Why Canon President & CEO and a stand-up came together to bring a ‘Big Smile’?

Canon India recently launched an interesting and heartwarming digital campaign, titled ‘Big Smile with Canon’, featuring Manabu Yamazaki, President & CEO, Canon India in collaboration with stand-up comedian Anshu Mor. It is a 5-episode campaign and showcases a juxtaposition of stand-up comedy along with corporate ethos, backed by the quirky humour and full of life attitude of both the CEO and the comedian.

Sticking to its tagline ‘Delighting You Always’, Canon takes the audiences through a visual treat as well as a meaningful journey through the campaign with valuable life lessons aligned with wit and humour. Canon, which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year, strongly believes in delighting all its employees, partners and customers and has uphold such values through the campaign. The objective behind the campaign was to build a stronger connect with the younger generation. The viewers get to have fun along with the CEO and the comedian.

In a conversation with Adgully, Manabu Yamazaki, President & CEO, Canon India, said “We strongly abide by our corporate philosophy of ‘Kyosei’, which indicates the spirit of living and working together for the common good” and revealed more about the campaign and Canon’s strategies. Excerpts -

What was the idea behind the campaign ‘Big Smile with Canon’?

With the market landscape evolving immensely post pandemic, there has been a shift in consumer behaviour, especially amongst the millennial audience. At Canon, we have shown utmost agility in the past 2 years by re-strategising our product portfolio and diversifying our consumer base. Hence, it seems natural to re-strategize our communication proposition as well with a well thought through corporate positioning strategy for Canon.

The idea behind launching ‘Big Smile with Canon’ campaign was to build a stronger connect and make the brand relatable to the younger generation of consumers. With ‘Big Smile with Canon’ campaign, we adopted the most innovative and unique approach to engage and strike a chord with our millennial customers. Understanding the growing popularity of comedy as a platform which finds strong resonance with the millennial audience, we decided to leverage this medium to create our campaign. It truly allowed us to position Canon as a young and vibrant brand to the millennials and inspire them on the true value of passion, creativity, and work-life balance, in a humorous way.

Besides engaging with our audience, it is also an endeavour from our side to spread big smiles amongst our employees and community overall by following a 360-degree integrated approach. Considering employees have started coming to work post pandemic, we also ensured that we create a fun filled positive work atmosphere through unique employee engagement activities. Further, with our adopted villages being an extended family to Canon, we also extended this campaign to our communities by bringing big smiles to them through various CSR initiatives.

What is the reason for bringing a comedian and the Canon CEO together for the campaign?

Comedy has emerged as one of the top forms of content that is being consumed by social media audience, especially millennials who resort to such relatable content to de-stress themselves. At Canon, we have our corporate culture known as ‘Big Smile’, which indicates our constant endeavor to spread smiles through our products, services, and community outreach. Hence, we harnessed the power of comedy as a medium to promote our corporate culture and re-invent our brand image by building an intentional connect with the millennial audience.

The last few years have seen the rise of stand-up comedians as artists, online content creators, and influencers that not only attract the millennials, but also draw a large chunk of audience across age groups. Anshu Mor is a well-established comedian who enjoys a massive following with content that resonates with Gen Z and the millennials. Being a former senior business executive himself, he made the best fit in the picture as he understands the corporate ethos that we wanted to speak about. What came together beautifully in the episodes with Anshu was the ideal synergy of discussing mentorship, professional culture, work-life balance, passion, and creativity in a quirky way.

How was the journey of filming the episodes?

It has been a memorable and fun experience for me to work with a talented stand-up comedian like him and try my hands at something new. Through these 5 short episode series of ‘Big Smile with Canon’, I also wanted to share my experience of exploring India, along with understanding more country specific nuances, but in a fun and engaging manner. I think the making of this campaign brought me even closer to the beautiful culture of India.

What are the other marketing activities undertaken by Canon?

At Canon, customer-centricity is the foundation of all we do. Given the exponential rise of the photography and videography culture, we have recently undertaken multiple initiatives with the focus of providing the best of our technology innovation led solutions to every segment of the customers.

To begin with, #FindYourStory, which is a multi-city campaign, is aimed at introducing our latest vlogging must-have for content creators under the EOS R System, called the Canon EOS R10 and empowering the content creator community with focused and specialised workshops to help them conquer the world of creativity.

As an ode to photographers, we also introduced ‘The Kathakaar of Life’ campaign on ‘World Photography Day. The digital campaign celebrates the art of powerful storytelling made possible for photographers using our dynamic offerings under the flagship Canon EOS R System. Rolled-out in nine different languages, it aims to strike an emotional chord with photographers spread across geographies.

Another one is the Cinema Excellence Suite, which is an industry-first experiential concept, showcasing Canon’s extensive range of cinema imaging technology right from EOS R System Mirrorless cameras to Cinema EOS camera’s entire production and post-production workflow experience directly to the cinematographers, DOPs, filmmakers, and production houses. Its unique mobile format allows for seamless movement across cities and was recently flagged off in Hyderabad targeting Tollywood, after its launch and unveil in Bollywood hub, Mumbai.

In line with the category demands and trends, we will continue launching unique and engaging marketing initiatives to further strengthen our connect with the target audience.

How has the consumer behaviour changed in the imaging, optical industry over the last few years?

Over the past few years, the increased usage of social media has led to good demand coming in from content creators, with ‘vlogging’ especially emerging as the most loved format of content creation. With proliferation of digital media, we also see immense scope from Tier 2 and 3 markets, especially from regional content creators. Catering to this demand and strengthen the imaging culture in these regions, we will focus on expanding our distribution network with our latest products such as EOS R7 and EOS R10.

Additionally, the demand for video content equipment has seen a massive increase, owing to the rise in content creation, media streaming platforms, and OTT production houses. This category is expected to grow even further in the coming years, and we aim to meet this growing demand with our line-up of cinema cameras. Keeping the trends in mind, we are working on strengthening our presence into new segments including Education technology, OTT, Preaching and Virtual Reality as we strive to be a one-stop-shop solution for all videography needs.

In the last few years, we have also observed expansion in the professional segment fostered by the growth of wedding photography in Tier 2, 3 and 4 areas. We see this as a growing trend, wherein youngsters have picked up wedding photography because it helps them earn more money and we see them opting for full-frame mirrorless cameras and buying professional gear.

There have been a lot of avenues and industry trends that we have been cultivating and leveraging to drive a stronger brand preference amongst our target customer groups.