Why is it my best campaign?
You are only as good as your last job. Doing Honda’s first corporate film in India was a mammoth task and I remember praying to god for his able guidance. As we geared up to do the job, I instantly recalled my trip to Honda Collection Hall in Tokyo three years ago. The sprawling museum showcases the legacy of Honda with all its iconic bikes and cars. The experience will stay fresh in my memory. Creating this campaign was like giving a peek to the audience into the brand’s vision statement. You don’t get to do something like this very often.
Brief to the agency
Hero and Honda had parted ways and this was going to be Honda’s first campaign as an independent two-wheeler brand. The brief was to metamorphose Honda into an independent brand in India while retaining its global ambition. So far, the Japanese auto major enjoyed higher recall with urban youth as maker of the CBR cult. Now, with a range of two-wheelers across price points, it set out to speak to the Indian masses in smaller cities, rural areas and mini metros. These markets account for humongous volumes for country’s leading two-wheeler manufacturers. Earlier, Honda was not marketing its range of scooters and bikes aggressively. The film had to be Honda’s grand ‘hello’ to India sans Hero. So, the priority was to become a name to reckon with in the two-wheeler segment.
Various routes considered
It took quite a few number of meetings to figure out what all could be done to arrive at the final positioning. The client asked us to take Mile sur mera tumhara as a reference point of something that united the entire nation. Not to say that Honda was looking for a catchy jingle. Again, my mind kept going back to the museum in Tokyo for the solution where one of the walls read, ‘products don’t lie’.
The route we chose and why
Besides coming up with the right positioning, we had to incorporate Honda’s global tag line ‘Power of Dreams’ in our communication. ‘Dream’ is undoubtedly the most abused idea globally. For instance, in India, Bollywood has made dreams mundane by making it a hot topic of debate in a majority of its films. It works because these films are able to bridge the gap between the reality and dreams of the audience. So I wrote sapne and sach on opposite sides of a paper. Faith could be the only bridge between these polarities and so I filled the gap on the paper by writing kar denge. This is how we arrived at the new positioning Sapne sach kar denge.
Next, we realised, unlike the yesteryears, today, people want to achieve their dreams as fast as possible. Two-wheelers get you from one place to the other faster and so the first line that brand ambassador Akshay Kumar speaks in the film is hume jaldi hai. In many ways, the actor’s journey so far encapsulates what a common man has to go through to make it big in life. Had we used him as a celebrity, we would have ended up making a fool of ourselves.
By the end of the film, the actor establishes how brand Honda (with its fast-paced offerings) is the enabler that’s out to bridge the gap between dreams and reality. In a bid to create a journalistic style film, we shot the film in multiple locations across the country.
Outcome
When Amit Sharma, the director of the film showed the first cut to me, I had goose bumps literally. The client was happy to see what we had achieved. The client and the entire team handling the account at Dentsu Marcom decided to call the campaign ‘Rush Hour’. The release of the ad film was followed by the launch of Dream Yuga, which marked Honda’s foray into 110cc segment. Within first three months of the launch, the company sold 1 lakh Dream Yuga bikes. Though we did a separate film for this bike later, the brand achieved greater visibility with the corporate film.
Will it work five years down the line
You can keep selling dreams forever. At the same time it’s difficult to say what’s in store for the future. Market dynamics in this category are so volatile that a well thought out strategy can fall flat on its face. But the values of this campaign will be relevant five years down the line as the chase from dreams to reality will continue.
Titus Upputuru
National creative director, Dentsu Marcom