Right to property

Corporates take great pains to create and sustain branded properties even when they don't have a direct impact on sales. Here's why

The Limca Book of Records - India's answer to the international Guinness World Records - was conceived way back in 1986 with the first edition hitting book stores more than two decades ago (in 1990). Brand Limca has seen a change of hands since then (from Parle to Coca-Cola in 1992), as well as some sharp swings of fortune, but its hard-bound property - a 200-page book celebrating record-breaking milestones achieved by Indians, which moved to the new owner along with the mother brand - has come to wield significant clout over the years. According to its editorial team, "the phone never stops ringing" with aspirants hoping to make it to the book with their triumph stories. By connecting the brand's 'Indianness' and its 'refreshment' positioning with the average Indian's penchant for 'refreshing feats', the spin-off property offers mother brand Limca a bigger play in the consumer's mind than its market share would accord.

Why does the Limca Book of Records matter? Simply because marketing isn't getting any easier. In establishing brand associations, marketers face a fundamental challenge: while consumers appreciate the value of brands, in reality they devote very little time and mental effort to thinking about them. So what does a marketer do when faced with an explosion in the number of brands as well as a proliferation of ways to communicate them? How can he elevate awareness of both the company and the products or services it offers, especially if the company operates in an impulse-driven or a boring category in which customer loyalty cannot be taken for granted?

One answer is, build a branded property. Irrespective of the size of his business or marketing budget, by developing unique and memorable properties a marketer can fully leverage the value of his brand building efforts. "Brand properties and events are increasingly gaining ground as a route to brand building. However, there needs to be clarity on the objectives of the association and a strong strategic fit/synergy between the brand values and the property is essential for success," says Atul Chand, divisional chief executive, Lifestyle Retailing, ITC Ltd, which has worked closely with the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) to co-create a property, Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week.

Granted, building properties is a highly complex effort involving huge investments in time and money, but if successful, they help keep the conversation about the company going, even offer the brand the much-coveted top of mind. "A key ingredient is to have a sustained engagement with the branded property,'' adds Chand.

Think Kingfisher Calendar, Fevicol Science Project Challenge, Tata Motors T1 Truck Racing Championship, Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon. None of these are spin-offs of everyday products. But they have all managed to create buzz that has rubbed off on the respective mother brands. And that has been possible because some key elements have fallen in place - namely, a genuine brand-property fit, commitment by the brand owner and painstaking marketing. That said, not every brand that starts off with a flagship asset can hope to gain traction. The task of creating and managing brand properties is intricate and goes deeper than your average sponsorship or co-branded events. "Ultimately, the success of a brand's association with any property is evaluated by how successfully the brand has been able to take the association to its core audiences. And to remain relevant to your audiences, one needs to adopt strategies that allow to maximise reach and engagement with the target audiences," says Chand.

Turn on the hype
In 2003, United Breweries' Kingfisher wanted to up the glamour and style quotients for not just the brand, but also the beer category as a whole. It turned its efforts up a notch with the launch of the Kingfisher Calendar that year - a property now known for its exclusivity, high fashion and exotic locations. Inspired by the Pirelli and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar, the Kingfisher Calendar has become famous for kick-starting the careers of glamour world divas such as Katrina Kaif, Deepika Padukone, Yana Gupta, Nargis Fakhri, Lisa Haydon, among others.

How did the brand achieve this?

The key is exclusivity. The calendar bears no price tag as it is never up for sale. It is circulated only to the limited lot on the chairman Vijay Mallya's mailing list.

Celebrity photographer Atul Kasbekar has been associated with the calendar since inception. The brief to him year after year is to make the calendar more inspiring, aspiring and coveted. It should look sensual without being sleazy.

 

Samar Singh Sheikhawat

To make the calendar a hotter property, a reality show on NDTV Good Times, 'Hunt for the Kingfisher Calendar Supermodel', was launched in 2010. Every month, a commercial on the making of that month's calendar girl is aired on the channel. "When the winners of the hunt go on to work for movies or gain fame in other arenas, the PR about them holds up the brand property as their claim to fame," says Samar Singh Sheikhawat, senior vice-president, marketing, United Breweries.

The TV show isn't all. Pre-launch hype is generated online through a 'countdown for the calendar' exercise. Kingfisher has a tie-up with digital player Hungama to unveil the calendar digitally before its physical launch. The digital marketing also makes way for engagement activities like 'make your own calendar', 'shoot your calendar', screen saver downloads etc. The launch itself is a spectacular song and dance show hosted every year on Kingfisher Chairman Vijay Mallya's birthday (December 18).

All these elements need to work in tandem. "It has to be bigger, better and more premium every year with exotic locations, great looking girls and high production value," says Sheikhawat.

Build on scale
Can a company operating in commercial vehicles hope to own Kingfisher-esque 'oomph'? Possible - or that's what Tata Motors is out to prove. The T1 Prima Truck Racing Championship introduced by the company to create buzz around the 2009-launched Prima range of premium trucks (priced at a 10 per cent premium over other brands) has its roots in the strategic challenges that the medium and heavy commercial vehicle category faced two years back.

The company found that rattled by the protracted economic downturn, second-generation big-fleet owners were looking to de-risk their commercial vehicle (CV) businesses by stepping into other avenues. There was also a 'lack of pride' in being associated with the CV category. With new international brands entering the fray, the company needed a breakthrough marketing initiative. "T1 was born to create something exciting, to bring people from the industry together to inspire the trucking community," says UT Ramprasad, head, marketing communications, commercial vehicle business unit, Tata Motors.

