TBWAIndia bags JK White Cement account

In a straight-pitch, TBWAIndia has won the advertising duties of JK White Cement, the white cement brand from JK White.

In fact, TBWAIndia had been actively pursuing JK White Cement and had, in the past, been sharing strategic inputs with the client.

Benny Thomas, vice-president, TBWAIndia said, the agency was recently invited to make a strategic presentation to the client. "The clients must have like what we had to offer because we were subsequently given the business," he says.

Before the account moved, the brand was with the company itself; McCann-Erickson used to handle the account before that.

While the size of the business at this stage is modest, Thomas assures that in the next financial year, the billings would go up to Rs 4 crore.

The task at hand for the agency is to grow the white cement market. Currently, the white cement market is controlled by just two players Birla White and JK White. "The market has been growing at a negligible pace, therefore the challenge is to expand the market by creating reasons for purchase," Thomas explains.

To begin with, the communication will be carried through below-the-line activities. Thomas is quick to point out that more importantly, it is the approach to the communication that is worth understanding.

"What we follow at TBWAIndia and worldwide is a strategic tool called 'Disruption Approach'. The normal practice, in order to understand a market, is to apply the given rules and assumptions, but the Disruption approach, through the exercise of its various tools, looks at finding business solutions in newer ways; placing them in a different perspectives," explains Thomas.

TBWA's Disruption Approach is essentially about breaking with convention and then taking it forward with a vision. So, for an agency working on Disruption Approach, it is essential to identify the conventions that govern the industry, work out how to break or disrupt them, and then create a vision to make the business profitable for the client.

Thomas adds, the interesting part is both the agency and the client work together during the formulation of the communication strategy. "We have something called a Disruption Day, where the client and the agency team discuss and arrive at a strategy through a series of processes." © 2004 agencyfaqs!