With over 20 years at Castrol and a career spanning the early days of edtech to rural tractor oil sales, Rohit Talwar, Vice President & Head of Marketing, Castrol India recently sat down with BW Marketing World to share insights on everything, from returning to the Indian market after five years, balancing media mix, leveraging data-driven personalisation to the role of storytelling in a tech-dominated world.
Excerpts:
What attracted you to the marketing landscape and when did you realise this was where you truly wanted to be?
Going back 25 years, I did my graduation in mathematics and in the year 2000, there was this new thing called the 'Internet' and I found this Edtech company, 'Navneet Education' and I joined them. It was a very enriching experience to be in a category creation mode where everything was about books. In the very early days of edtech, we built a new brand called 'TopScorer'. Given that it was a small team and I was a young graduate, I had the opportunity to work on many different things including selling to institutes to actually creating a brand and launching that brand.
That's when I fell in love with marketing and said that the business of brands is where I want to be and I saw the impact that it can have. Post that I went to Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad where I majored in marketing and strategy and enjoyed the sales courses as well but marketing is really where my heart was.
Castrol was a company that was early on campus and I have a deep love for automobiles so I joined the company and it's been a fantastic experience since then. One point I'll make is when I joined the organisation I spent about three years in sales and worked across India with a very memorable stint.
I remember, in rural Punjab working with farmers, we were talking and marketing tractor oil. It was a very good experience and I think having that strong foundation in sales makes you a better marketer because you're then able to do stuff that actually drives business impact.
You have returned to the Indian market after five years. How does it feel? And how do you incorporate cross-cultural insights, especially from the South Asian market, into your marketing strategies for better understanding and effectiveness in India?
The Indian market is incredibly exciting. If I look at 2023, 25 million new vehicles were sold in that single year in India. So it is a market of growth. I think the mindset is really how do you get after that growth in a meaningful way? A dynamic market, strong growth and lots of opportunity - that's how I look at India.
On the cross-cultural or the cross-category pieces that resonate across markets, one piece from Asia that is consistent is that vehicle owners are getting younger and getting more and more aspirational, a trend I've seen in ASEAN markets as well. Now, when I look at India, according to CRISIL, between 2019 and 2023, premium car sales have gone from 11 per cent off the market to 25 per cent - that's a huge shift. Indian consumers are not looking for the entry price point, they're looking for premium products and special experiences. This creates a great opportunity for a brand like us which is why we bring in the best technology products into India to set new benchmarks for performance and give consumers that performance.
These insights give us consistent opportunities around product innovation, bringing those products across these markets and activating these products meaningfully for consumers in these markets.
The second piece is around mechanics which is unique to our category. Mechanics want the right level of earning but they are also looking for upskilling which brand can help them learn about the latest technology, be better equipped to service vehicles and make them more employable.
Third is recognition. What is my place in society? Which brand can help me be recognised as the expert that I am? And this is an insight that's consistent across markets.
Being in the automotive lubricants market, how do you balance traditional and digital media to effectively engage both older and younger audiences? What does your media mix look like?
At Castrol, we serve both automotive and industrial customers. Within automotive, there are cars, bikes and commercial vehicles and there are about 300 million of these vehicles on Indian roads. Within the diverse audience set, you have consumers who buy directly and service their cars at a roadside garage or a small workshop and then those who go to the OEM-authorised workshop.
Now if you look on the media side, India is a very unique market where traditional media is still growing. If I look at the groupM report on ADEX in India, ad spend in India is going at 10 per cent and traditional media is also growing. TV and print are growing and digital ofcourse is growing faster.
At Castrol, traditional media has a role to play which is about building top-of-mind awareness and brand consideration, especially in categories that are deeply penetrated. We just launched a high-performance oil for cars called Castrol EDGE with SRK as a brand ambassador and we chose to lead with traditional medium. We did a lot of TV and print, and then we had a bit of social and digital to supplement. I would say about two-thirds of the marketing spends of the campaign was on traditional and then a third of it was digital.
That's on the brand-building and equity side, but then there's the other side. In our category, you have an influencer mechanic and have the workshop where the consumption happens. We're currently piloting a programme which is allowing consumers to book services online. Therefore we're doing demand generation into workshops, bringing in new footfalls and new consumer walk into our workshop. That has a very strong digital performance marketing element to it. We also have a fast-growing ecommerce business, small but growing.
Data-driven personalisation is one of marketer's favourite tools today. How do you leverage data to drive personalisation in your marketing campaigns and what challenges have you faced in ensuring that data-driven strategies align with customer expectations?
Firstly, on the consumer side, we use both deterministic and probabilistic signals to understand how best to reach different audiences, like bike owners versus car owners versus commercial vehicle owners. That allows us to serve ads to the right audience, making it more effective and efficient for us.
The second is that we now have a massive database of mechanics and we have those mechanics that are classified by the different segments that they serve. And we can then use that data to target offers to different types of mechanics and different segments of mechanics. We then also analyse that data to be able to make sure that we're able to drive sales forward in each of these segments.
One of the interesting works that we did was with rephrase AI - to create a campaign with a celebrity that we were working with that gave personalised videos to workshop owners and mechanics and that saw fantastic engagement. Personalisation drives deeper engagement. It makes the consumer or the customer feel like the brand understands me and knows me and is able to give me the experience or the product at the time that I'm looking for it.
I think in the consumer space, as you get more and more data, you'll have the ability to then customise those messages a lot more. Gen AI will play a fantastic role in that and we've seen a bit of early success with that, with some of the work that we've done with mechanics already.
Also, to understand better, do you think storytelling has become easier with technology or difficult with the clutter or has it lost its impact in the tech-dominated world?
Clutter is here to stay. We spoke earlier about how fragmented media is and how new channels are being added every day. So storytelling is more important than ever.
To capture consumer attention, you need a simple, sharp and entertaining story with your brand message interwoven seamlessly. Technology is an enabler that helps reach audiences, scale and personalise but the core idea still comes from insight and need and that will always stay true.
One of the important pieces today in the marketing mix is content. The reason content is getting more important is some of the younger audiences are not so active on television and other mediums but they are highly engaged in content. There is an opportunity to bring the brand into content directly. For example, we have a partnership for the last three years with a show called the 'Bombay Journeys' where it's about stars talking about their journey through life, talking about the vehicle and traversing the streets of Bombay in a very beautiful interaction that happens.
I think for different audiences, there is a way to engage through content if the traditional mediums are not really where those consumers are spending their time. It's not easy getting the mix right, but if you're able to say which audience has what needs and where are they really spending their time, and then have a mix that addresses that, you can reach them no matter where they are.
Which marketing veterans or leaders do you admire and find inspiration from in your journey?
First, Byron Sharp, founder of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and author of 'How Brands Grow'. I think that's a great book for all marketers to read. It challenges the status quo and talks about what are some of the simple principles of marketing that drive growth.
Maybe it's the mathematician in me, but this is all about evidence-based marketing and therefore resonated very strongly with me and certainly a person with a point of view.
The second person is Tennis player and sportsman, Roger Federer. I've had the opportunity to see him play live in different parts of the world.
A couple of things about him that inspire me is he is one of the tennis players who always travelled with his family while he was on tour and always thanked his team. These are a few things that I take away from him.
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