Castrol MAGNATEC's goal: to grow salience to build consideration with car owners for the brand.
Castrol MAGNATEC, a market leader in the Car Lubricants category, is known for its quality and decades of legacy. Specifically engineered for today's urban driving environment and designed for non-stop protection against the wear caused by the start-stop of the engine in busy traffic, it caters to the mid-to-high-end car segment.
However, the category suffers from low involvement. An oil is just an oil for a consumer. Castrol MAGNATEC, at almost 40 percent premium compared to its competitors, is always at risk of a switch by the consumer.
From a meager mention to a continuous physical presence of the brand, Castrol sought to raise brand awareness. For the second year in a row for the activation, the brand elevated its visual presence.
Castrol aimed to engage a discerning audience seeking sophistication, specifically targeting mid to high-end car owners and enthusiasts aged 25 to 45.
Video was the way to go, as determined by research. For instance, the Indian online-video sector garnered 6.1 trillion-minutes of consumption, with 89 percent of Indians using smartphones for the same. Further, 88 percent of their time of was spent on YouTube, with one-third of YouTube viewers in India accessing videos on mobiles. Demand for VOD is also the highest amongst young consumers (aged 25 to 34 years old), with video content with celebrity and influencer videos accounting for nearly 32 percent of share of online-video consumption.
In addition, Mumbai, a city of dreams and stories, inspired the brand to create a series showcasing individuals' journeys from struggle to success. Castrol brought celebrities from across India to share their experiences in the city of dreams. And these conversations needed a long-format content construct. Castrol created a video series called "The Bombay Journey" for audiences to enjoy through their second screens.
Moreover, Castrol aimed to engage a discerning audience seeking sophistication, specifically targeting mid-to-high-end car owners and enthusiasts aged 25 to 45. Castrol also partnered with Mashable, catering to an average of 30 percent automobile, culture, and entertainment enthusiasts. The platform garners 11 million unique visitors and has an ardent following of 1.5 million across social media.
To leverage partnerships, Castrol sought to get India's favorite celebrities to converse like a friend on a long drive with the host. The brand chose these celebrities based on movie trends, popularity index, and recency of the celebrity, be it at the box-office or OTT content.
Breaking the mold of conventional celebrity interviews confined to studios, the series marked a refreshing change. This smartphone-friendly, unscripted talk-show, sans audience, featured top celebrities in a moving car through bustling city-traffic, where the anchor facilitated candid conversations about the celebrities' early city-experiences, non-stop journeys, struggles (stops), and successes (starts), fostering relatable dialogue for Castrol MAGNATEC.
The budget was used solely on digital activation, given the nature of the show. The Bombay Journey series is a digital show running across social platforms.
Twenty-five guests with a collective following of 200 million were associated with the brand, including Raftaar, Jackie Shroff, Neena Gupta, Kunal Khemu, Randeep Hooda, Shriya Saran. Over 600 minutes of long-format-video content on YouTube, as the brand created 25 videos, launched monthly basis the recency of the celebrities. Further, the company had over 50 minutes of teasers and reels to promote the content and created 125 brand conversations.
The effort was extended to key brand markets in Delhi and Hyderabad, and launched a segment of rapid-fire questions to celebrities about their personal life journeys and passions, and how they gave themselves and their dreams the "non-stop protection" required against every obstacle (stop-start) they faced.
A social media contest was also hosted to increase audience engagement; Castrol gave viewers a chance to win a branded car pillow exclusively autographed by the celebrity, by commenting on their favorite celebrity interview.
With an estimated 32 million cars, rising incomes and improved road infrastructure, India has been consistently seeing a YoY growth in car sales (an increase of 8.2 percent compared to 2022). And with this expanding market and the highly competitive Indian engine-oil category, Castrol MAGNATEC wanted to solve situations at hand with a research takeaway; for example, the average driver makes as many as 18,000 stop-starts per year, causing significant wear to the engine during idling in traffic or waiting at junctions.
Results for the campaign included:
