MUMBAI: It is the second year of association between Tata Motors and the Indian Premier League (IPL), and the former is pretty positive that the season is going to help it in boosting the recognisability of its new launch, ‘Harrier’. This premium flagship SUV from the Tata Motors’ portfolio was announced as the official partner of the game recently.
Talking to Indiantelevision.com at the event, Tata Motors head – marketing, passenger vehicles business unit Vivek Srivatsa shared that it is extremely difficult to get a wider penetration into a diverse country like India, especially in the smaller towns but platforms like cricket play a great role in taking the brands to each household. He said, “What we found very endearing and attractive about IPL is how it has a national fervour as well as a regional flavour. Thanks to the broadcaster Star’s initiative, it has got transmission in all the four Southern languages, Marathi, and Bengali as well. I think it has allowed us to go very deep into and achieve a great level of relevant reach. It also creates good awareness and this it has helped the brand really well.”
He added, “We have already got good momentum and with IPL we would like to take it even further. With Harrier, fortunately, the customer response has been extremely strong since its launch in December. With IPL, we want to only improve it.”
Definitely, IPL has a strong viewership and it draws a lot of interest from each section of the society. Thereby, Tata Motors has a strong planning perspective as to how to leverage this platform in the best manner possible. For Srivatsa, digital is at the core of each marketing strategy, “For Harrier, we already have an extremely strong Instagram handle. It already has 25,000 organic followers. Thus, you will see a lot of Instagram activity happening this season.”
He shared, “Digital will provide the backbone for every activity that we do. There is ‘Super Striker’ and then there is ‘Fan Catch’, the two strong properties already established by us in the last season, which we will continue to grow this time as well. With Super Striker, every match has a player who is awarded a very unique award scale model of the car. I see that the players get excited and they go on their own social media handles to celebrate. It has become good content for us. Also, there are almost 400-500 sixes that are hit during the IPL. Now, every time a sixer is hit, people start looking out for who will catch the ball and win the ‘Fan Catch’. For us, this means a brand recall of 600 times during a season.”
Apart from this, Tata Motors is also planning to give the cricket fans an online virtual reality cricket game experience. “This will probably be in our showrooms and a few malls. I have already tested the game and it is fantastic. It feels like playing a real match,” said Srivatsa.
He added that there will also be an online ‘choose your dream team’ kind of championship from last year. Since the IPL trophy tour will be covering two cities-Bengaluru and Delhi, it will also be promoted heavily on digital platforms.
