Truck makers focus on branding, advertising; media spends increase ten times

MUMBAI: Truck makers are increasingly loosening the purse strings for branding and mass media advertising. The staid B2B segment is tapping B2C channels of TV advertising and print campaigns to grab the eyeballs.

If Tata Motors is sponsoring an IPL team and organising truck, its nearest competitor Ashok Leyland has Mahendra Singh Dhoni as its brand ambassador, trying to improve its pan-India presence.

ET learns that the spending on mass media has jumped almost 10 times in the past five years to Rs 200 crore at end of FY14 and it is going up in the double digits. For Tata Motors, the share of mass media advertising in its overall marketing mix has gone up from 15 per cent to almost 50 per cent in recent years, whereas for Ashok Leyland it is about 20 per cent.

The advent of mass media advertising began with the creation of small commercial vehicle category by Tata Motors in 2005 with Ace, as the product catered to a completely new customer base in form of small traders. With the entry of global majors like Daimler and Volvo, the focus on bigger trucks has become imminent for the top two.




Ravi Pisharody, ED and president of commercial vehicle business at Tata Motors says, with the international competition coming in, people need to be convinced that foreign is not necessarily better than local.

“Truck racing or sponsoring an IPL Team is all response to things like that We do believe that while the details of the conversation has to be dealt through customer meets and road shows, but we also need to do umbrella branding for Tata Commercial Vehicle,” said Pisharody.

Unlike the past, when medium and heavy duty trucks were known as 2518 or 4024 derived from tonnage category and engine horsepower, today the category has its own brands like Tata Prima, Tata Ultra or Ashok Leyland Boss or Ashok Leyland Captain.

While Ashok Leyland has spent over 10s of crores in hiring Mahendar Singh Dhoni as its brand ambassador, Vinod Dasari, MD of the company says, even as Dhoni has a role to play, but he would rather prefer investing in front line point of sale then advertisement.

“Our marketing spend is 80 per cent towards point of sale. We are not in the business, which says, this is a sexy vehicle, so buy it. My customer is a businessman, they buy the vehicle to do the business, they have to generate the return, so I have to give him a product that performs and continues to perform,”said Dasari. But then how effective can the mass media advertising be for a B2B segment like commercial vehicle? For sure mass media has a role to play in commercial vehicle business, says Alpana Parida, president at brand strategy firm DY Works but the spends by truck makers so far have been quiet disproportionate.

Parida says mass media is a much cluttered medium and delivering efficiency is quiet challenging.

“The effectiveness of a mass media campaign cannot be measured and hence one needs to be judicious about allocating money into this vibrant medium,” she added.

“Ingredient branding can be appropriate for a B2B industry like commercial vehicle, for example owning a high-tech Tata truck can be a good selling for a logisitic firm to its customers, just like how Carl Ziess lens became a big selling point for Nokia,” observes Parida.