Sports, Fashion, Experiential – Hyundai Embraces It All: Virat Khullar

Hyundai takes pride in being the number two player in the car market for the last two decades. It claims to be the leader and the innovator from the features point of view, technology point of view, and not to forget, safety point of view.

Customer safety in cars is very important for Hyundai. And under that, the brand has got a mission of democratising safety, under the hashtag - Safety for All. The brand has been introducing both active and passive safety features over the last several years. The big leap that the brand took on 1 October, 2023 is that in India it decided to standardise six airbags across all 13 cars that it produces in India. Also that at that very point of time, Hyundai got its five-star safety rating of Global NCAP on the Hyundai Verna.

So, taking this as a big cue and knowing the importance of safety in customers and obviously the family consumers, Hyundai came up with a campaign. With the ongoing Cricket World Cup (CWC) and the festive season, the brand introduced its campaign - ‘6 Hai Toh Safe Hai’. If it is safe, if it is six. We all know six is the big number in cricket. If it crosses the boundary, it's the highest score and it is a safe score.

In a virtual tete-a –tete with BW Marketing World, Virat Khullar, AVP & Vertical Head, Marketing, Hyundai Motor India chats on the ‘6 Hai Toh Safe Hai’ campaign, the brand’s focus on sports, fashion and more. 

Edited excerpts:

What about the ‘6 Hai Toh Safe Hai’ campaign getting a good engagement on all your platforms?

We've run the campaign on three different mediums. We've done it, obviously, on TV where we've got Hyundai as the principal partner on impact like KBC and impact like Big Boss. We are the principal partners on TV.

So the campaign is integrated inside the show, on a show like Big Boss and obviously we've got FCT's playing on the World Cup. We've got a CTV plan that is running. We are obviously targeted to a bit of the premium side of the customer who have now become cord cutters. That is an interesting niche that we have picked up for the World Cup. 

On print, the innovation that we have done is that we've actually taken half page ads in key papers on the sports page on the day after the India match. That means that when the newspaper on the sports page carries the India match story, we have a half page ad right below the main story. So that is a very interesting thing and I mean, so far India is five one five. So we've got very good coverage on the match. And just below that, Hyundai says ‘6 Hai toh Safe Hai’.

So this is a very topical and colloquial thing, which is around the World Cup. And then on digital, while we have got very strong click throughs, and getting into the numbers it is one of our best click throughs, what is very interesting is that when we look at a campaign like Safety, we get a very strong positive sentiment. So through online reputation management, through RM, we actually monitor positive, negative sentiment online.

And this campaign has got us one of the most positive sentiments as a percentage of total comments or total engagement that is coming in. People have views on cars, people have views on announcements. But when you do a campaign which proactively says we are standardising safety across every version that we produce, very interestingly, we are getting higher engagement than a regular corporate campaign, much bigger open rates on our emails and our messages, much better click throughs. But also one of the highest positive sentiments we have seen thus far. This is not my biggest campaign from a product launch point of view, but it's one of the biggest corporate campaigns of the year. So we are very happy to see that we are kind of giving the right kind of message to our corporate brand.

We had a massive car launch in July, which was also a big success. This campaign in certain mediums has even done better, which is very interesting to see that maybe we are right on dot with the customer requirement or the customer needs. 

What kind of an advertising and marketing strategy has been planned for the new launches, along with the focus on six standardised airbags integrated in the campaign? What else can we expect to see with this regard? 

Specifically, we are in the marketing parlance today. There is a new format, there is a new ratio, there is a new platform getting launched almost every quarter.

And consumers are quick to embrace them. Consumers are moving from traditional to new age media. So the aim of every marketer is to be present.

Which is fine, but sometimes your dollars do not allow you to have very high frequencies. So when you're operating on threshold frequencies or threshold reach numbers in every medium, the aim is to innovate. What we have actually done on our digital campaign on the Exter is do a lot of gamification is to do one of the first virtual limitless zooms with the Exter, which had the campaign tagline ‘Think Outside, Think Exter’.

Then on outdoor, we had not one of India's and Asia's largest Lego based installation outdoor, which was almost 300,000 blocks, used to create an Exter OOH. The way we launched the car was also very innovative with kind of a simulation of a helicopter dropping the car on stage. So the point I'm making is that we started with every launch. Obviously we will achieve thresholds on what is required from a communication, what is the TG we need to reach, what is the percentage. But there will be innovation. The Ioniq5 that we launched, which is a car that has vehicle to load, it was launched at the Gateway of India.

This is what you have seen in the recent past over the last two years. But going forward also in this frenzy of multi category launches and also car launches, Hyundai will aim to innovate and be integrated to the consumer content consumption. So we are obviously planning continuously and programming for our launches even over the next one year or 18 months.

The aim is to do a kind of a deep dive job which then gives a little bit of virality to whatever we are creating. 

What is your strategy specifically for the festive season and for the upcoming six months? 

