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| Edited By: Collin Furtado |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 22, 2018, 04:29 AM IST
Tata Motors on Wednesday launched its latest car—Hexa—the first in the premium crossover segment. The SUV is the latest offering from the Tata Motors stable after the launch of Tiago in April last year. It is primarily going to take on the likes of the Toyota Innova Crysta and the Mahindra XUV500.
The company is known to create offbeat strategies for its marketing campaigns during the launch of its cars. For instance, for the launch campaign of Tata Zest, the company attached a key with the print ad on leading publications. This key could be taken to showrooms and people could get a free test drive. Even for Tiago’s launch campaign they had attached cardboard virtual reality (VR) headset to the print ads in newspapers which gave people a VR display of driving the car.
Vivek Srivatsa, head of marketing, passenger vehicle business unit, Tata Motors, spoke to Collin Furtado on what new is in store for the Tata Hexa campaign.
HEXA is a lifestyle SUV and our objective is to enable our customers to experience the breadth of the vehicles’ capabilities. Hence, marketing for HEXA has been focused on experiential and engagement. We began our activities even before the vehicle was commercially launched; and we kicked off with our first activity as early as October 2016; three months before launch. In a nutshell, our activities included - 1) Driving in Jaipur and engaging over 75 CEOs to experience Hexa in a specially designed experiential zone 2) Association with Rock On 2—to present Hexa as the drive of the new generation—where the star cast of the movie jammed to a leading song in Hexa. 3) For building on our customer engagement initiatives, we launched Hexa Experience Centres across 5 cities. in India; these centres were designed for customers to get a first hand experience of HEXA’s prowess on and off road 4) Influencer program: an initiative where we allowed a select set of people from different walks of life to live with Hexa for a few days and share their drive and the short ownership experience. We are delighted to share that Hexa has been complemented and appreciated for its drive, comfort, infotainment and the overall feel of luxury.
Print is an important part of our marketing mix. For Hexa, we utilised a large format print insertion immediately after the commercial launch to drive awareness. This added to the overall positioning of the car as a lifestyle SUV.
Today, to effectively communicate a certain message to the audience, we need to leverage the interconnection of all mediums. TV, print, stills, digital, mobile, augmented reality, virtual reality and various other mediums are all feeding off each other and do not exist in isolation. All the mediums that we have worked with have a different strategy, be it print, digital or mobile. Experiential marketing is another important leg that we are focusing on as we believe that on-ground activities create great impressions on people’s mind.
We do not share break-up of our spends. However, for Hexa we spent a higher share on experiential and engagement activities.
Hexa is available on sales across the country and hence, our launch campaign is focused on pan-India.
We are targeting a far younger set of buyers for who have an active lifestyle and have a set of varied demands from their vehicle. From an easy to drive and comfortable car within the city to a safe and powerful vehicle for long drives with family during vacations, Hexa will more than satisfy every need of its demanding customer.
