Maruti Suzuki celebrates six years of Arena with Rs 18 crore ad blitzkrieg

Launched in 2017 with the sole goal of giving the joy of mobility to as many families as possible and having crossed the mark of selling a lakh cars a month, Maruti Suzuki Arena has completed its six-year journey in the country.

On this occasion, the top car maker came up with an ad campaign, titled ‘Find Your Match’, which also features the celebrity brand ambassador, Varun Dhawan.

Speaking to BestMediaInfo.com, Maruti Suzuki’s Senior Executive Director (Marketing and Sales), Shashank Srivastava, emphasised that in a span of six years, Arena has become one of the top channel brands across the Indian automotive space.

“This particular campaign is for young consumers, of which a majority are still first-time buyers. ‘Find Your Match’ precisely builds on this new relationship between the brand and the first-time car buyers and is based on their car buying experience and the car itself from Maruti Suzuki’s distinctly large portfolio,” he said.

He also mentioned that via the Arena Campaign, ‘Find Your Match’, which began airing on September 17, the brand is also urging young audiences to not find the vehicle of their choice but something that truly reflects their personalities and aspirations.

The campaign which is slated to run for four weeks will be rolled out across 14,000 spots in a pan-India fashion across both mainline and digital mediums.

The film:

Throwing light on the media mix and ad budget allocation for the singular ‘Find Your Match’ ad campaign, the marketing maven stated that the brand would be allocating a sum total of Rs 18 crores, majorly on Television which includes both OTT and CTV, along with 20-25% being allocated to digital amongst other mediums.

He then went on to add that the automobile major has come up with a slew of creative edits for the particular campaign, which will be rolled out both in Hindi and English, right from spots with a duration of 90 seconds to 60 seconds to 30, 20 and 15 seconders along with an additional five seconder.

“During this year’s festive period we’ll also be coming up with different ad campaigns for different geographies around different festivals with different intensities and do away with the typical dubbing and running approach and come up with films that are specifically made in the local languages of various geographies so as to give the best and authentic flavour to our ads,” he pointed out.

While the number of these ad films is pegged to be 12, these films will be running across the festive period.

Apart from the regional ad films, the brand will also be investing in its media spends, like it did during the Asia Cup, on the ICC Cricket World Cup, Srivastava denoted.

“In the non-sports arena, we’ll be investing largely in GECs, vernacular and movies,” he said.

Sharing more information on the psychographics that the brand targets in the country, Srivastava stated that with Arena, the brand aims to target all the first-time buyers spread across the country who are young, tech-savvy and are looking for more features, which is why the experience of an Arena also reflects the same in the form of its dynamic and techy CI elements.

Upon being questioned about the importance of Arena in the overall architecture of the automobile major, he replied that the brand is managing both Arena which is a young and tech-savvy experience provider for first-time car-buying youth as well as Nexa which is more like a buying experience, not just for selling cars, but also about creating and inspiring a premium buying experience to consumers.

“Currently, the sales ratio between Arena and Nexa is 65:35 in India, but it does vary with the varied geographies. For example, in Delhi, the ratio is more like 60:40. Having said that we do take into account our spends on both the brands, depending on the underlying volumes that we see,” he stated.

Moreover, in his views, while Maruti Suzuki’s core philosophy since the beginning has been all about providing the joy of mobility, the focus in mind is not on the functionality but on building the core of the brand around opportunities spanning across networking, going with friends, bringing in togetherness within families, etc.

Henceforth, the brand’s underlying objective remains the same in the long run and that coupled with the burgeoning Indian economy is upping the brand’s expectations in terms of volumes.

“By 2030, we expect the industry to go up to 6 million+ from the current expectations which is 4 million and that growth in terms of volumes is something which we are preparing for. It essentially also means having a larger number of brands, a larger availability of vehicles which further implies a larger network of Arena,” he opined.

In order to match the pace of pent-up volumes, the brand is likely to increase its Arena outlets in the coming years from the current 2,900 outlets which cover 2,400 cities.

“Like other democracies, India is also a young country with 65% of people being capped below 35 years of age, hence first-time buyers are still pretty strong. In fact, for the past two decades, the trend has been similar with 45-47% population consistently coming under the category of young first-car buying audience,” he mentioned.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com