Nitish Bajaj, Vice-President, Marketing CEAT Ltd talks to us about their latest ‘Our Grip Your Story’ campaign and how the brand will stick to keeping ‘safety’ as the foundation of their marketing strategy in the near future
By SAMARPITA BANERJEE
Q] Tell us about CEAT’s latest My Grip Your Story campaign.
Our latest campaign is a shift from the Irrfan campaign where we had a very mass-audience message, an audience that resorts to various things like a ‘nimbu-mirchi’ or a ‘nazar battu’ on the cars. It wasn’t really talking to an SUV audience that likes to explore the world. If you speak to an SUV owner, he will tell you he bought the SUV to explore the world. He may not do it 90% of the time. But his stories, his blogs, his writings are all about that. So while it is 10% of his time share, it’s the 90% of his mind share. And that’s where the insight of exploring the world in the SUV and a tyre helping you to explore the world came from. We added the element of child to it because a father in this audience would also want the child to be initiated to this kind of experience. We picked up that insight, called one of the fathers in our research who talked about him going out with the child, and that’s how we came up wuth the idea. When you look at how the child describes his journey, it may be a routine thing for a dad because he likes to explore, but in such an exploration journey, a child adds a lot of imagination and that’s how this entire campaign came about. It was about a child adding a lot of imagination to his journey. So it’s a mix of an imaginary world coming out of a child and a real world where actually an SUV and a good tyre lets you explore.
Q] From the ‘Be idiot safe’ campaign to the ‘Nimbu-mirch’ and monsoon smart campaigns, safety seems to be the foundation of your marketing message. Is there going to be a change in your message moving ahead?
Tyres are not naturally associated with safety in a customer’s mind. They usually associate it with an air bag, the overall vehicle and its stability. But when it comes to two-wheelers, clearly tyres are one of the key pivots on which they associate safety and can clearly verbalize it as grip of the tyre. That was out starting point where we said our tyres give better grip and hence are a safer driving experience. But when it comes to passenger cars, it’s not purely about grip, it’s also about control which is the way we drive and the way we maintain our tyres. So it’s not a direct message. But by making it core to our audience, we are communicating that our tyres are designed to be safer and also make sure that passengers have better control and grip on their driving. Secondly, by staying put on this core area, we are also making sure that our brand stands out in this frame. We do not foresee changing it. In fact, all our product investments and enhancements are also making sure that our tyres have best-in-class grip and are safer versus other tyres.
Q] What is your media mix for your campaigns?
Our investments have been focused dominantly behind TV in the past. Going forward, the mix is going to shift to TV and digital. We will continue to invest big on TV and also invest a lot in the digital frame as our audience is gradually shifting to that as a strong medium of usage and it is a strong touch point for us from a consumer connect point of view.
Q] What are the benefits of roping in a brand ambassador like Irrfan Khan?
Irfan Khan was not necessarily a choice for us because of his Bollywood association. The Irrfan campaign was all about breaking myths around beliefs on what will keep us safe on roads. And Irrfan Khan is actually a genuine character who comes out and calls a spade a spade. So his entire aura, perception, imagery in the minds of our target audience was well suited for us to communicate the message. And that’s why he was chosen. Clearly he brought in a lot of benefit. The ad was distinctive and the brand recall really went up. The message and story recall also was very strong, and our business really gained in strong double digits. We had growth and our market share stood out quite well in the passenger segment after the campaign. Having said that, every campaign has a life of its own, so we are now getting into the next phase with the new campaign where we say how to make the brand more contemporary, more premium, and hence more relevant to the emerging audience in the SUV space.
Q] When there was volatility in the truck tyre business, you turned to the two wheeler segment and came up with a tyre the design of which looked like a rope set on tread. Walk us through the process and then and how you effected the shift in strategy.
The shift was done around 2010-11, which was not very profitable time for the tyre industry. But when we looked at our business and dissected it, we found that profitability was much better in the passenger segments than the commercial segments which were more competitive and also more price sensitive. We took a call to put more investments behind the passenger business and that’s was the genesis of investments on 2-wheeler and also in the passenger car, especially in the SUV segment. That was a transition call we took in 2010 and since then the journey has been quite good for CEAT. By focussing on these categories, we got the entire business organization, sales function, marketing function and all the optimization focus was behind the key priority, the passenger segment.
Q] CEAT has a three-year strategic timeout sponsorship with the BCCI for IPL since last year. What led the decision to go with this and is there enough room for innovation in this space?
We felt strategic time-out is a great fit because it gives you a presence on TV and it is an active association unlike a TV branding. In a way, there is a break where the viewer is heavily engaged into watching the IPL and then comes a break. In a way it’s a clear standout association which consumer gets to see and also gets to experience the brand at that point of time. Typically for IPL we are also active with our advertising. The campaign which was on air at that point of time was of our tubeless campaign on motorcycles following which we had good gains in our sales.
Q] What is your overall marketing strategy for the next few years?
Our investment has been focused around passenger segment but if you look at overall category of tyres, the dominant business still lies with the commercial segment, more so with the truck area. We are now also going to enhance our focus on investments on the commercial segment, like trucks. Today, we are a smaller player in the TBR segment which is where the business is shifting in the truck segment. That’s an area we will dial up in times to come, and one possible shift for us but otherwise rest of it being core to the passenger category would remain as it is.
Q] What are you doing in the digital space to connect with your consumer? How are the different initiatives working out in terms of connect and reach?
There are quite a few innovative things. One is our association in the area of safety where we recently tied up with schools. We asked children what safe riding was all about and captured some of their voices. Many of them spoke about incidents where their parents do not practice safety in real life, like parents talking on phone while driving and or not wearing seat-belts. We captured these sound bytes and played their voices back to parents. They were actually quite shocked and moved. And that’s how the idea of ‘Drive Safe’ campaign came about where we capture kids’ voices and communicate the message through radio. Similarly, we initiated a campaign with Party Hard Drivers where we sent congratulatory messages to people who do not drive after drinking and use a driver. We also have quite a few innovations lined up that are a mix of digital and real world in the same space. Another key area of our CSR investment is the truck driver. A lot of truck drivers in India have poor eyesight. So CEAT, under its CSR initiative, runs quite a few eye camps where people with eyesight problems from the trucking community are identified and given treatment which makes roads safer for us. Lastly, RPG, our corporate group is trying to make travelling safer for women at night. Through this initiative, women travelling at night can choose to have women drivers rather than being exposed to risk of drivers who are not verified. So we are also building an association with Priyadarshini cabs where we are training quite a few women drivers and hence making drive around a much safer experience for women along with creating employment opportunities for them.
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