With the right mix of ad campaign and social awareness, Tata Tea seems to have got the perfect brew
The Jaago Re Facebook page has the image of a large plain white mug with the morning newspaper next to it. The image captures the subtlety with which an approximately $1 billion brand like Tata Tea (now Tata Global Beverages) has transformed the traditional marketing of tea. The white mug has no branding of Tata Tea on it, and yet the slogan Jaago Re and Tata Tea are synonymous.
Behind the image lies one of the most successful brand campaigns to have come out of India in the last five years. This is clearly reflected in the almost three lakh page likes Jaago Re has; its nearest competitor, Brooke Bond Taj Mahal (by Hindustan Unilever), has 3,014 likes. The ‘likes’ are also a reflection of how Tata Tea changed the target audience of tea from a middle-aged person to the youth brigade hungry for change. And it did so without screaming the brand name out.
When it launched the Jaago Re campaign in 2007, it had no idea what it stumbled on to. Jaago Re—meaning ‘Wake Up’—was a brand campaign to bring all the Tata brands of tea like Agni, Gemini, Kanan Devan, under the parent brand of Tata Tea. It was a bid to take on a serious competitor, HUL. What they did, in turn, was take on serious issues and become the bridge between problems and solutions. The marriage between Jaago Re, a social awakening, and Tata Tea created a case study for any cause marketing campaign not only because of the scale of the idea but also for its reach.
Sanjiv Sarin, regional president, South Asia, Tata Global Beverages, says, “While tea may wake you up, Tata Tea awakens you. The campaign demonstrated Tata Tea’s thought leadership in positioning tea as a medium of ‘social awakening’ and not just ‘physical awakening’.”
While the theme matched the angst of youngsters, it also helped Tata Tea reach scale. By propagating their theme during the 2009 elections, the campaign ensured that it addressed at least 720-780 million people, those above 18 and eligible to vote.
All along, Tata Tea has been able to ride the wave of trends in social activism. After the buzz of elections died down, and even before anyone could anticipate the spate of corruption scandals that would unfold in the years to come, Jaago Re had moved on to the theme of corruption.
(This story appears in the 07 December, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)