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Neurobion Forte Champions India's Unsung Heroes in #HelpingTrueHeroes
Neurobion Forte's #HelpingTrueHeroes is a 2017 Indian healthcare campaign created by WATConsult for Merck's Neurobion Forte in partnership with TheBetterIndia, profiling four ordinary Indians overcoming personal hardship to serve their communities through a documentary-style film series and a live-streamed felicitation event.
The campaign operates on a straightforward narrative premise. In India, countless individuals endure physical pain and social adversity while quietly contributing to the welfare of those around them. Neurobion Forte, a pharmaceutical brand operating in India's vitamin and nerve-health segment, chose to build its annual #HelpingTrueHeroes initiative around this human truth rather than around product claims or clinical messaging. The 2017 edition surfaced four such individuals: Gazi Jalaluddin, a Kolkata taxi driver who founded informal schools for children in the Sundarbans; Uma Venkatachalam, recognised for her work with underprivileged children; Archana Suresh, a corporate communications specialist engaged in sustained social work; and Damyanti Tanna, whose efforts addressed hunger and poverty in her community. Each protagonist's story was documented in a short film produced in association with TheBetterIndia, described by the campaign as India's leading positive news portal, lending the series an editorial credibility that straightforward brand advertising rarely achieves.
The campaign's mechanics combined digital video distribution with a physical recognition moment. The four heroes were brought together for a formal felicitation event attended by dignitaries, the proceedings of which were broadcast via Facebook Live on 17 July 2017 at 5:00 p.m. IST, as documented in the campaign record. The choice to close with a live event anchored the digital narrative in a tangible act of public honour, reinforcing the brand's positioning as a genuine ally to those who push through pain. Across India, the #HelpingTrueHeroes hashtag served as the unifying identity for the initiative, connecting audience participation with the brand's broader values platform. The campaign was formally published as a professional advertising listing in August 2017 and is catalogued in the Clapboard archive with a score of 63 out of 100.
WATConsult grounded the #HelpingTrueHeroes campaign in a consumer insight rooted in Indian cultural values. The insight is direct: across India, the people who sacrifice most for their families and communities are rarely the ones who receive public recognition. Neurobion Forte, as a nerve-health supplement sold to working adults managing physical discomfort, occupies a category where the product's functional promise — helping people keep going — aligns naturally with stories of perseverance. By choosing to dramatise that alignment through real people rather than actors, WATConsult transformed a pharmaceutical brand into a platform for social acknowledgement.
The strategic partnership with TheBetterIndia was central to this approach. TheBetterIndia operates as a credible editorial voice for positive human-interest stories in India, and its involvement gave the film series a journalistic legitimacy that a brand-produced video series would struggle to achieve independently. This co-branded content model positioned Neurobion Forte not as an advertiser seeking attention but as a facilitator of recognition that the subjects genuinely deserved.
The market context in India reinforced the strategic rationale. India's vitamins market was valued at approximately ₹9,231 crore in 2016, according to laafon.com, with the vitamins segment recording growth of around 11.8% in late 2016 per the same source. In this competitive environment, Neurobion Forte faced established rivals including Becosules, manufactured by Pfizer, and Supradyn, marketed by Bayer, both of which compete directly in India's B-complex and multivitamin segment. Against competitors who rely on conventional health-benefit messaging, Neurobion Forte's decision to invest in long-form human narrative represented a deliberate move to build brand affinity rather than product recall. The annual nature of the #HelpingTrueHeroes initiative further signals a brand building a values-based identity in India over time rather than pursuing a single-campaign spike.
The creative execution of #HelpingTrueHeroes rests on the choice to treat each protagonist's story as a documentary subject rather than a brand ambassador. Each of the four films in the series follows one individual — Gazi Jalaluddin, Uma Venkatachalam, Archana Suresh, and Damyanti Tanna — through their daily lives, capturing the texture of their commitments without the visual grammar of a pharmaceutical advertisement. The result is a film format that sits closer to editorial video journalism, in keeping with TheBetterIndia's established editorial style, than to conventional healthcare brand content produced in India.
