Classmate urges students to focus on individual ambitions, not peer pressure

Classmate, India’s largest Notebook brand, has launched a new campaign ‘Be Better than Yourself’, which focuses on today’s school-going generation and aims to challenge the long-standing and widely held social assumptions on the nature of “competition” in academics.

In this competitive world, I Classmate shows a heart-warming way to tackle exam pressure with a reminder that the goal is not to be better than anyone else but to improve one’s own past performances. In its new campaign marking the exam season, Classmate encourages students to chase their own milestones instead of being trapped in the constant pressure of performing better than others.

Speaking about the campaign, Mr. Shailendra Tyagi, Divisional Chief Executive, Education and Stationary Products Business, ITC Ltd said, “Classmate has always focused on relevant issues concerning parents and their children. With this campaign, we are trying to boost the confidence of the upcoming generation and reminding them that the rise to the top is a competition with oneself, and a journey with others. Children today are measured by the marks they score or their performance with respect to their peers, while the true measure of success should be continuous self-improvement. We believe that in this regard, it is much more than a marketing campaign – it is a social drive.”

“Brand Classmate has a mandate to take its new philosophy to as many Indian homes and classrooms as possible, and thereby the brand finds purpose in providing a pressure-free, happier environment for our children to grow, and live in,” Mr. Tyagi added

The TV commercial starts with a mother who finds a letter from her daughter in one of her Classmate notebooks. The daughter expresses her guilt over getting low grades in her maths exam and apologizes to her mother with a promise that she will try her best next time to get better grades than her friends. In the letter, the daughter also asks her mother to bake a chocolate cake for her next time if she manages to beat her class-mates in the exam. To her surprise, when the daughter gets back home, she finds the cake on the table, and her mother praises her for improving over her previous marks. “This is for beating yourself, not others,” she says.

Admittedly, it is a concept born from a societal truth. Children, through school and college, are almost always compared with others – their classmates and peers. And in an achievement-oriented society like ours, they are conditioned to perceive their peers as competition.

“Be Better Than Yourself” kicks off a crusade against such a prevailing view, and how it shapes the kids as they grow up. The campaign is designed to encourage a child to chase her or his future self. To set only their personal values and ambitions ahead of the competition; and to be judged only on their own metrics, not anyone else’s.

The brand understands that the achievement of a child’s potential is influenced and shaped by parents, teachers and the academic environment, and hence it reaches out to all stakeholders – particularly parents and children – with the key message. The brand will use TV, Cinema, Outdoor and digital platforms to communicate its message through a 360-degree campaign.