Incredible India: why cracking the audience is key

Tasked with selling a brand that encompasses over a billion people and is associated with everything from poverty to power, Sydney-based Transmarketing turned to the audience for answers.

Cricket and curry or yoga and Zen? When Transmarketing was tasked with selling India to Australians, the team knew the only way to tackle the mammoth brand was to break it down into market segments.

That meant digging into the very reasons Australians travel in the first place.

“What we had to do was uncover the essence of what the Australian traveller sees in India, what draws them there,” says managing director of Sydney-based Transmarketing, Lincoln Graham.

“And what we arrived at is Australia is a nation of experienced and educated travellers. When it comes to India, we’re a nation that wants experiential journeys over sightseeing visits, that wants experiences over happy-snap holidays.

“For Australians, India is experiential.”

A mass reach integrated campaign, Transmarketing’s high profile ‘Incredible India!’ story launched in 2009 and ran across Australasian TV, newspapers, magazines and outdoor.

Press ads ran in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, The New Zealand Business Review as well as Donna Hay and glossy travel publications. TVCs ran during The Ashes and in the final episode of Masterchef, one of the highest rating evenings in Australian TV history. Two monorails were ‘wrapped’ and the outdoor signage surrounding Sydney Airport dominated.

Pulled together with a common visual identity and the tagline of ‘Your incredible journey awaits’, the campaign targeted three separate Australian traveller types: those interested in culture, wellbeing and adventure.

Ads aimed at the culture crowd focused on India’s history, mythology, architecture and poetry. Ads aimed at the wellbeing set highlighted the benefits of spirituality, health and rejuvenation. And those geared at adventure lovers extolled the country’s breathtaking wildness and natural beauty.

“With recent press highlighting some of the difficulties faced by India, what we needed to do was highlight the many sides, the many experiences of the country – and what those experiences could mean to Australians,” Graham says.

“Through the campaign our goal was to reveal the true diversity of India: that it’s not all busy markets, packed streets or urban unrest but also mountains to the north, beaches to the south, this incredible environment of natural wonders.”

The Incredible India! campaign came with several challenges for Transmarketing.

For a start, it launched just months after the Mumbai bombings when Australian sentiment toward India was clouded with uncertainty. The campaign was in fact part of the Indian Government’s global ‘Visit India 2009’ program, a strategy aimed in part at counteracting consumers’ negative associations with India following the Mumbai bombings.

The campaign also needed to be turned around, from strategy to creative, production and launch, in a very tight timeframe.

Despite the challenges, Graham says his creative team focused on finding brand truths and delivering those to a segmented audience.

For more information contact Lincoln Graham, managing director, Transmarketing.