You may or may not love luxury lawn but living in Pakistan, you can’t ignore it. It resiliently dominates the landscape, sending jigsaw puzzles of florals and geometric prints across your line of vision until you’re driven dizzy. If you live in Karachi, you’re currently exempted from lawn sirens staring enticingly at you from billboards dotted all about the skyline. Regardless, the onslaught of three, four and five-pieces is unrelenting, taking over radio, television, digital media and of course, billboards in cities less fortunate than Karachi.
However, despite the consistent advertising, lawn marketing is often forgettable, following a predictable format: a silk dupatta flutters in the air held by a svelte model. She is ideally fair-skinned and is often preening away in the last places you’d expect to see luxury lawn. She’ll be the overdressed lady with the scantily-clad women at a beach in Thailand, she’ll choose to wear expensive designer shades while balancing on a camel in the Thar desert, she’ll insensibly stare into the distance while standing dangerously close to the railway tracks in Vietnam or she’ll teeter on high, high heels on the cobbled roads of Spain, Italy, Monaco or Croatia.
This imagery has been carefully conceived, is supposed to exude luxury and has cost a considerable sum of money. Should the lawn brand be interested in extending its marketing budget even further, a star or starlet can be hired to be the face of the brand. It turns out that this can lead to quite a dilemma.
A more cerebral campaign for lawn makes a mark over glamorous locales
Till last year, lawn moguls could happily search across the border and have a Bollywood actress as their model for the year. Given recent cross-border tensions, though, this is no longer a good idea. Instead, they are left with no choice but to scrounge around into a very small pool of local talent.
Immediately, local actresses with a penchant for item numbers, vampy roles and a predilection for bursting into dance in cars’ backseats have to be vetoed. Inevitably, the local lawn star ends up being an actress who has gained considerable popularity enacting good girl roles, preferably ones in which she gets tortured by her evil in-laws and ultimately emerges victorious. These are the celebs that are wholeheartedly loved by the nation and they reap the benefit of shedding all those on-screen tears by earning big bucks with lucrative lawn deals.