Castrol CRB TURBOMAX, a leading engine oil and lubricant brand in India, is committed to positively impacting the trucking community, recognizing truck drivers as key decision-makers.
Castrol's initiative aims to foster entrepreneurial spirit and enhance professional skills among truck drivers, targeting over 100,000 truckers nationwide. Castrol's ambition is to achieve market growth by increasing penetration among truckers while maintaining brand preference among existing consumers.
Truck drivers are the most important stakeholder in ensuring seamless transportation of goods over long distances yet remain vulnerable due to the fragmented and informal nature of the trucking industry.
The unorganized nature of the trucking business because of no formal training and lack of opportunities to upskill, has stunted the growth prospects in this industry.
The most startling fact is that more than 93 percent of truckers work as employees and only one in 15 truckers drive a self-owned truck.
This community is always on road and is technologically averse. A trucker seeks stability and progress for himself and his family. Trucks are the main source of income for drivers. A trucker decides on which engine oil needs to be used and will pay premium to get the right engine oil, which will protect the vehicle. Truckers prefer to service vehicles in independent workshops.
The oils and lubricants category is a highly cluttered market with too many competitors offering minimal product differentiation, making it a low-loyalty brand for end consumers. For brands, these truckers are influencers that push brand love. But there is very little a brand does to elevate the very lives of these truckers.
Castrol's ambition is to build a purpose platform for all the truckers that will allow them to nurture aspirations to progress in their lives.
Castrol aimed to spur entrepreneurial zeal and enhance the professional competencies of truckdrivers across India.
The target demographic is men between the ages of 25 to 55 who are the operator of a truck or multiple trucks with each truck capacity of more than 10 tons.
More than 6 million truckers in India do not have formal training in the profession of trucking and along with limited education and technological challenges, they are facing low social-security and wages, lack of safety, and high fatigue due to long working hours. As a result, 84 percent of truckers said they would not recommend trucking as a profession.
Castrol transformed two trucks into classrooms that took two different routes covering all the four regions of India.
The enroute journey engaged truck drivers in interactive, on-ground classrooms, thereby transforming each of the 35 truck parking areas into educational hubs and built around the theme #BadhteRahoAagey (urging the truckers to move onward, upward and forward).
The pre-hype on-boarding activity became the first leg of data collection at the activation location and through "Interactive Voice Response mechanism" which helped truckers enroll and share first party-data for further engagement in their preferred language.
Over 1.1 million truckers actively showed interest and registered to be part of this School of Progress. As a result of this data collection, Castrol was able to give daily real-time updates on the movement of the School of Progress, informing them of the nearby classroom sessions.
Further, the company leveraged this first party-data to create AI-based lookalike audiences on Facebook and YouTube to identify and reach audiences with similar interests. Thus, this increased the scale from 1.1 million to 4.5 million, forming 75 percent of truckers in India.
Registered truckers are now engaged in one-on-one classroom sessions through bite-sized learning modules and quiz-based interactions over WhatsApp.
Further, Castrol developed educational content in seven regional languages that highlighted the three pillars of growth and progress for every trucker in India:
Castrol partnered with the biggest TV network of India TV9 to bring to life the "School of Progress." The company then roped in a hugely popular face from the Bollywood universe "Sonu Sood," who is known nationwide for his altruism.
The launch of the campaign gravitated the support of Mr. Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Road Transport and Highways of India. Additionally, category influencers, transport industry experts, and national ministers supported this initiative by generating discussions at a national level around the truckers community across seven regional TV news channels.
A missed call mechanism was deployed via TV, digital, and OOH to prompt the truckers across the country to receive details of the on-ground activations in their preferred languages on WhatsApp.
The volume sales of Castrol CRB TURBOMAX saw a 15 percent growth in a six-month period (Oct 2023 to Mar 2024) for the same period last year. Similarly for the same period, the market share gain grew by 100 bps for the same period last year.
The trucks covered 8,000 miles across 35 cities conducting more than 19,000 hours of classroom sessions in seven different regional languages, educating and empowering more than 13,000 truck drivers on their journey from a driver to becoming an owner. Other results included:
