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avatar of Hero Honda, announced that its dealers sold a record 650,000 motorcycles and scooters in October. Farmers had harvested their crops, and salaried people had got Diwali bonuses; the company had no reason to complain. Some days before that, it had declared its financial results for the quarter ended September 2011, the first full quarter without Honda as a shareholder, which showed that sale as well as profit had hit at an all-time high. For several years, the Munjals, the promoters of the company, have been known as sharp businessmen but their success was always credited to technology and innovation from Honda. The ride without Honda was the real test of their skills. The Munjals and Honda had formed Hero Honda, a 26-26 joint venture, in the late-1980s. The first sign of discord became visible over ten years ago when Honda set up a 100 per cent arm, Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India. Finally, on December 16 last year, Hero Honda informed the stock markets that the partnership was over and Honda would soon exit the company. Click NEXT to read more...
There were some international cases in the lot, though the majority was Indian. Some were success stories, others
were not. The job from here was to find the right specialist to rename the company and design a new brand, and then find an advertising agency that could convey the makeover in an effective way. In the days that followed, the Munjals sent out feelers to brand specialists from across the world. One of the gobetweens contacted Charles Wright of Wolff Ollins, an Omnicom company. Wright perhaps knew that this was no small opportunity: Hero Honda (as it was called then) was the largest Indian maker of two-wheelers. The very next day, he was in the Hero Honda office in a cramped south Delhi market (the Munjals don't move out of the
market apparently because they consider it lucky for them) to meet Munjal and his brother, Sunil. Click NEXT to read more...
Once the anthem was ready, A R Rahman was contracted to set it to music and sing it as well. Rahman was in Los
Angeles where he composed the tune. An anxious Munjal went over every stanza and line with him on Skype. Once Rahman had done his job, film maker
Anurag Kashyap (Dev D, Gulaal, Black Friday, That Girl in Yellow Boots et cetera) was brought on board to make a film around it. The storyboard was the achievements of ordinary people - a girl from Jharkhand who wins a medal at a gymnastics championship, a young boy who wins a dance contest et cetera. The celebrities on the company's rolls - film stars like Hrithik Roshan and cricketers like Virender Sehwag - were kept out of it, perhaps because the Munjals didn't want the message to get lost. Kashyap shot the film at various locations in India, except the shots of Rahman which were done in Los Angeles. The Munjals were now ready to roll. Click NEXT to read more...
The results, Dua claims, have been better than expected. "Our market share in motorcycles has improved from 54.5
per cent to 55.5 per cent in the last one year, and our mindshare has gone up by four percentage points after the campaign." Spontaneous brand awareness, where people are asked to name two or three motorcycle brands, Dua says, has improved from 99 per cent in the Hero Honda era to 100 per cent in the Hero MotoCorp days. These are still early days; the challenge is to sustain it in the future.
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