Asia Brand Congress 2008: Brand building in a complex world

In one of the sessions at the Asia Brand Congress 2008, two marketing honchos presented two very different stories of brand building. While one was a highly effervescent youth brand making a late yet successful entry, the other was a very popular regional print player launching a nationwide movement.

When Reliance ADAG decided to enter the Internet space with an email portal and a gaming portal, it had its work cut out for it to grab people’s attention. With most of the Internet savvy population already signed up on one or more email websites and some already hooked onto gaming portals, Zapak Digital Entertainment was entering a category that was more or less cluttered.

Zapak vouches for its marketing mantras. To begin with, it started off with a few viral campaigns, one on the iconic Hindi film, Sholay. Zapak brand mascots Bishnu and Rocket Raja were part of the road shows and movie premieres that were undertaken, and they brought the brand a lot of visibility.

Next on the agenda was innovation and impact. “We caught our target audience unawares with our media strategy,” said Arun Mehra, chief marketing officer, Zapak Digital Entertainment.

To popularize its gaming portal, Zapak branded urinals in malls, multiplexes and public toilets, after airing the related TV commercial across television channels. Staircases and escalators were also branded in malls. Heavy presence on social networking sites, blogs and user generated content ensured that the word was being passed along through viral marketing. Region specific email IDs, an alliance with IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders, and celebrity buzz with actors Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Bipasha Basu created further attraction. Zapak also tied up with Domino’s Pizza to create a pizza called Zapizza.

Rajiv Jaitly, president, marketing and ad sales, Dainik Bhaskar, spoke about the new campaign that the company launched for its brand. Dainik Bhaskar has been a strong regional brand, one of the most read newspapers in the Northern markets. However, there was a need to invigorate the existing brand strategy. Jaitly said there was a need to change the image of the brand across markets and not just in the areas in which it was present.

What led this change was the consumers, he said. “There is frenzy outside, with the consumer being targeted at every touch point. The retail phenomenon, mobiles, multiplexes, the social responsibility phenomenon, DTH, the FM revolution, all have left little scope for the print media,” he explained.

Faced with the task of repositioning Brand Dainik Bhaskar, the company gauged the category and the changing scenario and created a proposition: “We decided to position ourselves as the drivers of emergence, since we have tapped the emerging markets.”

“We wanted to bring alive our brand attribute – that of being an ambitious go-getter brand – in our positioning,” he said.

Thus was born the brand campaign, ‘Zidd Karo Duniya Badlo’, with cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni as the brand ambassador, which was the brand’s first ever national campaign. The campaign was relayed across print, OOH, radio, cinema, Internet and television.

The Asia Brand Congress 2008 was presented by Times Now. Reliance Consumer Finance and Airtel were the sponsors of the event.