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Britannia advertising has its own spur in the competition offered by Parle-G, the topseller still. Biscuits might have been a dull advertising category had it not been for Britannia and its relentless pursuit of 30-second capers that entertain and sell. So it is that Britannia has scored so well with its Good Day commercial featuring cricketers Rahul Dravid and Virendra Sehwag---drawing an analogy between the nut-rich cookie with a syrupy India milk-dessert called 'kheer'. Look at the commercial, and look at it again. Twist your earlobes forward and focus your pupils. There is nothing in it so suggest the influence --- of any sort whatsoever --- of any competitor. And Britannia prides itself in the uniqueness of its offerings. So how does competition come into the picture? Obliquely. For all of Britannia's innovations, the brand must still reconcile itself to the fact that one of its oldest and hardiest competitors is still able to go on TV to thump its chest as the world's topselling biscuit. The competitor is Mumbai-based Parle Biscuits, and the product so advertised is Parle-G, its humble old brand of glucose biscuits. Say what you like about the fun quotient of Britannia's advertising, but anything Indian that can credibly claim to be 'Duniya ka sabse zyada bikne waala...' ('the world's largest selling...') has a certain appeal of confidence to it. The glucose rival's campaign may sound so-gee, how to put it---'plebeian' to the urban sophisticate. But there's a colloquial charm in the very sound of the brand name as it rolls off the tongue in, say, a Churchgate-to-Andheri local train in Mumbai, where Parle is pronounced 'Paar-laa' and 'jee' is a standard suffix that holds varying degrees of reverence.
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