For more than five decades, Sintex has built a strong association with water storage in India. So strong, in fact, that the brand name is often used casually when people refer to water tanks, even when they may be talking about another brand.
Sintex is now turning that unusual brand recall into the idea behind its latest campaign, “Choose the Original. Choose Sintex.” Conceptualised by Sideways, the campaign takes a simple, familiar consumer behaviour and uses it to remind people of the difference between a category name and the original brand.
When “Tanki” Becomes Synonymous with Sintex
The campaign begins with a familiar question: “What name comes to mind when you think of a black tank on top of a terrace?”
Rather than relying on technical product features, the film builds on something much more powerful: memory. Over the years, Sintex has become so closely associated with water tanks that consumers may use “Sintex” as a generic reference for the category.
The campaign turns this behaviour into a humorous retail moment, eventually landing on its central message: “Choose the Original. Choose Sintex.” The idea is to remind consumers that while several brands now operate in the water-tank category, the name they have traditionally associated with it is Sintex.
The campaign also builds on the brand's familiar proposition,
“Tanki Matlab Sintex,
” which Sintex says has become associated with qualities such as quality, durability and reliability over generations. For Sintex, this creates an interesting brand challenge. Category leadership has made its name incredibly memorable, but that same familiarity can blur the distinction between the original brand and competitors.
Sideways founder Abhijit Avasthi describes the campaign as a response to this challenge, using an everyday retail situation rather than a loud product claim to remind consumers to ask for the original. The campaign therefore works less like a conventional product advertisement and more like a brand recall exercise. It takes something consumers already know and turns it into a reason to choose Sintex at the point of purchase.
With “Choose the Original. Choose Sintex,” the brand is using its biggest asset, its name, to reinforce a simple message: when a brand has become synonymous with a category, the next job is to remind consumers that the original name still matters.