brand also wanted to show people in uniform to depict the feeling of pride and strength. For that purpose, Salman Khan was roped in to act as a naval officer in the ad.The beverage brand wanted to play Pepsi’s strategy against them by using the ‘Choice Of The New Generation’ (Pepsi’s tagline back then) before Pepsi and Coke had a chance to enter India. This is when Khan became their choice and stayed on for 10 years as an ambassador. Suniel Shetty and Akshay Kumar were added to the Thums Up endorsement family years later.Nanji vaguely recalls, “The client suggested Salman Khan as far as I remember. We were never in favour of roping in movie stars.”“Tom Cruise’s Top Gun film had become very popular back then and we wanted to portray the fighter plane scene from his movie in our Indian version,” she added. The Indian Air Force agreed to give the brand access to two fighter planes for the shoot of the ad.Kurien recalls a heart break when Thums Up was sold to Coke in 1993. “I cried when Coke bought Thums Up. I was a part-parent,” he added. “Ramesh believed in me back then and 25 years later, Thums Up outsells Coke and Pepsi together till date. ‘Taste the Thunder’ is India’s longest running national campaign even today,” he concludes.(BE Saal Baad is a series that looks at advertising back in time)Follow and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube"
<https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/advertising/how-thums-up-got-the-taste-of-thunder/89678208>