The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Funky ads and novelty made this place a household name

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 13, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Funky ads and novelty made this place a household name

Susan Muthalaly

Fruit Shop is a brand most associated with Chennai

CHENNAI: Although Fruit Shop on Greames Road also has branches on Mount Road, and in Besant Nagar, Kilpauk and six other places, it will always be known as "Fruit Shop on Greames Road."

The campaign has helped Fruit Shop become one of the brands most associated with Chennai, according to a survey by Ford.

The brand's success can be attributed to the efforts of Harris Abdullah and Salim Mohammed of Fruit Shop, and Rubecon, the advertising agency behind the popular campaign that has become part of the city landscape.

Harris and Zac (Alexander Zachariah, director of Rubecon Communications) got together to talk fondly about their respective companies and their working relationship.

Fruit Shop is where young couples take their budding romances, blushing bashfully to match the pomegranate juice in their glasses. College students continue to patronise the Lime-mint Cooler, a staple for the eternally broke. Dieters and gym-bodies mill around the counter with specific orders of no sugar, hold the ice.

`Unpretentious'

Harris says that both Rubecon and Fruit Shop grew together after starting within two years of each other. "We are successful because we are both pretty unpretentious. Both Rubecon and Fruit Shop were novel ideas at that time," he says.

The original Fruit Shop idea was to sell fruit. But considering that the only place that one could get a glass of juice and be assured of its hygiene in 1995 was at a five star hotel, Harris and Salim decided on a fruit juice place. They came from a plywood background, where family get togethers and wedding conversations were dominated by talk of wood and current market rates. So going the juice way was thinking totally out of the box.

Zac was a friend who was willing to help them out, and thus began the campaign.

Creative taglines

One of the ad gems that was appreciated by the police department bore the tagline "It's ok to drink and drive". They were talking juice, of course, and at that point the need was to promote drinking juice over the more popular soft drinks.

The series of ads that appear in print and as hoardings around the city have developed their own identity. They are always tongue-in-cheek and accompanied by great visuals. One of their more suggestive ones was "Put your lips to good use", accompanied by two orange pods arranged as a pair of lips.

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