Gazi Jalaluddin's film illustrates the approach most clearly. A taxi driver based in Kolkata, Jalaluddin used his earnings and personal time to establish informal educational facilities for children in the Sundarbans, a region where access to schooling is constrained by geography and economic circumstance. The film presents this effort with observational directness, allowing the subject's actions to carry the emotional weight without voiceover advocacy or product integration. This restraint is a deliberate creative decision: the brand appears through association with the act of recognition rather than through the narrative itself.
Production credits for the Gazi Jalaluddin film and the broader #HelpingTrueHeroes campaign series are not publicly documented in available records. What is documented is that the campaign comprised four media assets in film format, as recorded in the campaign listing, and that the felicitation event held on 17 July 2017 was produced for Facebook Live broadcast, requiring a live production infrastructure alongside the pre-produced documentary films. The campaign's visual and editorial identity was shaped jointly by WATConsult's creative direction and TheBetterIndia's content sensibility, producing a coherent aesthetic across all four films that prioritised authenticity over production spectacle.
No independently verified third-party performance audit of the #HelpingTrueHeroes campaign is publicly available. The figures in circulation derive from campaign documentation. According to campaignsoftheworld.com, over four weeks the video series reached more than 34 million people across India and generated more than 15 million views. The same source records more than 73,700 Facebook shares across the campaign's content. These are substantial distribution figures for a branded content series in the Indian digital market in 2017, a period when Facebook remained the dominant social video platform in India before short-form video competitors achieved their current scale.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on several compounding factors. The partnership with TheBetterIndia extended the content's organic reach into an audience that actively seeks positive human-interest narratives, reducing reliance on paid amplification to achieve distribution. The Facebook Live felicitation event on 17 July 2017 created a real-time engagement moment that transformed passive viewers into participants in a shared act of recognition. The hashtag #HelpingTrueHeroes provided a durable identity that connected audience conversation to the brand across platforms.
The Clapboard Score for the Gazi Jalaluddin entry within the #HelpingTrueHeroes campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its narrative strategy with competence and cultural relevance while remaining constrained by the inherent limitations of co-branded content: the brand's direct role is subordinated to the human story, which serves emotional goals but can dilute product-level recall. Within India's pharmaceutical advertising landscape, where regulatory frameworks limit the nature of health claims that can be made in mass media, the values-platform approach represents a structurally sound alternative that prioritises long-term brand equity over immediate conversion.
Gazi Jalaluddin is a Kolkata taxi driver who founded informal schools for children in the Sundarbans. He was profiled in one of four documentary-style films produced by WATConsult and TheBetterIndia for Merck's Neurobion Forte as part of the 2017 #HelpingTrueHeroes initiative in India, which recognised unsung community contributors.
#HelpingTrueHeroes was a 2017 Indian healthcare campaign created by WATConsult for Merck's Neurobion Forte. It profiled four ordinary Indians through documentary films made with TheBetterIndia and culminated in a live felicitation event broadcast on Facebook Live on 17 July 2017, reaching audiences across India.
WATConsult created the #HelpingTrueHeroes campaign for Merck's Neurobion Forte. The agency worked in partnership with TheBetterIndia, India's positive news portal, to produce the four documentary-style films and organise the felicitation event that was livestreamed on Facebook on 17 July 2017.
According to campaignsoftheworld.com, the campaign reached more than 34 million people across India over four weeks and generated more than 15 million views. The campaign also recorded more than 73,700 Facebook shares, making it one of the more widely distributed Indian pharmaceutical brand content campaigns of 2017.
The four individuals featured were Gazi Jalaluddin, Uma Venkatachalam, Archana Suresh, and Damyanti Tanna. Each was profiled in a separate documentary film produced in association with TheBetterIndia and was subsequently felicitated at a live event in India on 17 July 2017, as documented in the campaign record.
The Clapboard Score for the Gazi Jalaluddin entry within the #HelpingTrueHeroes campaign is 63 out of 100. This reflects competent narrative execution and strong cultural alignment with Indian values, while acknowledging that the brand's presence is secondary to the human story, which may limit direct product recall.
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