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Brand Introduction
Brooke Bond Red Label is one of India’s oldest Tea brands with a history of 110 years, while their partners for the Breaking Barriers campaign, TheBetterIndia, a tech-media platform that uses impactful storytelling and claim to reach over 50 million people every month.
Summary
With the turn of the millennium, the Indian society has grown to accept and be inclusive of more and more diversity and different people, and yet certain stereotypes still remain intact. The erosion of such stereotypes from the minds of the Indian audience was one of the core objectives of the Breaking Barriers campaign.
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Problem Statement/Objective
With Breaking Barriers, Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia intended to help India unlearn stereotypes by capturing five true stories about how the country is dismantling prejudices and paving the way for an inclusive India.
Shiva Krishnamurthy, Category Head - Beverages, Hindustan Unilever Limited, said, “Brooke Bond Red Label stands for inclusiveness. We believe that heartwarming stories, like that of the harmony in Mallah village, deserve to be told and heard by many. Under this series with TheBetterIndia , we’ll bring forward true stories from across the country that inspire togetherness, break social barriers and pave the way for a more inclusive society.”
Brief
The core objective per the brands was to create content that one, communicates the brand’s ethos, and two, leaves the brand’s legacy behind by inspiring the audience.
Creative Idea
Over a period of five months, the brands handpicked stories of people having each other’s back no matter what. Stories of people willing to face all societal challenges to support what they believe is right.”
Finding and curating such heartwarming stories from across the country of people who are setting wonderful examples with the great work they are doing, Breaking Barriers then began to take shape.
Challenges
Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia needed to find real-life inspiring stories that conveyed the brand’s message whilst stand as an example for the society to lead by example.
Execution
Breaking Barriers was a 5-part video series based on real-life stories from different corners of India that inspire togetherness. TheBetterIndia and Brooke Bond Red Label created a microsite for the campaign and worked towards generating buzz among their social media audiences with an announcement post, 5 days before the launch of their first video from the #BreakingBarriers series.
Dhimant Parekh, Founder-CEO, TheBetterIndia, said, “India is witness to thousands of stories of fellow countrymen helping each other out. We are happy to have a partner like Brooke Bond Red Label with us on this journey to uncover many such stories that celebrate togetherness.”
A follow-up post was made on 19th October 2017 to further sustain the ongoing buzz among TheBetterIndia's social media audience.
TheBetterIndia urged their followers to get involved with some activities such as rearranging a few words to create a powerful sentence, or sharing ‘Stories That Inspire Togetherness.’
Chapter One of the Breaking Barriers series was rolled out on social media on 25th October, 2017.
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Titled Religion Of Love, the nearly three-minute video brings forth the story of Mallah, a village in rural Punjab where only three Muslim families live among a vast population of 100,000 with the utmost love, respect and tolerance for one another.
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Post the release of the video on social media, TheBetterIndia followed it up with reminder posts, directing their audiences towards the videos with creative illustrations.
Highlighting such stories that shatter the stereotypes that we have become used to hearing or watching was the intended purpose of Breaking Barriers and achieved positive reception from the social media audience.
TheBetterIndia continued to promote each of their previously released videos with follow up posts on regular intervals, ensuring the conversations did not die down and the audience interest into the stories did not fade away.
The teaser to Chapter Two of the Breaking Barriers series was unveiled on 27th November 2017, following up with the launch of Chapter Two on 4th December 2017. Chapter Two, titled The Bare Truth, portrays the story of Sankalp, a male nude model who is challenging the traditional societal views of masculinity and prejudice against a profession such as nude modelling.
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Following up the pattern of releasing a teaser before every new Chapter of Breaking Barriers, Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia unveiled three more stories titled, Beautiful Love, the story of love between an acid attack survivor with a man who loved her for who she was; A Place Called Home, and I Can.
All the stories were launched on Facebook, as well as on YouTube, receiving a positive reception from the social media audience for bringing these little-known stories of courage, diversity and determination to a wider audience.
Emotionally compelling and powerful stories have always been loved among the Indian audiences, and with #BreakingBarriers, Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia found stories and topics that click with the Indian social media audience. Emotionally appealing and wholesome content is appreciated with great enthusiasm and this was reflected in the reactions and comments to the post, and also how widely the stories were being shared.
Often, brands take a certain liberty with the duration of the content, although with Breaking Barriers, the crisp and well-made content helped in garnering rich attention span of the social media audience.
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Not being relegated to creating a great piece of content, and basking in the limelight of social media engagement, Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia went a step further to spark and cultivate meaningful and uplifting conversations around their campaign.
The ever eager and digitally active youth was urged to get involved into the cause and help cast away and destroy stereotypes. This positive attitude and eagerness to get involved was reflected in the numerous comments under the videos which helped the brand align themselves to a greater cause and leave behind a positive residual recall in the minds of social media users.
Inspiring others to join their cause, Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia successfully received participation from many social media users.
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https://www.facebook.com/thebetterindia/posts/10155924215174594
Previous Campaigns
This is not the first time Brooke Bond Red Label have aligned themselves with a cause and leveraged some commendable storytelling. They previously did the same with the Cannes winning ‘6 Pack Band’ wherein the brand raised awareness about the stigma and hardships faced by the Transgender community in India, Surprise Visit (spoke about Live In Relationships), and others.
While they have managed to hit the bullseye at times, some of their campaigns fell short of the success they could have achieved if marketed well.
Also, like their previous campaigns, this one too was disseminated to through various other content channels as opposed to Brooke Bond Red Label India Facebook page, which has been inactive since 2016.
Results
Quantitative
Chapter One from the Breaking Barriers series, Religion of Love received over 1.1M views on Facebook, with over 25K Reactions and 6.3K Shares. On YouTube, it received over 24K Views.
Chapter Two, The Bare Truth received 1M views on Facebook, with over 17K Reactions and 2.3K Shares, while it received 12.6K views on YouTube.
Chapter Three, Beautiful Love received 1.4M views with over 14K Reactions and 6.3K Shares, receiving 1.4K Views on YouTube.
Chapter Four, A Place Called Home received over 1M views on Facebook, 21K Reactions and 4K Shares with over 1.8K Views on YouTube.
Chapter Five titled, I Can, received 1M views and more than 16K Reactions, 2.8K Shares while it received 1.2K views on YouTube.
All the videos were appreciated, and positively received by social media users across both the platforms as Brooke Bond Red Label and TheBetterIndia managed to spark over 4K conversations around the subject, touching the lives of more than 13M people on social media.
Cumulative views for all the five videos exceed more than 6M views across Facebook and YouTube.
Qualitative
The brand was able to meet the desired objective to drive conversation and were able to drive over 4000+ positive conversation about people accepting and breaking the stereotype barriers.