For us it's a high involvement category. Car buying decisions are taken about 60 to 90 days in advance. So our aim is to get active to be part of top of mind awareness of in-market consumer of cars from June July onwards, which was the right time when we launched Exter to get new consumers, new segments of consumers walking into our showrooms. I think the aim in festival is two.

One, we will do always on performance marketing to continue to get the right mature leads into our showrooms. But the other more important thing is that people who have booked or people who have planned their purchases in advance for deliveries in the festival season, the aim is to have a brilliant customer first experience in our showrooms. They should get the car before or at the date they have planned it, when new and new families are entering our fold to make them more and more advocates of the Hyundai brand.

So, two things we do, we will continue to be performance marketing or lower funnel strong on digital, and also aim to have a brilliant consumer experience at our showrooms so that we make customers forever. 

We've seen a lot of brands using a lot of celebrity and influencer marketing when it comes to the marketing mix. What is your take on that as a brand? 

Obviously there is no doubt that celebrity influencers or celebrity brand endorsers break clutter for you, give you a bit of edge in advertising. We've had obviously Shah Rukh Khan for us for more than 25 years. But this year we've added the youth icon as per us, Hardik Pandya. He's come on board as our brand ambassador for extra and he continues to be in for other cars. We've also got the woman cricketers, Smriti, Jemimah Shafali, etc.

We've got five women cricketers as part of our brand ambassadorship. We use all of them either for the corporate brand or for product launches or for social engagements or topicals. So they definitely help us. Obviously, the aim is to measure overall engagement, to measure brand mentions on those posts and also to measure organic versus promoted reach that we get. 

We do on and off influencer programs separately. Ideally more with macro influencers than nano. But I think the aim with influencer marketing is to let the influencer do what they do best and try to integrate the brand into why their fans are following them rather than doing a separate brand narrative with them. What we aim to do better is to measure the ROI from influencer marketing.

But it is a new edge medium, it is a thumbstopping medium and I think it is where the consumer is. So the advertisers should find a way to innovatively be there.

How do the female endorsers of Hyundai resonate with the brand's vision, in terms of tapping the TG?

It's not that female endorsers are appealing to female audiences or only male audiences.

We are having a double digit female ownership on our cars. It's a strong number now. Secondly, almost one fourth of the web visitors on our sites are females. Currently what data we don't have is obviously we know that consumers in terms of spouses or children will remain females.

Keeping all of that in mind, we have always been gender neutral in our communication. About one and a half or two years back, we actually onboarded female sports persons and our brand ambassadors. Currently, we've onboarded five cricketers. We've got Shafali, Jemimah, Yastika, Renuka and Smriti. And we also have Aditi Ashok who is a woman golfer from India. She represents India in all the international, amateur and national events.

So we've been doing a lot of different kinds of engagements with them. While the women cricketers featured in a television commercial with SRK last year, they have been doing a lot of social engagements with us on topicals like Independence Day etc. They've also been leading the social media content for the ‘6 Hai Toh Safe Hai’ campaign.

Aditi, on the other hand has been active with us on below the line activations. We've done kids golf tournaments. It started last year as an IP and it will happen this year in November, December, where we encourage kids to give kids an opportunity to play in a very strong level of competition with there on the final day, doing a small coaching session, etc.

So the aim is that and you will also see in the future we will be using all kinds of cars, all kinds of stars, all kinds of endorsers for our car campaign because they are an equal participant in the buying decision. 

How much does the festive season contribute in terms of sales and revenue for Hyundai? 

We've just completed a very strong October. So it's about a 15 per cent growth on sales year on year for the month of October versus last year. There is a different seasonality this year versus last year with respect to festive season – there is a delayed Diwali in the middle of November.

Car buying is slightly longer term consumer behaviour – it is about 60 to 90 days at a minimum, while we are seeing it shortening a bit. But that's the overall because the category is high quality. So, consumers start prospecting cars in Q3.

We get a lot of bookings also by the end of Q3 and then Q4, depending on the availability, deliveries, etc. They take the cars on their special occasions like Dhanteras, Diwali. The aim right now for us is to basically have a premium consumer first experience for the buyer and his families when they take the car in a festival. The showrooms are ready, the deliveries are happening.

Auto brands, since quite some time, have been focusing a lot on experiential marketing when it comes to test drives and offering an experience to customers and potential customers. So how do you plan to differentiate yourself from the competitors in terms of building a memorable experience for your customers and what is the strength in building a stronger experiential marketing plan?

Experiential marketing for Hyundai India is a very strong pillar. It's a big part of our marketing plan. It happens at two different levels. One is how will we use Experiential marketing to convince more and more leads to fall lower in the funnel.

So how we use experiential to talk to prospects - that is one part of it. 

And the second part of it we are also doing very strongly is how do we use Experiential to create an augmented product beyond just the car for our owners, for our consumers. 

Obviously in the beginning to talk about the prospect side, there are things like media drives that are happening with the journalists. There are a lot of displays that happen in key high footfall market areas. The line that is learning is that now outdoor experiential malls, sports activation, things like fashion weeks they're all getting to be a part of experience of below the line events and activations.

