TBWAIndia bags the creative duties of Style Spa

The Chennai wing of the agency has won the business after a multi-agency pitch

The Chennai wing of TBWAIndia has won the creative business for the K K Birla Group’s Style Spa Furniture, manufacturers of ready-to-use furniture. The agency won the account, pegged at an estimated Rs 11 crore, following a multi-agency pitch that included O&M, McCann Erickson and Lowe Lintas.

The incumbent agency is Hakuhodo Percept, which had won the account from RKSwamy/BBDO in early 2004.

TBWAIndia bags the creative duties of Style Spa

A media pitch for the account has also taken place, the results of which will be announced soon, maintain Style Spa officials. The media agencies that participated in this pitch were Lodestar, Mindshare, Lintas Media Group and Allied Media. The latter handled the media duties prior to the pitch.

Chennai-based Style Spa, known as Gautier India until 2003, maintains that a dual-agency approach was one of the necessities for the brand this year, because the company plans to focus on extensive brand-building. Arun Mahajan, managing director, Style Spa comments on the appointment, “Till now, we were busy expanding and consolidating. However, post-Gautier, which had good brand recall, we wanted to stand out in this highly unorganised segment. Now is the right time to emerge as a differentiated brand, as there are no clearly defined leaders and brand names.”

In order to take the brand to the next stage, Mahajan believes TBWA's Disruption practice will help. He adds, “The agency's disruptive thinking and their creative approach will give our brand the necessary thrust to not only consolidate our leadership position, but also exponentially grow our market share.”

He maintains that the brand, whose advertising has traditionally been print-led, will venture into other media, including TV, and have a pan-India presence.

Amarnath, vice-president, TBWAIndia, Chennai, says, “We are delighted to have been assigned this brand. The scope to do some really disruptive work is immense. The team is rearing to go and execute the work we presented during the pitch. It, for sure, is a great way to start the year.”

The furniture category, according to him, has a lot of potential. “The market is crowded with small players and consumers generally tend to have greater affinity towards local carpenters. So, this gives us scope to try out new things.”

He adds that a lot of BTL activities will be executed to push the brand and reach the consumer. At the store level, walk-ins are precious and need to be converted into opportunities.

For the record, Style Spa has more than 90 outlets across the country. The brand foresees a shift in the Indian psyche towards acceptance of ready-to-use furniture, especially amongst the burgeoning upper middle class. Style Spa Furniture started operations 10 years ago and pioneered the concept of ready-to-use furniture in India.

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