Amul's Tasty Musical Journey

Amul is India’s largest milk brand. It has now created 42 other milk based product brands. These 43 brands serve consumers at breakfast (milk, butter, cheese) to end dinner time desserts like gulab jamun, basundi etc. While Amul, with the tagline “The Taste of India”, was the master brand, individual sub-brands needed to be highlighted and had aggressive sale targets.

India is a land which epitomises unity in diversity. With 28 states, 18 official languages and 2000 dialects, it presents an almost unique marketing challenge. Amul needed to find content which would allow seamless integration of all its brands, communicate offers and marketing activities through a single, distinct platform, cutting across states, religion, age and gender.

Bollywood music has long been the boundary breaker across the vastness of India and was identified as the ideal content. Amul needed to find a medium that would marry format and content with each of the brands. Amul tied up with Star Plus, the country’s largest TV channel, that broadcast a show across India with contestants from each of the 28 states. This was a one hour musical talent contest broadcast at primetime weekend slots over 21 weeks. Amul decided to put more than 70% of its campaign spend in the programme. The show “Amul - The Voice of India” evoked the spirit of “The Taste of India”. The show’s content allowed Amul to integrate and highlight multiple products, some of which would otherwise never have been advertised for lack of advertising budget.

This was the first time that a company philosophy and anthem, “Manthan” was integrated into show content. The final 4 contestants from different states performed the Amul Manthan song together. An on-pack contest was designed to leverage the popularity of contestants who had become mini-celebrities. Amul used them on 1 million ice cream packs across India, to create a unique scratch-sms-win contest, which led to 30% increased off-peak sales. The brand mascot, the Amul Buttergirl, was integrated into program content by getting her to strut across the screen as the judges announced the scores.
Amul converted all four ad breaks in each episode to Utterly Butterly Breaks. Amul also  printed the integrated program logo across 30m butterpacks, 9m milk pouches and 1000 milk vans and hosted the program on Amul’s website.

Amul sales turnover grew by a record 28% in 2009. Amul touched the lives of 35 million people across India over 21 weeks through the show.