Amit Ghugre on evolution of Shell Lubricants’ marketing strategy & roadmap for India

Shell Lubricants is a division of Shell Global, a multinational energy company with a long-standing reputation for excellence in the oil and gas industry. Shell Lubricants specializes in providing high-quality lubrication solutions for both automotive and industrial applications. With a focus on innovation, technology, and sustainability, Shell Lubricants aims to meet the evolving needs of its customers while maintaining a commitment to environmental responsibility.

In an exclusive interaction with Adgully, Amit Ghugre, Chief Marketing Officer, Shell Lubricants India, speaks about how Shell Lubricants engages with consumers and industry professionals through various channels, including marketing campaigns, brand ambassadors, strategic partnerships, and targeted outreach programs. By understanding the unique needs of different sectors within the lubricants market, Shell formulates tailored strategies to enhance brand awareness, drive product adoption, and build long-term relationships with its stakeholders. Ghugre also sheds light on Shell’s extensive engagement with the mechanics community and how it has worked out for the company.

Could you tell us about Shell Lubricants’ growth strategy and roadmap for India? What are your key focus areas for 2024?

At Shell Lubricant, our typical business gets divided into two main parts – the automotive lubricant side and the industrial lubricant side. We have a slightly different approach and strategy towards both the verticals, given the needs of those sectors and how we see those sectors evolving. Talking about the automotive lubricant side, we see a lot more interaction with the consumers, and therefore, we are focusing primarily on brand building, where we basically drive our brand with influencers like mechanics, for example. We create our presence via our ATL and BTL marketing activities; then that brand building has to be complemented by the right product portfolio – you have a brand, but if you do not have the right product, obviously you can’t sell.

The third step is the distribution network, which will allow us to basically sell that portfolio at the right place. Our growth strategy, therefore, in terms of the automotive lubricants will be about creating the right marketing campaigns and brand and supporting it with a product portfolio that is relevant for the consumers, and then eventually creating a very robust distribution infrastructure so that we can continue to build that.

On the industrial side, the brand still has a value because that gives us the right access with our customers to talk about our value proposition. But the big part of the industrial lubricant strategy is really talking about what is the total value that we can add as a Shell company – not just being a lubricant provider, but also the services which come along with it. Lubricant has multiple requirements, not just as a manual product, but also its monitoring technology, testing the product, if required, some filtration, and when it gets out of use, then its collection and recycling, etc. There are quite a few things which are basically associated with that journey, where we can play as an important company. And that’s our outlook.

At the core, of course, is our R&D, the global expertise that we bring being the No. 1 in lubricants for 17 years in a row now across all the sectors of lubricants. We definitely do have a good brand and a solid R&D product development capability at place. But now, it is about figuring out who are our target sectors where we want to focus on and what do the consumers need – and not just as a lubricant product, but the entire services that we can potentially offer. So, these are the two different approaches that we take for automotive versus industrial.

Shell had roped in Shahid Kapoor as the brand ambassador for its Lubricants business last year. What was the strategy behind this association and what was the traction that you saw for the campaign – ‘Rukna Mushkil Hai’?

Brand building, particularly for the automotive lyrical side, was an important pillar of our strategy. One of the important opportunities that we see here is to create a stronger brand awareness and brand preference for our brand, and for that, we decided to basically go via a celebrity route, because we definitely believe that that can just add that additional traction, or it can at least accelerate those parameters of the brand building that we wanted to associate with. But, it wouldn’t have been possible without having the right celebrity on board who can actually really represent the values that we want to basically talk about being shell, and that’s why we are very happy to get Shahid Kapoor on board when we started last year, because Shahid Kapoor is the kind of person who really represents the brand values of hard work, having that talent, and then basically he himself is a very passionate biker.

We are very happy to say that our first year of association has been very fruitful for us. We measure our presence not just in terms of our volume growth, but also in terms of the brand scores that we normally measure. We definitely see a significant increase in those parameters, which gives us confidence that our choice and Shahid coming on board definitely has helped our brand.

How has this association with Shahid Kapoor helped you engage with the youth TG? 

Shahid himself is a big name and his popularity is not limited to only the youth target audience, but cuts across age-groups, which is one of the reasons why we are so happy to have him on board. We always continue to measure our brand scores, and we also try to see who are our target customers, are they even better skewed for the brand – parameters that we want to measure against the general public. With our brand tracking we have found that our TG has definitely been able to connect better with Shahid, besides he also has his own brand following.

