Good morning all of you. I know it's hard to get going this morning, so I've got lots of videos in my 30 minutes for breaks. Let me get started with what Anurag started with, the book 'Same as Ever'. I said I'm going to take an anti-house view: digital marketing is a tool, but insights build brands. The core is insights. Strategy is about making choices. Five years back we defined our brand purpose based on an insight: people want expression and freedom, a desire to get away from it all. Research wouldn't have shown adventure as a top reason to buy cars, but we bet on it. We defined our brand purpose: 'Life is an adventure, live it boldly while caring for our planet. Our agile, bold, and collaborative people create sophisticated and authentic SUVs with sustainable, innovative technologies that inspire your spirit of freedom.' That became 'adventure ready'. The first product was the Thar. The old Thar sold 4,500 a month; after launch it reached 6,000 a month for the three-door. The insight was enabled by COVID—freedom and exploration became paramount. We launched on August 15, 2020, with a freedom drive. The brand took off. We created a TV campaign leveraging the famous Rajesh Khanna song. The insight: people seek exploration, make it mainstream. We featured a couple in off-road terrain, breaking the stereotype—women now are a large portion of buyers. I met a lady who is a stage 4 cancer survivor; she uses her Thar to get away every three months. That opened a new segment. I'll show you the Thar television commercial and then move on.
So it's impossible. Impossible. Okay. So that was the Thar three door which went on to do very well and as we launched that there were many people who said it would be great if it was a mainstream product with the conventional five doors. By the way, three doors—nobody ever thought in India a vehicle can sell with three doors. When you speak to anyone in the auto space, they will say three door is a no-go. To create a volume 6,000 per month brand with the three door was itself a huge task in market creation. But we had seen the opportunity to create a regular mainstream product which you all know now as Rox. I'm going to come very quickly to the campaign here because I want to spend some time on the electric vehicles that we've launched recently. The insight here was there was huge anticipation from the three door waiting for the five door and we converted that anticipation into the brand idea which was about 'Intezaar' and how the country was waiting for the launch of this. A lot of we've almost got completely off mainstream media. With all our launches, our whole strategy has been to use primarily digital influencers to create the hype and sell out on the day of the launch. That's the strategy: get so many bookings that you don't need mainstream media, which is why you see almost no follow-up campaigns for at least a year or two. The same thing happened with the Thar Rox. So I'll show you the campaign. There were several shorter versions of the teasers which led to this on the launch day which was again 15th August 2024. So we'll take a quick look at the Tar Rox.
So we actually launched the Rox in a rock concert where we had Faran Akar on 15th August last year. And the car got revealed in the same way that you saw here with the vehicle dropping from the top and coming on stage just at the end of the rock concert. So we connected the idea of Rox in the whole way we build up the marketing. This was what you saw was a culmination of multiple teasers in multiple languages. But the whole buildup happened digitally and led to huge anticipation around the event which happened on 15th August. So I'm just going to take a quick second on the way we defined brand architecture as we were coming to electric. So we kind of said 'Explore the impossible' is what our ICE brands will stand for, and we said we need to move into a new identity for electric and that is 'Unlimit'. BE is the new brand we're creating. XEV is a carryover of the XUV. So I'm now going to talk a little about the lead-in to the launch that we did last year in November. So we were around September, two three months from when we wanted to reveal the two electric vehicles. The mood was we were just off the Thar Rox launch which had huge hype, and right after that we saw huge negative sentiment around EVs. The whole media narrative was moving into hybrid versus EV, and there was a lot of 'will EVs really anyone want EVs'. That was the mood. We did a workshop with all the bright marketing and creative people on what can we do to recreate the hype of Rox. That seemed like an impossible mission at that time. Nobody in the country really wanted to look for EVs, and we had a lot riding on these two products. Then we came up with this idea, and that's where insights come in. There's no research going to tell you this, but just 20 people in a room saying 'what creates hype in the country?' and what we came up with was: anytime India wins on the world stage, there's hype. India won a World Cup in 1983, we just won the T20 World Cup a year back, there was no space on Marine Drive. Neeraj Chopra throws a javelin, a sport which nobody follows, the country stays up in the middle of the night to watch. So anytime India wins on the world stage, it creates news and hype. So we positioned our whole launch event not around the launch of two EVs but as an India event, and it came to be called 'Unlimit'. So the whole idea was about India takes on the best in the world and was not about Mahindra launches two electric vehicles. The whole buildup led into getting the country to watch the reveal of the two Indian icons which are going to take on the world on the 26th of November. I will show you a video which captures everything that happened from 26th November till the auto show in January. But before that I'll quickly show you the two commercials that we made. The whole strategy here was around lifestyle, and that was the insight: we don't want to sell economy or sustainability because the country is not really ready to buy on sustainability. We want to sell the benefits of the lifestyle: tech, looks. Anurag spoke about design. All of that went into creating a very aspirational product portfolio. So two lifestyle commercials for the two products and then I'll talk for a minute and show you the summary of the whole three stages of the launch.
Can we have the TV ads? Cool. Could you go to the next? Oh, unlimited love, XV9E, Mahindra electric origin SUVs.
So I'll show you some data on the digital viewership at the end, but first a quick 2-minute video capturing the journey: the launch event on 26th evening with reveal, then on 27th November we compared our cars to two top luxury brands at 2.5x price, tested by a neutral agency. Let's take a look.
So really the message here is: marketers, we've got to think idea and content first, everything else follows. If you try to think of the means before the idea, you're probably not going to get anywhere. I'll share the kind of reach we created mainly through digital, but I'm not going to read each one out because time is up. Thank you everyone for your attention. Summary: focus on the big idea which comes out of insights, and go with your conviction. Make the right choices. Thank you.
