Which products require placement?

Which products require placement?

I saw the 3 Idiots movie for the second time and this time internalise some things from marketing product perspective.

I am not writing this to share any Gyan, but with questions for which I am seeking answers. I will refer to two very short scenes from 3 Idiots and leave them with two open ended questions.

Scene 1:Aamir and Madhavan breaks into Boman Irani’s office to steal question paper.If you observe the scene when Aamir puts the question paper back in the envelope, he applies gum on the seal to close it. The gum bottle was turned around, to not display which brand it was but by seeing the typical blue bottle with black cap, you recognize it as the Camlin Gun bottle that you may have used n number of times. Now the question is why did even without seeing the name on the bottle, I can identify the brand with the blue bottle?

I made some observations:
•There is no such brand as the blue bottled Camlin gum that has created such strong brand recall.
•Its been able to do this brand recall simple by being an unchallenged product for a long time
•But will it hold on to its market share since , non-sticky adhesive rollers are fast capturing the glue market


Scene 2: When Mona Singh (Kareena Kapoor’s sister) is helped by Aamir and friends to deliver a child using suction cap on a TT Table

If you observe Kareena, show an animated video demonstration of how to deliver a baby using a suction cap. Now the video is shown as a video on YouTube.

Mind you YouTube is not product placement but is acknowledged as a Media Alliance. To make this scene logical YouTube was the ideal platform to extract this demo.

In all likelihood the production team of 3 idiots must have approached YouTube , to use the latter as an ideal platform to extract the delivery demo video as that will make the scene more authentic. My search in YouTube using key words like Suction cap enabled delivery didn’t fetch that video.

Now the question is here is a brand that was needed by movie to make it look its scene authentic. Don’t’ you think this is exceptional? As normally product run after movie banner to make there product placed e.g. Airtel, Reliance BIGTV etc did in the movie.

My observation is that utility of a product in this case YouTube makes the brand indispensable.