A calendar that kept Kingfisher alive and kicking

The Kingfisher calendar from the house of UB is one of the oldest and long-surviving forms of content marketing in print by any alcohol brand in India. The content property launched 18 years ago, in the form of a calendar, has a deep-dived marketing insight behind its inception and helps the beer brand set its glamorous and premium quotient high among the audience.

The property now fetches a PR value three times more of the cost involved in the making of the calendar in terms of ROI, said Gurpreet Singh, Head Marketing, United Breweries.

He said, “It helps create hours of content. Otherwise, I had to pay and create. This is a ready idea and acceptable to many young people. According to our research, the calendar helps meet the brand score as far as glamour and style is concerned.”

There was a time when Kingfisher used to produce a lot of content around fashion. But since sports started taking the centre-stage, especially with the advent of IPL, the brand’s focus shifted towards other genres of content and advertising. The Kingfisher calendar alone kept the style and glamour quotient high for the brand in all these years. “We too do a lot of campaigns around cricket and celebrities. But I don’t think we are doing anything significant enough to continue to score well on the aspect of style and glamour. What boosts our scores in this regard is single-handedly the Kingfisher calendar.”

Talking about the reason for which the brand wants itself to be associated with style, fashion and glamour, Singh said, “Beer is not a common man’s drink. It is priced expensive, unlike the western market. We are placed for the set of audience that is a premium set of alcohol drinkers. A common man can’t afford beer on a regular basis. Therefore, we need to stay contemporary, stylish and glamorous to them. The calendar helps make sure those scores really up.”

In 1991, when the economy started opening up, and the international brands started entering India across the sectors, many of the Indian brands disappeared and were not able to withstand the competition.

Singh said that if Kingfisher didn’t have the style and glamour quotient attached, it would have also vanished. “It helps in keeping the desire for the brand high, withstanding the slew of competition from the international brands that have come in. I don’t think we would have been able to price Kingfisher variants Kingfisher Ultra, Ultra Max, Storm at a premium price so successfully. A lot of its goes into the style and glamour quotient we have created in all these years.”

The story behind the inception of the calendar

Singh, who has been involved in the calendar’s journey since the inception, said the idea started with a simple conversation with photographer Atul Kasbekar in the summers of 2002. It was then when the brand decided to do something in the fashion space.

He said, “In those days fashion existed only in exclusive, high-end and by invite-only kind of a zone. Therefore, marketing on the lines of fashion helped us to associate with and be seen as a glamorous and stylish brand. It also started making it feel like an exclusive brand.”

Continued to tell the story, Singh said, “In those days a young and upcoming photographer Atul Kasbekar, who is now a celebrity, came up with this idea at our office. He wasn’t a celebrity photographer then. He said that the only brand that can pull off a yearly calendar property in India is Kingfisher.” 

Over some time, Kingfisher also became a platform for the discovery of talent for the fashion and film industry at large.

Singh said, “Many people won’t recall this, but in 2003 when we launched the first calendar, there is a very famous actress who was discovered on the calendar. No one had heard of her back then. Her name is Katrina Kaif. Like this, a lot of talent was discovered on the platform.”

NDTV Goodtimes and Kingfisher’s friendship goes back in time

Interestingly, NDTV’s English lifestyle channel Goodtimes’ name comes from the Kingfisher’s brand slogan ‘The king of good times’. “While we ended the partnership a few years ago and are no longer in a business partnership as such, we gave them the rights to continue with the name Goodtimes,” added Singh.

The production and the distribution of the calendar is minimal and not accessed by all. But the brand wanted to make it appealing and aspiring for the consumers at a mass level.

Singh said, “The only way we could have done that is by creating content around the calendar and put on digital media or television. Therefore, we have Goodtimes as our television partner and create the whole story behind the shoot of the calendar.”

Although TV is an expensive property to invest in, Singh said the medium gives the brand a mass appeal.

This year, the series was shot in Cape Town, South Africa. The six-part series around the making of the calendar premiered on January 11, 2020, and airs every Saturday at 10 pm on Goodtimes and its website www.mygoodtimes.in.

Kingfisher’s digital strategy to promote the calendar

When the calendar was launched, digital was a minuscule medium then. Therefore, the calendar was entirely conceived on the print medium. But gradually, the digital medium started fetching footage and allowed the brand to promote the calendar at the mass level.

Singh commented, “Digital has been very beneficial for us. Earlier there was only buzz a week or after the launch. That time the opportunity to showcase the calendar was very limited. Now we have a lot of content to put out throughout the year.”

Now, the brand produces content throughout the year. The brand has created online content ‘Models diaries’, ‘Travel Diaries’ and ‘Photographer’s diary’, where both the models and the photographer share their experiences during the making of the calendar. This year onwards, Kingfisher has also started putting out content at the beginning of each month around the making of that month’s calendar.

The brand’s involvement in the calendar creation and execution is mostly around the content produced in the making of the calendar.

“As far as selecting locations is concerned, Atul proposes options, we study and have a healthy conversation about it and select it jointly. He selects the models as he understands that world better. And as far as how is it going to be shot is entirely left to the professionalism of Atul and his team. We trust him to deliver the best calendar each year,” said Singh.

Some of the behind the scenes and the making of the calendar videos:

The first look of this year’s calendar:

Will Kingfisher calendar ever feature male models?

While the brand mainly has its core audience between the age group of 21-35 and primarily men, the calendar’s audience has a relatively healthy ratio of females as well because of the glamour, fashion angle and style quotient attached to it. 

So why doesn’t the brand at least for once create a calendar to win their female audience’s hearts?

Singh answered, “We have been talking about it for the last 2-3 years. It’s one of our thoughts when we want to do something radically different. We are open to the idea. We get asked about it by our female TG. You never know, we might just do it.”

Why calendar is not accessible to everyday consumers 

There is a full-fledged marketing strategy around not distributing the calendar at scale. The brand wanted to create the aura of the calendar as not very accessible. Kingfisher distributes the calendar among its few clients and friends. The calendar is available in two versions. One is the wall calendar, “which is a rare commodity and difficult to gets hands-on” and the other one is a desktop commodity “that we give out to friends, partners and media. At request, we make it more available to them freely”, said Singh. 

Singh concluded, “It’s one of those things when everybody has heard of it, but very few get access to it. That’s the part of the marketing strategy. When I put a price to something, then it is something whose price is known, but if we don’t put a price to something, that becomes priceless.”