Maruti Suzuki has rolled out a campaign ‘Find Your Match’ for its young buyers on the sixth anniversary of its retail channel ARENA.
exchange4media caught up with Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Officer, Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki, who shared the idea behind the campaign and how this time the marketing budget is close to around Rs 1,000 crore, 15% up from last year.
Tell us about the campaign ‘Find Your Match’. How was it conceived?
We have launched this campaign on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of ARENA channel which is the number one channel in the automotive space. We have reached over 7 million people in six years and add 1 million every year. The rate is one lakh a month. India has a growing economy and a lot of young buyers come into the buying space every year. ARENA is normally the place where younger people buy their first cars. So we thought we’ll have a campaign not just for the product but the entire channel with ‘Find Your Match’.
It is based on the research on what the buyers are really looking for when buying a car. It is not just about buying functionality that is transportation but also their lifestyle and aspirations. Cars enable them to socialise and it is also a status symbol in Indian context. Consumers have a relationship with their first car and we wanted to give them the good experience of buying the car through ARENA. It meets different requirements.”
What will be the marketing strategy for the campaign and the media mix?
We have realised that it has to be vernacular. Young buyers are consuming a lot of vernacular content. On TV and OTT, it is GEC that we are focusing on. For digital, we are spending almost 30 % of our overall spends. For ARENA anniversary we have especially used influencers.
What are the plans for the festive season? Will the marketing be any different from last time?
We are looking at vernacular in a big way. We’ll have 12 festive films in vernacular which we will run on GECs, OTT space and digital too. We ran one film in Malayalam during Onam. We have a whole calendar line-up with Navratra, Durga Puja, Dussehra, Diwali, Christmas, Lohri etc. We have 12 such films which we will run in the next few months largely in the TV/OTT space and digital as well.
What will be the marketing budget this time ?
We have the World Cup also this time so we will be rolling our campaigns there too. The budget has increased by 15 % over the last year. The annual budget for the marketing campaigns this year is close to about Rs 1000 crore.