And they will also would like to be part of festivals where there are people coming families so prospects can feel and see, and touch the car but also drive - because we all know that people may feel that a car does not require a touch up. But the upgrade that happens every year, the technology that gets loaded in, somebody who may not see it, the whole push on safety, the whole push on connectivity - the newer the car, the better looking and the better loaded it is. So that is the prospect side.

Now the good thing we are doing to generate rider ownership is we run two large programs. One is the Under Explorers program under which we do very large scale drives for our customers, for our SUV owners. So we have already done more than six drives last year. We are almost going to do more than six drives this year. We've already engaged more than 200 different consumers, families I'm talking about. They do two things - they obviously build loyalty by using the car on a Hyundai program to experience what they bought the cart for. Secondly, those social media videos that come out, they are used by my salespeople to explain to customers that you're buying the lifestyle, you are not buying the product.

So we are doing Explorer Adventures and Explorer Carnivals - that we are doing with current customers. Also with our consumers, under the IP,  Hyundai Spotlight we have done concerts with A to B level singers in key markets where 2000 - 3000 families have attended, which if you own a Hyundai car, you are free to walk in, you're free to enjoy a concert which happened at the end of this year in the last two months and it is a property that we want to continue.

The point is that obviously we will build experiential for prospects. We have done 3D outdoor, anamorphic displays, we have done Lego outdoors.

These are all experiential work for prospects. But for owners to build a pride of ownership we are also doing continuous engagement that a Hyundai owner gets just because he owns a Hyundai car and there is no other qualification. So those are the kinds of experiences I think consumers love beyond just buying the vanilla product.

You also spoke about technology and we also know that a lot of AI is being used in marketing when it comes to auto brands. So how does view AI as an opportunity to build its innovation muscle in terms of advertising and marketing? 

We all know AI is the buzzword not only for the tech companies but obviously marketing organisations and a lot of the other fields where AI is now progressing very strongly as a tool to assist decision making, as a tool to assist processes.

So, Hyundai is right now inn a pilot phase. We are working on generating content through AI in India. We have tested some creative – both, static and video. We may be using them in our upcoming launch. Our agency is using that for pitch boards. They are using it for a lot of the thought discussions that we are having when we do brainstorming.

On the content side, AI used for above the line as of now as a pilot phase. Also AI helps in personalisation. I mean, if you are doing mass, digital campaigns, AI is one of the tools that helps in mass personalisation. So we have been using AI based chatbot right now. We are using AI based digital content creation techniques as of now. But to be very frank, as I said, Hyundai is right now in pilot mode. We are working with our global counterparts also to see what kind of, I could say high confidence, error free gen AI kind of campaigns that can happen.

I know a lot of impulse categories, have done some work, with the consumers, it seems, I've also seen some award winning work. But I think for us they are right now drops in the ocean. But with the pilots being successful this year, I think from very early next year we will see some strong AI actions going to our customers also.

Sports as a platform is growing. Be it cricket, hockey or any other sport, how do you see sports as an efficient marketing platform for your brand? 

Sports is clearly a passion point in India. We know cricket is one of our biggest religions. We are seeing the performance, the great performance of the team as we speak on the ICC Cricket World Cup.

We are also very strongly engaged where the consumer is. So from a sports point of view, we have been partnered directly with ICC and BCCI in the past. On the current Cricket World Cup, we are running ‘6 Hai Toh Safe Hai’ campaign. On the ICC World Cup, we are using the CTV platform to do the campaign as of now. We were also be presenting partners with Sony on the Asian Games that just happened, where the Indian team performed great and crossed tally of 100 medals, where we also animated and created films with the sportsmen and women who went to the tournament.

We are also looking at doing strong partnerships with golf. Golf is being used on ground, and also we are using it by creating our own tournament, which will go on air. 

So, the aim is that it is sports. Obviously, due to the nature of cricket, cricket gets a lion's share of it. But we are doing all levels of activation sport. We are doing ground level support of students. We are doing partnerships with men and women. Hardik Pandya is now our brand ambassador. We are also looking at partnerships on television.

Each of these levels, the ROI will be differently measured. There will be a lot of top funnel ROI. There will be a lot of engagement ROI.

Sports is a passion. It is where consumers are. I think every marketer has to decide based on his campaign objective, based on his media mix, based on the budget strength, how and where to get it. But for us, almost all facets of sports marketing – we are very actively part of those and even pursuing further. 

You have been the principal sponsor for Hyundai India Couture Week. How you are planning to build on fashion? How does that fit into the role of Hyundai’s marketing mix? 

India is a very premium engagement activity. Whenever we hear or we see fashion, we tend to associate it with Bollywood. We tend to associate it with the top echelons of the country. We've taken on premium fashion because we've got our stellar model, which is the Ioniq5, which is priced at Rs 46 lakh in showroom. So that car is our top of the line product.

So to move our positioning towards more premium positioning in India, but we are retaining something that I strongly believe in, is the India connect. So Couture Week is actually a representation of the artisans of the country.