Tata Motors recently roped in soccer heart-throb Lionel Messi for its overall brand association campaign #madeofgreat. Delna Avari, Head - Marketing Communication and Services, Passenger Vehicle Business Unit, Tata Motors tells us about the association with Messi, aimed at adding to the brand’s cool quotient and wooing the next generation of customers
By SAMARPITA BANERJEE
Tata Motors has done something it never did earlier. The brand that is one of the largest automobile companies in the country has come up with an overall brand association campaign - #madeofgreat- to endorse its Passenger Vehicles in India and globally. To add zing to the campaign, it has roped in soccer hero and four-time FIFA Best Player of the World Lionel Messi as its brand ambassador, incidentally the player’s first endorsement of any Indian brand.
The message that the brand is trying to convey with the campaign is simple – ‘What drives us from within is what makes us great’. The aim of this brand transformation is to simply pitch Tata Motors products as being trustworthy, pioneering and at the same time having a cool quotient. The idea of the campaign came about after a lot of analysis and research revealed that the brand did not exist for the younger audiences, who did not have a direct understanding of what the brand stood for.
“Since then, it became important for us to crystallize what we stood for,” says Delna Avari, Head - Marketing Communication and Services, Passenger Vehicle Business Unit, Tata Motors. “For any brand to be effective, a lot of attributes need to be anchored in reality and that reality for us came from the first two pillars we have gone ahead to crystallize – trustworthiness and pioneering. Tata Motors, as a brand, has always shown these two qualities in the past – be it our products, first SUV, the first indigenously developed car, the lowest cost car in the world or more recently our launch of petrol engine with multi-drive for the mass segment or the first diesel AMT in the compact sedan category. The third pillar, adding the ‘cool’ to the brand was tricky because we wanted our brand to have that coolness quotient.”
The need for associating with a global brand ambassador also had other reasons. Talking about the brand’s fascination with ‘cool’, Avari says, “Why to choose the word cool at all when defining a heavy brand? ‘Cool’ is anything that makes me feel good about myself. But more importantly, it is something that makes my peer group want to associate with me. It became extremely important to define what we wanted to stand for, for the next generation of customers who today do not consider the Tata Motors brand. When you decide that you want to be something that you currently lack, the journey for a brand can take a lot more time. The way to hasten this process is to have an association because a brand ambassador brings his or her own values to your brand as well and if there is a good match - which we have with Lionel Messi - it reduces the amount of time you take to make the transition from where you are to where you want to go.”
Lionel Messi as the brand ambassador also made sense because football is being watched and liked by an increasing number of youngsters. Messi is today one of the highest paid footballers and one of the most loved. “When we defined our brand values of trustworthy, pioneering and cool and started scanning for a relevant brand ambassador, we started putting all our filters. But we realized that there are very few people who actually qualify. In India, we have seen that the less-than-35 audience feels that football is the new cool. While Bollywood and cricket will continue to be the mainstay for the foreseeable future, the growing trend is all about football. A lot of heroes for the younger generation are in the football space. When we ran the numbers, Lionel was way ahead of the others.”
The campaign has been rolled out across TV, Radio, Print, Digital and OOH. Commenting on the importance of using all mediums to promote the campaign, Avari adds, “The days when media worked in silos is gone. You can no longer say that a particular campaign is specifically for TV, Print, Radio or Outdoor. Today, every medium is feeding off each other and when it comes to cars, experience of BTL has been an important part.”
The campaign follows Tata Motors’ Horizonext strategy that was all about its internal transformation of the organization. As per the strategy, the company had laid out a plan to launch two new products every year until 2020. Horizonext was kick-started with the launch of Zest and Bolt.
On the brand’s overall marketing strategy for the next few years, Avari says, “It is going to be about continuing to connect with our target audience where they are talking in a language they are comfortable with. Today, it is more and more about almost creating your marketing strategy for one person. Increasing emphasis will be given on analytics, on understanding the customer, on understanding our audience and taking them through the journey. I am very clear about the fact that everything we do needs to be defined as a Return on Investment (RoI). The strategy will be for the target audience, catch them where they are, in a language they are comfortable speaking, but with a clear RoI.”
Feedback: samarpita.banerjee@exchange4media.com
