Walkers and Co. is all about fostering culture and building communities: Shweta Jain

Inspired by the ‘rallying cry’ of Johnnie Walker to ‘Keep Walking’ which essentially is all about the spirit of pursuing work on bettering one’s present best as he/she continues to chart new paths, Diageo had set up a platform, Walkers and Co., to celebrate young people who changed the definition of success from that of being limited to individuals to actually impacting a larger community.

As per Shweta Jain, Chief Business Development Officer- Luxury, Reserve and Craft (India and South Asia), Diageo, this happened when the brand wanted to find out what it could do for consumers in the country from a plain contemporary culture POV and realised that the nation had already arrived at a juncture where there was ‘amazing vibrancy’ around the creative economy.

“It was after this that we figured out how the brand required a platform such as Walkers and Co. to continuously empower and create opportunities for creators, known as Walkers or bold boundary pushers, who have reached a certain level of success and help them reimagine themselves as enablers for others who are on the brink of creating something meaningful and big,” she added.

It is owing to this very reason that the platform associated itself with multiple personalities beginning from John Legend and Rajakumari to Sushant Divgikr and Hanif Kureshi for its launch in 2022, which falls in line with Johnnie Walker’s international stature of creating narratives that inspire people and not mere content.

‘Keep Walking’ Anthem-

Commenting on the objectives that Diageo aims to achieve with its community platform, Jain highlighted that since Walkers and Co. is all about fostering culture and building communities, both of which happen over a period of time, there isn’t any set time-bound goal.

But having said that, she also emphasised that there is a mission that is associated with the platform- making Walkers and Co. an actual community which is as large as the aspirations of the contemporary icons that the platform associates with and being as dynamic a source of inspiration as the man, Johnnie Walker himself.

“This time around, we’ve collaborated with Aravani Art Project to cover the huge landscape of outdoor space via billboards in various cities of prominence, which aren’t just limited to the top Tier markets but extend to other cultural hotspots such as Pune, Indore, Guwahati, Calcutta, Punjab, Chandigarh, Goa, etc. as well as in several airports. The idea behind collaborating with them was rooted in their stand on inclusivity and progressive art,” she added.

Walkers and Co. x Aravani Art Project-

Commenting on how the brand ensures that Walkers and Co. in the pursuit of standing for inclusivity and promoting progressiveness don’t end up getting caught in the crossfires for being too woke or ahead of time like many others, the CBDO emphasised that such hasn’t been the case for the platform owing to the ‘meaningful social listening’ that it does which happens to be one of the biggest guide for the brand to remain deeply connected with its consumers.

“There's a lot of conversations that go on in the partner ecosystem which includes not just the creators that we have associated with but also with institutions and culture platforms that the platform has partnered with such as Lollapalooza, Echoes of Earth, NMACC, Social or even Taj and that is what allows us to be meaningful,” she said.

Further, she also emphasised that the community platform is not centred merely around ‘talking’ but also ‘walking’ as that is what helps in giving representation and building the brand’s real estate in the form of Walkers and Co. or Diageo’s other products, unlike several other brands which simply come up with a simple 30 seconder piece of communication around wokeism.

She then went on to further support her statement by sharing the example of how the platform didn’t just stop at John Legend and Rajakumari writing the ‘Keep Walking’ anthem which went live in December last year and actually got them to perform at a concert in Bombay and Delhi.

“It is this act of enablement that showcases how we just don’t engage in talking but also walk our talk and listen as much as we talk and that is precisely what differentiates us,” she stated.

The same understanding of listening ‘culture’ not just ends at consumers and creators but also the agency partners that the overarching brand has such as Vice’s Virtue Worldwide, PhD Media Worldwide and Enormous Brands along with the internal team which also has ‘Culture Managers’, as per Jain.

Throwing light on the big plans that she has for Walkers and Co, Jain shared that one of the big areas that the brand is deeply understanding is what ‘luxury’ means to young consumers in India so as to ensure that the brand has a point of view on the same.

“We also want to evolve Walkers and Co. as a platform towards a more nuanced understanding or representation of more premiumisation that our brand is currently seeing across various consumer segments in the country as the experiential economy is evolving. We are looking at experiences with a lens of sustainability as well as the new codes of affluence and the aesthetic that is evolving around the same,” she added.

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