Urbane, suave and sophisticated are adjectives that best describe the new furniture portals like Urban Ladder. Bangalore based Urban Ladder, that launched operations in 2012 in India, has made its communication vibrant, classy and innovative, catching the consumer unaware. Through its mailers that pop up in your face with subject lines as diverse as ‘OMG Monsters’, ‘Breaking and Entering’ and many more, the brand has made sure its noticed, talked about and acted upon too. It’s woven a narrative around itself that is, if nothing else, hard to ignore. It launched its first TV commercial in January 2015 and has made strategic shifts to digital for spreading its message about its growing range of services.

The latest series of advertisements on digital have gone a step further to underscore Urban Ladder’s urbane appeal. The ads address the young, upper middleclass mindsets and lifestyles. The new online campaign has 4 short videos featuring pets,and are aptly titled ‘Creature Comforts’. The campaign talks about the different services offered by Urban Ladder making any purchase more convenient and easy for the short-on-time consumers. Services such as Free Delivery and Assembly, Interest Free EMIs, Easy Replacement and Returns and Cash or Card on delivery are depicted through pets in the campaigns. The Dog, cat and goldfish as protagonists, lend humour to the ads through their witty conversations and cuteness quotient. Through the dynamics between the house dog, cat and Gold fish, Urban Ladder makes furniture shopping seem effortless and fun.

Commenting on the reasons for using the digital medium for this campaign, Nikhil Ramaprakash, VP, Marketing, Urban Ladder clarified, “While the key message of our brand campaign on television is about creating beautiful homes with Urban Ladder products, the digital campaign explains the services we offer to help ease the process of making homes beautiful. We feel this combination of a larger umbrella message on television, and a specific message about our services on digital helps us communicate with users at different touch points.”

When asked about the inspiration for the campaign, Nikhil said it came from the customers themselves, “Over the years, we have received many wonderful pictures and stories from our customers of their pets sprawled on our furniture. That was truly the inspiration behind the campaign. The idea came from our customers and we thought why not do something clutter breaking by using pets as the protagonists.

Using animals especially companion animals for marketing is not new for brands. The Basset Hound in the Hush Puppies commercial, the Beagle in the Viber ad, the Pug in the Vodafone commercial are just some of the examples that come to mind where animals were used to catch consumer attention. The ‘Best Buds’ advertising for SuperBowl 2015 by Budweiser is known to have gone viral taking viewers through a gamut of emotions.

While animals may get their own appeal to a commercial, it is how effectively they are used in it, that matters the most. The idea for this campaign was conceptualised in-house, scripted and executed by Circus Elephants (A Division of MMSPL). The campaign went live on social media earlier this month. As Nandini Pai Bhat, AVP, Brand Solutions, Circus Elephants says, “The overall objective of the campaign was to educate and engage the brand’s growing customer base to purchase furniture from Urban Ladder with confidence and implicit trust.”

Evoking confidence and implicit trust in consumers today seems to be the hardest task for brands with a host of competitors vying for their time and attention. But as Urban Ladder’s campaign suggests, clarity in communication coupled with humour and animals could become a winning tactic. “We had to make sure that the salient brand values were effortlessly highlighted in the pets’ conversation keeping the overall aesthetic witty and casual. That was our biggest challenge,” adds Nandini.

All’s well that ends well. The 4 ads of the campaign have managed to send out the right message about the various services on offer for Urban Ladder.

View the videos here: