It is common for big brands to onboard 20-30 or even hundred influencers as media channels to amplify their mainline ad campaign. In such a scenario, not all such influencer collaborations end up making an impact on the consumers’ minds and cause spillage of the marketing spends.
On the other hand, if one has to effectively engage with consumers through collaborations, the brands should strategically collaborate with fewer influencers rather than using them as a media channel, focusing on the content quality, aesthetics and relatability of the content with the creator’s audience. So many times, when it comes to brand-influencer partnerships, influencers are made to post about the brand which is not even close to the tonality of content that their audience likes.
Returning with a mainline campaign after a gap of 4-5 years, Samsonite recently launched its biggest campaign ‘Tested like Samsonite’.
While the mainline ad film of the campaign features Amitabh Bachchan, Yuvraj Singh and Mithali Raj - for its digital content strategy, instead of spending heftily on TVC distribution, the brand collaborated with seven influencers across categories. The influencer leg of the campaign has garnered massive attention across social media.
What worked in the brand’s favour is that it ensured to focus on the relatability, aesthetics and impact of the content influencers created for the brand, instead of using them just as media channels.
The influencer leg of the campaign garnered an engagement rate of 63.7% (views, share, comments, likes etc) and helped fetch close to a million visits on the Samsonite website.
The campaign seeks to create common ground with individuals that have come face to face with the various adversities of life and is a testament to those who chose to rise back up and face the challenges with confidence and valour, tying it with the insight of various tests the Samosnite bags go through before reaching the market.
Pradnya Popade, Head - Marketing Communications at Samsonite South Asia, said, “The personality of the brand is more functional. People know the brand because of its reliability, and durability. But we also wanted to imbibe an emotional and soft connect with the consumers by positioning it as a brand of stature and legacy.”
Samsonite collaborated with seven influencers: drummer Sivamani, DJ and host Nikhil Chinapa, actor Gaurav Kapoor, Boxer Mary Kom, Bruised passport influencer couple Savi Munjal and Vidit Taneja, choreographer Rukmini Vijayakumar and actor and model Manushi Chillar.
Talking about the brand’s digital content strategy, Popade said, “When it comes to social media audience, I personally haven't seen ads that perform well in terms of impact. We don’t like to see ads on social media. We like to engage with the content digitally and influencers are the biggest content creators. We thought to bring the ‘Tested like Samsonite’ campaign alive on digital by associating with influencers. The idea was to communicate the different six tests through 7 different influencers.”
She further said, “Samsonite TG is a well-travelled premium audience. Therefore, we had to communicate something which is relatable and impactful yet aesthetics. We also wanted to tap the various affinity and passion points of our audience and hence onboarded influencers across categories.”
Let’s take a look at how each influencer created content for their audience, which relates to the brand’s functionality and also keeps in mind the creators’ audience's taste.
Manushi Chillar tested the bags in sub-zero temperatures by keeping the bag for more than 48 hours in an ice block.
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Drummer Sivamani composed a music piece by doing a dart test on the Samsonite bag to check its endurance and durability.
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Nikhil Chinapa did the 50-cycle tumble test by throwing it 1000 steps down.
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Gaurav Kapoor created a video by attaching the bag with the balloons and flying it in the air to show how light the bag is and ultimately dropping it from 331 metres height.
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Mary Kom created a video by using it as a boxing bag to test it for its impact and the amount of pressure it can endure.
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Bruised passport influencer couple Savi Munjal and Vidit Taneja took Samsonite suitcases with them for their February trips across busy airports, cobbled streets of Paris to the snow-laden Arctic Circle and the igloos of Lapland. Altogether, they rolled and tested for 32 kilometres.
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Choreographer Rukmini Vijayakumar created a video of her dancing on the bag:
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Popade emphasised that the brand ensured to leverage the content style of the individual influencer and not asked them to create something just to match the brand’s mainline campaign.
While brand fitment and engagement of the influencer is important, Popade pointed out that it’s important to collaborate with an influencer who is very much willing to create good impactful good quality content for the brand on his/her own instead of just creating a random post about the brand to earn some money.
“For example, Savi and Vidit (known for their Instagram page Bruisedpassports) travel a lot. They were travelling to a country, but we were not fine with the choice of the place. So, we decided to wait. Their video was supposed to go in early January, but we waited for them to travel to Finland which aligned with us and eventually we put up the video in February. In the case of Sivamani, he created a new music composition for us. Gaurav Kapoor was willing to travel to Palgarh for us to do the test,” said Popade.
All seven content pieces created by the influencers were conceptualised and executed in 1.5 months in collaboration with Ashish Khazanchi’s Enormous Brands.
Not just for travellers, but luggage have an equally important role to play during weddings. Therefore, last year, the brand also collaborated with designers, stylists and Karan Johar to promote Samsonite bags’ utility.
A few of the posts for the wedding season by Samsonite last year:
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Popade doesn’t believe in collaborating with content platforms for brand integrations. Stating the reason behind the same, she said, “I don’t believe in those content integrations, which also holds true for in-film integrations. As a marketer, it’s only I who would be happy looking at the integration and the consumers will not even notice. This has come from learning only when we tied up with a James Bond movie years ago, My Name is Khan and Agent Vinod movies. There was absolutely no brand recall from the movies. It’s like a push mechanism.”
She added, “TVF and FilterCopy of the world create good content, but people watch it for their storyline. Instead of burning money in integrations there, I can use that money for my own branded content and do justice to the story, brand and influencer.”
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