The Buddh International F1 Circuit on the outskirts of Delhi was selected as the venue for the T1 Prima Truck Racing Championship. Internationally acclaimed drivers, with proven track-records in truck racing (the British Truck Racing Championship and European Truck Racing Championship) were invited for the event. The inaugural chapter of the event held earlier this year also included a Harley Davidson show, truck stunts, a truck art show by Manish Arora and even a fashion show.

While the branded property is new, over the next few years, Tata Motors hopes to work with its customers to shortlist Indian drivers for the upcoming races to make truck driving, as a profession, more aspirational.

Leverage consumer loyalty
At times, building a brand property can be all about hitting that sweet spot a brand already shares with its consumers. Take Fevicol, which unveiled the annual Fevicol Science Project Challenge in 2010. The exercise has a three-fold objective: to make arts and crafts more meaningful for students and teachers, to impart modern education in an interactive way, and to increase the number of occasions for consumption of Fevicol.

The primary target audience is students from class 5 to 10 in schools across India, besides their art teachers. "Our field teams personally visit schools and brief the principals, and science and art teachers about the nationwide challenge," says Rahul Sinha, president, sales and marketing, consumer products, art, stationery and fabric, Pidilite Industries.

It works like this: Pidilite's representatives (regional and city level) meet the school administration and share what happened in the previous edition to gain their interest. These teams are outsourced for the activity, and each representative is given a month of education and training. A window of three months is allotted to each representative to reach a certain number of schools. "Fevicol has been in the educational product space for long and has existing relationships with a lot of schools, which was leveraged in this exercise, apart from building relationships with new schools," says Sinha. About 4,000 schools participated in the last edition.

Once a school agrees to participate, the teacher chooses a topic from the brochure provided by Pidilite and asks students to work on the concept. Participating students are divided into two groups: juniors and seniors. In the first leg, there is a school level contest to shortlist candidates, wherein they are asked to prepare models. Pictures of the shortlisted models are taken along with details explaining the concept. These entries are then uploaded on the Fevicol website for review.

Panelists from science and academics backgrounds are chosen by Fevicol to sift through all the entries. Four entries each from the senior and junior groups respectively are shortlisted from a total of eight schools, and the shortlisted teams (comprising three students and a teacher each) are called to Mumbai for a final round. Teams are then given an impromptu topic with a deadline of two days to procure material and execute the model. A panel comprising curators from the Nehru Science Centre in Mumbai judge the eight entries, to identify a winner.

While the teacher in the winning team is given a token gift, the students are awarded trophies, certificates and prizes, including trips to international destinations. In the first edition of the Fevicol event in 2011, 56,000 children from 357 schools participated; in 2012, this number shot up to 1.8 lakh students from 700-plus schools. In 2013, this number stood at 7 lakh kids from close to 2,000 schools. "This initiative strengthens the unconditional bond between the brand and our target group," says Sinha.

For the long haul
Now take the story behind the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon. The bank, which thrives on the philosophy 'Here for Good', wanted to create a property that is a 'race' for the long haul, literally. So 11 years ago it introduced its branded marathons - Standard Chartered has been organising marathons in nine countries for over 16 years - to Mumbai. It faced three challenges initially: convincing local authorities like municipalities, Mumbai Police and the state government to allow for the logistics of the marathon; to get people to participate; and finally, to convince the company's internal stakeholders to put their resources behind the project.

Sumeet Singla

The problem was, the sport did not have mass appeal in India. "We needed concerted efforts to elicit participation and to grow this event into a movement for social change," says Sumeet Singla, regional head, corporate affairs, India and South Asia, Standard Chartered Bank. So in the early days, teams were deployed to go to schools and offices to urge people to register. Registrations, done in-house, were chaotic. Standard Chartered expected 30,000 people to apply in its first year. Only 8,000 applications were received.

A lot has changed since then. Participation has increased manifold and the event itself has become more sophisticated. Take the timing chips. Aspirants are given timing chips to pace their run. There are points on the course and once participants step on it, the timing chip embedded in their running bibs give them the exact duration they have taken to reach that location.

Earlier, the brand advertised heavily before the registrations for the marathon. Today, it needs to advertise only two weeks before the marathon, and the registrations are announced through a press conference. Advertising now relies less on traditional media and more on digital media. For instance, in 2013, Standard Chartered created a social media initiative with 25 Instagramers from Mumbai shooting Mumbaikars' 'reasons to run' the marathon. This was part of its 'Run for a Reason' campaign aimed at taking the Mumbai Marathon beyond the streets and into the hearts of avid runners. The event, since inception, has been broadcast with a live feed on Doordarshan and a private sports channel (for the last few years, that partner has been STAR Sports).

An event like the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon also give other advertisers one more avidly watched property to showcase their products. The company says its brand awareness score is around 70 per cent, thanks to the marathon. The bank also uses this event to promote its banking products - such as its credit and debit cards. Company executives participate and help raise funds for the various sustainability initiatives that the bank supports.

The Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon has helped raise over Rs 109 crore since its inception for non-profit organisations. In 2014, for instance, it generated over Rs 20 crore for charity, benefitting 269 NGOs. The event could be cited a classic example of the key properties of a branded property coming together - a solid idea, marketing scale and use of technology - all of which have contributed to reinforcing Standard Chartered's 'Here for Good' positioning.