It is one of the oldest luggage manufacturer brands in India, but while it has successfully retained its leadership position year on year, VIP Industries Ltd has one perception battle to fight constantly - that it is a brand meant only for the older generation. Sudip Ghose, Vice President, Marketing, VIP Industries Limited, talks about how the company is infusing youthfulness into the 45-year-old brand
Q] What was the insight behind the VIP campaign ‘When you are very important’?
When we were grappling with our problem statement, one of the things we thought we must do is tell people why they should carry a VIP bag, which literally stands for ‘Very Important Person’. So we decided to redefine one of our oldest brand ideas and tell people that if you are important and have to carry important things, use a VIP. And thus came the tagline ‘VIP, when you are very important’.
Q] Tell us about the latest collection you are trying to promote through this campaign.
We have really modernized the product and designs, and reduced the weight of the bags in our Tube collection along with making them scratch-resistant. These are small innovations to make the product look younger. They are priced between Rs 4800 and Rs 8000.
Q] Why did you pick Hrithik Roshan as the brand ambassador for VIP bags as opposed to a fresh face if the idea was to make the product look younger?
VIP as a brand is more than 40 years old. There are positives and negatives for any brand which has been standing the test of time for so many years. The positive being it’s trustworthy, and will be there with you forever. The hindsight is that it’s not a young and sexy brand, and not for today’s generation. Therefore, we felt the need to rejuvenate ourselves at least once every decade. Thankfully, brands can become younger unlike us human beings. We needed somebody who brings in the values which have been lacking in VIP purely because it’s a strong timeless brand. And those values were sexy, sophisticated, international, the sexier side of macho and not just the tougher side. Hrithik Roshan fitted the bill to the T. Also, VIP being a brand with a heritage, I couldn’t have taken someone very new. It would have been a misfit. We needed somebody who like the brand has stood the test of time.
Q] What is the marketing mix for this campaign, and what medium is the focus of your ad spends?
VIP is a very television-heavy company. We love television and television loves us, so the bulk of the spends are on TV. However, television has its own limitations. India is a one TV household even today, the younger generation doesn’t get hold of the remote too often. Most of them are always on their phones and laptops. It’s very important for us to get the younger audience to embrace our products because we are trying to make brand VIP younger. So the digital medium which has a high reach becomes important, fortunately it is not that expensive. We have got Hrithik to tweet about the campaign, some well known bloggers to write on it and are in the process of releasing a longer ad on the digital medium. We are quite bullish about it. We are also targeting Print and Cinema and have dedicated 20% of our marketing budget for this campaign alone.
Q] How does having a brand ambassador across all the big categories help a company which is already the Number 1 luggage brand in India?
We have six brands which need to be segmented properly so that they don’t eat into each other’s consumers. And the best way to do that is to get a celebrity, because then the brand has a face. Skybags is a peppy, young, ‘don’t-give-a-damn-attitude’ brand. We needed a celebrity to match that kind of an attitude and not someone serious who wouldn’t go with the brand. Varun Dhawan who endorses Skybags has a personality of a young, carefree college-going guy, while Hrithik is more mature and fits a mature brand like VIP. Our other brand ambassador Alia is a young, happening girl. Every female consumer of ours would like to emulate her. It’s not just because we love our movies, which we do, but because when budget is limited, celebrities work best. It reaches out to the audience better than communication without a celebrity. This ad without a celebrity would still have been great, but not as much as it is now.
Q] VIP is known as a mass brand, are you going elitist with the tagline ‘When you are very important’?
Anybody who feels that he is important needs our brand. Therefore we are still going to be the mass premium brand. It has got nothing to do with trying to be elite, it is just about attempting to bring the basics back to the brand.
Q] VIP traditionally is known to do well in the under Rs 10,000 category, how is the company doing as far as the premium category is concerned?
We have a brand called Carlton to address that category and it is growing at the rate of 35% every year. We are very happy with it. We have some plans to grow that segment further this year.
Q] While your market-share is more than 50%, it has gone down from around 70% in the early 2000s, how would you explain the drop?
See 70% market-share is unheard of in any space and can only happen when there is no competition. Even Apple won’t have that kind of market-share with active competition. In the early 2000s, we were the only brand in the luggage space. With competition very strong today, even 50% is unrealistic but we still manage to hold on to that and in fact can grow it by over a couple of business points to perhaps 60%. We are probably the only country where our competitor, Samsonite, which happens to be world’s Number 1 luggage brand, is placed second. We are very proud of it and have not allowed the largeness of the brand to take over yet. With great products, communication and pricing strategy, we are able to keep the world leader, Samsonite, behind us without much effort.
Q] You have a huge umbrella of products; what is the strategy for each and how differently do you target urban and rural audiences?
While there is no syndicated data, very roughly Caprese the handbags brand endorsed by Alia has around 20% market-share in the category. In the span of about three-and-a-half years, in most of the departmental stores and e-commerce portals, we are either Number 1 or 2. We are being a little bullish and wondering if we can turn Caprese from a handbag brand to a lifestyle brand. Skybags which is a young and not-so-expensive brand would be around 15-20% while VIP, targeted at the metros, would be around 20-30%. And two of our other brands in the lower price category – Alfa and Aristocrat -- along with our premium brand Carlton, would be about 5-8%. We have channel specific and region specific brands. It helps us to spread the business much better. We launch a new collection every quarter, a brand at a time so as not to cannibalize our other brands. At the end of the day, there are a lot of consumers who do not know that Skybags or Carlton is from VIP, and we want to keep it that way. There are times when VIP brand brings to mind positive things and there are times when it has limited influence on the particular category of consumers. So we treat each brand as an individual and not as part of a great family.
@ FEEDBACK
neeta.nair@exchange4media.com
