Brands have leveraged unique concepts to get in to the skin of their target audience and make themselves appealing. They have hung out with celebrities, shouted their uniqueness from rooftops, created scandals and used everything under the sun to make themselves heard and differentiated.
So it was a pleasant surprise when I got invited to the ‘Signature Look’ launch of Asian Paints themed “The World Homeward”. Having moved away from just talking about the walls, AP has ventured in to ‘home décor’ ideas for Indian consumers with a sense of adventure. But what surprised me the most was their association with travel.
Their philosophy is that every home is the embodiment of the person or family that lives there. More often than not the person creates his décor based on the places that he has visited and fills it with memorabilia from his travels. Hence each décor style was carefully researched by the AP team and customized in a way to make their memories permanent in the most personalized way possible.
Vicarious travels:
The event itself was aptly designed as an interaction with 3 people who are involved with travel in a very unconventional manner.
Kaustubh Khade is a kayaker and holds the Limca Record for completing a 500 Kms journey from Mumbai to Goa and from Kutch to Kanyakumari along the west coast of India. His anecdotes about his intrepid adventure where his girlfriend was riding a bicycle parallel to the path he had taken was fun and inspiring.
Yeshwant Holkar related his experiences of launching the one of its kind travel platform –Umoja- for families having people with limited mobility. His pictures depicted people experiencing the sea for the first time in a specially built float for the physically challenged, was heart-warming.
Rishabh Joshi was full of energy while narrating his experiences as a young EDM musician who globe trots and performs at aspirational festivals like Tomorrowland and Sunburn. His tales about overcoming the fear of flying and going where probably no ‘gujju’ has gone before, were amusing and exhilarating.
The new platform of AP seems to be an all pervasive one truly taking the brand to unchartered territories for a paint company. The brand extension becomes more connected to its core audience with its new philosophy and makes the category more interesting. Will be interesting if it does a backward integration in to the travel business itself.. what say?