What is the rationale and significance of Rukna Mushkil Hai (RMH) 2.0 for Shell and the Indian consumer market? What would be your marketing strategy for RMH 2.0?

With RMH 2.0, we are launching an upgraded portfolio of Shell Advance AX5 and AX7 range of lubricants in limited-edition packs featuring Shahid Kapoor on the pack. An important part of our strategy is to be meaningfully available on the shelf for the consumers. Our product should stand out on store shelves. We believe that this packaging with Shahid should definitely help us to get more traction and demand from our target audience.

We are also going to maximize this opportunity via our robust marketing programs, which is a combination of both ATL and BTL. For us, BTL is an important part of our strategy because a lot of the business happens via the role of influencers or mechanics, because most of the consumers still do not necessarily get into the day-to-day understanding of what lubricants they are using. Therefore, the mechanic plays an important part.

We have a very holistic program now, which will be focused on the trade, the displays, distribution, as well as mechanics’ engagement and activation. Alongside, we will also have a direct engagement with our consumers now with appropriate digital programs, presence in the ATL channels, PR events, etc., to make it even more attractive and bigger for us.

What are the various partnerships and collaborations that Shell has entered into to strengthen its marketing efforts in India? 

We have collaborated with influencers who are currently active in a particular area and who are talking about our product, the experiences that they’ve had after using Shell, and so on. But we are focusing more on the mechanics community, because they are the influencers for us. When the consumer, who doesn’t understand oil, comes to change the oil, the mechanic is the person who will basically decide or recommend to him as to which brand to use. A large part of our influence strategy is for the mechanics community and we have been actively engaging with and doing a lot of work with our mechanics not just via normal reactivations, but also building a more holistic program to engage with them. It talks about basic training of the product – not just a Shell product, but about the whole technology and how it is changing. We do a lot of those trainings.

Last year, we also launched a program for the mechanics, called ‘Sapne honge apne’, which goes beyond the transactions that we any way do. It enables at least one mechanic per week. That is how we are executing it to support him financially to an extent, to meet his objectives and aspirations of becoming even more successful. We carried out a very extensive study last year before we launched that campaign. You have to really understand what the mechanics want. They talked about three or four big areas where they would like to collaborate or expect some companies to partner with them – such as their own training and development, gaining recognition within their own community, upgrading their skills to be able to service their customers, and the financial security of their family, specifically their children’s education. Basis that we came up with the ‘Sapne honge apne’ campaign, where every week we helped one mechanic financially or otherwise to get one step closer to his dream.

As far as the media mix strategy is concerned, what media are you investing in more and why? How are you sharpening your digital marketing plans?

Before media, I’ll come to the marketing mix – for us, it’s a combination of what we call the media side of it and BTL, which is trade driven. We have a very strong focus on trade activation, because the mechanics community, the retailers play a very significant role. A lot of our investments will continue to go into activating the trade channels. As far as the ATL side is concerned, which is the media part of it, definitely we have a combination, but it will be more skewed towards digital. So, we are definitely looking at social media leverage, and at the same time the OTT platforms. We will be basically focusing on digital-focused ATL media, which is a combination of ATL as well as VTL. Our aim is longer activity and not just a one-time burst, where after six weeks you forget everything. For this we need to keep creating stories and continue to engage our target audience with more and more news in the future.

Shell Lubricants had their first ever movie collaboration with YRF’s ‘Pathaan’. How was the entire experience and what kind of ROI did you garner? Are there any further movie associations lined up?

‘Pathaan’ was our first ever movie collaboration and we are very excited with the opportunity. It received a lot of praise from both Yashraj and Shah Rukh Khan. It’s almost one and a half years since that collaboration, but the recall is very strong. Ultimately, everything has to translate into volumes for the business and profitability. In that sense, I think it has become definitely a very big element of our strategy. And as I said, people still recall those associations, which definitely means that it has helped to also drive the brand image in some way or the other. To that extent, we are very happy with that association. As far as the future options of collaborations are concerned, I think it remains a very interesting marketing strategy, but we have to evaluate in context of what other choices we have and also in the context of, let’s say, the movie being talked about – what is the message that the movie or a celebrity is conveying and how does it gel with the brand and the story that we want to stand for? If there is a good amalgamation, then why not? We can definitely look into that.