Tata Tea’s second wake-up call

450 billion cups a year — that’s the potential reach for an average tea brand in India.
Small wonder Tata Tea, the market leader in this far-reaching category, hit the bull’s eye when it launched the Jaago Re campaign, which went on to become a non-partisan movement. With the pitch, the company successfully built an emotional connect with its target audience.

Explaining the logic behind the campaign, Sangeeta Talwar, executive director, Tata Tea, said, “There was only one question at that time — can we step back and reach the essence of the message that tea gives us. Tea wakes us up but we looked beyond the cliche of ‘waking up in the morning’.

We thought, how about waking our thoughts, minds and start questioning.”
The campaign, which kicked off as a speak-up drive initially, took the shape of a revolution in 2008 when it endorsed the idea of democracy. The opportunity lay in the fact that only 10% of youth cast their ballots and the target was to encourage the remaining 90% to vote. 

This movement was not just a call for action but a platform (www.jaagore.com) that provided a potential voter all the information and the facilities for becoming a part of the electoral process.

“The impact was immense. We did a study in March measuring the impact on the brand. 85% of the respondents narrated the campaign back to us. It was the same target group we tried reaching through the campaign. In terms of sales, the results were overwhelming. While tea industry in India is growing at 3%, we have been growing much faster since the campaign was launched,” Talwar added.

The success of the campaign led to further improvisation. “We decided to move from one issue to another and this time the target was corruption,” Talwar said. The new Jaago Re —christened  ‘Aaj Se Khilana Bandh, Pilana Shuru’ — urges the citizens to wake up and fight against corruption.

Talwar explains, “Corruption is a malaise that is endemic to our everyday life. It’s our next connect point with our consumers. It’s one problem we all detest but still are part of.” The ‘Khilana Bandh, Pilana Shuru’ campaign will be a 360-degree integrated marketing effort, which will connect equally with consumers across Tata Tea’s retail network and through online and mobile touch points.

A myriad of on-ground initiatives will take the message closer to people. Tata Tea will also come out with a ‘Jaago Re Corruption Index’ to gauge people’s perception about corruption and quantify it. Tata Tea will also promote December 9, which is internationally celebrated as ‘Anti-Corruption Day’.

“We have kept about 1,00,000 pledge books with kirana stores across the country, and the focus this time is on people at the grass-root level,” she said.

This time Tata Tea hasn’t put a number to pledges it wants (unlike the one billion figure it had for the last campaign), but Talwar said, “a billion wouldn’t be bad.”