How redBus built a strong connect by being culturally relevant to Bharat

redBus, an established player in the intercity bus ticketing sector, recently rolled out its digital-first campaign featuring brand ambassador and South superstar Allu Arjun. With the two commercials that were launched across digital and social mediums, including national and regional TV, redBus intends to mature, from promoting functional aspects of its service, to building an emotional and cultural connect with its audience across India.

Through extensive research across 15 cities, redBus culled out some interesting insights – both cultural and emotional – which were part of the overarching theme and narrative for the campaign.

In an exclusive interaction with Adgully for their column Talking Insights, Pallavi Chopra, Senior VP & Head of Marketing, redBus, spoke in detail the ideation, concept of the campaign.

What’s the objective of this film and who are you targeting with these digital films?

We launched our first digital-first brand campaign with our brand ambassador, Icon Star Allu Arjun, ahead of the festive season, with the objective of positioning ourselves at the center of intercity bus travel in the country, this festive season. As part of the campaign, we rolled out two ad-films with Allu Arjun in the lead, delivering the message of “bringing your loved ones and dreams closer with redBus”. Being the first organised digital player in the industry, redBus is clearly positioned and recognised as the go-to platform for intercity bus ticketing in the country and we now intend to progress from a functional positioning, to one that builds a more emotional and cultural connection with our audience. We aim to build enduring relationships, trigger a habit change among offline ticketing travelers, as well as attract young first-timers, and have crafted the campaign to that effect.

The campaign, based on the theme, “redBus: Apno ko, sapno ko kareeb laye”, we are poised to be perceived as enablers, allowing people to follow their dreams as well as perform their family duties, but not at the cost of one another. We are targeting both, our existing user base, to strengthen our relationship with them, as well as new users, including offline-only ticket purchasers. Being a digital first campaign, we intend to reach and engage with all people who seek to travel by bus and use smartphones.

How did you arrive at the insights? What insights did that extensive research reveal?

We undertook extensive research across 15 cities and reached out to hundreds of people from different walks of life with the objective of identifying the emotional and cultural anchors that we needed to create the theme for the campaign. The two aspects that stood out were – ‘India dreams big’, people are ambitious, with a zeal to make it big in life; and ‘Family comes first’, commitment towards family ranks high in priority. This creates a dilemma among many, having to choose either ‘ambitious goals’ or staying connected to loved ones and we saw here a clear opportunity to resolve the conflict and ease the tension by positioning ourselves as an enabler, allowing people to follow their dreams as well as perform their family duties. With this emerged the campaign tagline – ‘redBus: Apno ko, sapno ko kareeb laye’.

What was the brief given to the agency? What was the idea and thinking behind these two films by the agency?

With this campaign, we wanted to:

• Onboard users from Tier 2, 3 markets who still book their tickets offline and are unaware of online bus ticketing
• Become a brand for Bharat , given our extensive coverage to the remotest parts of the country
• Stake ownership of the bus category as the largest and most trusted bus booking platform

Our brief, therefore, to the agency was to create a culturally and emotionally powerful campaign which marries the two dominant themes mentioned above for Bharat.

Given this brief, the agency came up with two strong storylines that tackled the dilemma of our target audience, head-on. The storylines in both these ideas are inspired by the responses/user persona that we got during our consumer research, thus capturing the emotional essence attached to our brand and with a functional aspect attached, we established redBus as an enabler that bridges the gap between dreams and duties.

How do you plan to leverage the films to get the desired impact?

The ad-films will be promoted extensively on digital and social media platforms, including national and regional TV. This will allow us to reach and engage with our target audience spread across the country and across age groups very effectively. The narratives in the ad films implies redBus’ strong bond with our customers, by being culturally relevant to Bharat as well as having a strong connect with individual emotions and aspirations, with extremely relatable storytelling. The other important aspect that makes a huge difference is, the presence of icon star Allu Arjun in the campaign, which will help us reach his huge fan base in every market.

What are the films expected to do for Brand redBus and how do plan to measure the effectiveness of the campaign?

The film is expected to:

• Change the brand narrative - from a functional narrative to a cultural, emotional narrative
• Create awareness for redBus in Tier 2, 3 markets and recruit the offline users to redBus
• Build an emotional and cultural relationship with our audience
• Stake ownership of the bus category as the largest and most trusted bus booking platform

We would ascertain the campaign performance by measuring brand health scores across markets.