Royal Stag has announced Indian fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah as their Brand Ambassador. Riding high on his excellent performance in the ICC Cricket World Cup and in the recently held West Indies tour, Bumrah is an embodiment of talent and extraordinary potential fits in well with the philosophy of the brand.Cricket has always been an essential part of Royal Stag’s marketing mix.
On the side lines of this announcement, Medianews4u.com caught up with Ishwindar Singh, General Manager – Marketing, Pernod Ricard India for a brief chat on their new association with the speedster and a lot more.
Read on.
How would you define the brand Royal Stag? If you had to describe it in say less than hundred words?
Dream and Achieve.
It’s as simple as that. It’s an iconic brand, which basically inspires people to dream large, to work hard, achieve and make it large in their lives.
How would you define the relationship of the brand with cricket? How has the sport contributed to the success of the brand?
I think, very early in the brand’s growth cycle we had identified that cricket and Bollywood are two passion points of the Indian consumer. 2000 is when we did our first cricketing campaign with Truly World Classwe started with Brett Lee, we started with Courtney Walsh and that was our first campaign which we started with.
We started with Truly World Class and in 2005 we moved to Make It Large, and in make it large, is when we really exploded with a lot of characters, because we found that cricket was a beautiful game, which embodies consumers especially youngsters dreaming about making it large, and working hard and actually day in day out living the philosophy of making it large.
We’ve been proud of our association with cricket and as cricket has grown so has our brand, and it’s been a very good partnership with cricket. In fact, last year, we took it up a notch higher and we tied up with ICC for 5 years. We’re very proud of that association too because we realize that cricket is a very important and very critical part of our marketing mix.
You explained as to why cricket is very important. But was there any other sport that you were looking at before you signed on cricket and you decided that cricket is the sport that’s going to give you the association and help the brand take it to the next level?
We would have evaluated other sports too, I wasn’t there back then, but I think we also realized that very quickly and very early that cricket is a religion in India and is not just a sport. If you really have to penetrate to the youngsters of the country today and people who believe in making it large, you would have to do it through cricket.Have we looked at other sports? Have we evaluated other sports from time to time? Yes, we have. But we believe that cricket and Bollywood still remain the two big passion points for consumers in the country today.
How has the positioning Make It Large helped the brand? Do you feel any other tagline would have positioned the brand better?
Brand positioning is a continuous process of improvement. And you do understand that very well. We started with, truly world class as the first positioning; it’s your life make it large came out in 2005. It’s the success of the campaign that for the last 14 years, the brand positioning has remained unchanged. Why? Because it has helped us drive our growth very, very aggressively. It’s something which is resonating very strongly with the consumers and it’s a great positioning place.Could there be other platforms, they potentially could. But here is something which is extremely powerful, touches the pulse of an ambitious India.
And we’ve seen success. So we’re very proud of this positioning.
Which are the associations that you wish to get to a rub off effect on the brand from Jasprit Bumrah?
Jasprit Bumrah today is an inspiration to millions of people out there, where it doesn’t matter where you start from;starting from a small town and not a metrocity and you work hard, you slog with ambition, you have a dream, you work hard towards that, and you get a chance and then you maximize that opportunity.
He’s a great ambassador of not just the brand, but the philosophy of the brand. And that’s the reason why he can communicate the positioning to consumers that if you dream, and if you have the self-belief, you will achieve it. Even if we communicate that to the consumers, I think it’s a great association. We are a country at the cusp of greatness and it’s this kind of self-belief and this kind of philosophy which will take us to greater heights so Jasprit Bumrah, embodies the new India very clearly.
What else are we going to see as part of the campaign, apart from the TVC?
While we will have a commercialor at which we will start with as the heart of the campaign you will see a lot of legs in digital or which will be a very interesting area into which we getting into a lot more aggressively and rest I would say just look out for the campaign it’s going to be a very interesting campaign, we’ll come and show it to you the minute it’s ready.
