Scarecrow Communications wins five Rupa brands

Scarecrow Communications has won the creative mandate for Frontline, Kidline, Euro, Thermocot and Bumchums; the combined media budget for the brands is about Rs 20 crore.

Scarecrow Communications has won the creative mandate for five brands under the Rupa umbrella. These brands include Frontline, Kidline, Euro, Thermocot and Bumchums. The total media budget for these five brands is in the region of Rs 20 crore.

Rajnish Agarwal, president, brand promotion, Rupa & Co has confirmed the development to afaqs!. The win is the result of a pitch process in which the team at Rupa assessed presentations made by several agencies.

Scarecrow Communications wins five Rupa brands

Prior to the pitch call, the Mumbai-headquartered Situations Advertising, was handling Rupa's entire range. Apparently, Scarecrow was asked to make a presentation on the brand Frontline, after which the agency was awarded the mandate for all five brands. With this development, Scarecrow will now handle half of Rupa's creative mandate, while the other half of the company's portfolio will continue to lie with Situations Advertising.

The Ahmedabad-based Publicity Parlour is the company's media agency of record.

Commenting on the development, Agarwal says, "We felt the need to engage a new agency that has the urge and capability to deliver something new and dynamic. We feel Scarecrow, with Raghu (Bhat) and Manish (Bhatt) in place, will be able to do justice to this thought of ours."

On plans for the brands won, Manish Bhatt, co-founder and director, Scarecrow Communications, tells afaqs!, "The ATL (above-the-line) medium will surely be used. At the same time, POS (point-of-sale) branding, packaging, and visibility in the cluttered retail space are also very crucial for TOM (top-of-mind) awareness." The ad campaign will break in a month or two, he informs.

The creative duo of Raghu-Manish has worked on innerwear brands in the past and this fact helped them secure this win. During 2004-07, they worked on Hanes and Wonderbra (the brands' launch in India) during their time at McCann Erickson and more recently, in 2008, they crafted the communication for brand VIP at Contract Advertising. Bhatt divulges that communication in the innerwear space needs to be highly clutter breaking and creative, and that the duo looks forward to using its past experience in this category to take its share of Rupa's brands forward.

Addressing the task at hand, Arunava Sengupta, founder director, Scarecrow Communications, says, "I think, from a strategic point of view, brand Rupa gives us a chance to do interesting work as we will work closely with the brand team to not only ward off challenges from local brands, but also take on the international biggies and ensure Rupa's continued dominance."

The agency is now looking to improve the status of the brands without disrupting the current recall value they already possess.

Rupa, a leading knitwear brand in India, has a daily capacity to produce more than seven lakh pieces of finished goods and covers the entire range of knitted garments, from innerwear to casual wear. Known for periodically introducing new varieties under each sub-brand, the company incorporates the latest fabric innovations, cutting-edge production techniques, and advanced design elements to give the finest experience of style and comfort to its consumers.

The company, headquartered in Kolkata, has more than 700 distributors. It boasts a turnover of Rs 530 crore, with a sale of 16.62 crore pieces in 2009-10.

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com