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Argentine and FC Barcelona star Lionel Messi will be the global brand ambassador for Tata Motors’ passenger vehicles for the next two years.
In a telephonic interview with BusinessLine , Mayank Pareek, President of the company’s passenger vehicle business unit, said roping in Messi was an important initiative to connect with buyers.
On Tuesday, Tata Motors will kick off a campaign, ‘#madeofgreat’, featuring Messi. The core idea is: ‘what drives us from within is what makes us great’. The process of selecting Messi as brand ambassador began with a careful study of the key pillars that the company felt underlined its brand image.
Brand image: cool According to Pareek, the company wanted the brand image to convey that it was trustworthy, a pioneer and cool. “To connect with young people, we wanted to be cool,” said Pareek.
It was clear that a face was needed to make the right connect with young buyers, which meant choosing celebrities from the predictable arena of sports and films. And that’s how the company zeroed in on Messi as brand ambassador.
“We realised it had to be a different approach and our survey took us to Messi,” said Pareek. The football icon fit the bill perfectly as he is seen to be cool, inspiring and confident. He is also enormously self-driven and it took him 17 years of hard work to overcome tough odds and become successful, said Pareek. “Our survey also showed that soccer is the new cool and cricket is actually perceived as a desi sport among today’s youth,” he added. Messi drives a Range Rover, whose manufacturer, Jaguar Land Rover, is owned by Tata Motors. To that extent, there is already an association of sorts although his promotional efforts will be confined to the Indian carmaker’s own brands.
From Pareek’s perspective, this is a critical point for Tata Motors, given that it has a lot of ground to cover after the Nano setback. The Zest and Bolt represented a transition and it is hoped that Messi will be able to push the next range of products by striking the right note with younger buyers.
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