An artwalk to remember
Puma Suede Gully was a unique campaign where a central narrative merged creative, planning and digital to create a street movement
Which do you consider your best campaign and why? When was the campaign launched?
It would be the Puma Suede Gully campaign we launched last year. I would choose it because this was a unique campaign where a central narrative merged creative, planning and digital to create a street movement to associate Puma Suede shoes with street culture, supported by a rap song by Vivian Fernandes, better known as Divine.
What did the campaign achieve for the brand? Could you also share some numbers to corroborate your claim?
The sales of Puma Suede in the first two months after the launch of the campaign were 44 per cent higher than that in the same period before the campaign. Overall, there was a 30 per cent increase in retail store sales and a 35 per cent increase in online sales in the first 10 days. The main launch garnered more than 12 million views across platforms. So far, the total reach has been over 20 million and there were 600,000 engagements. The song was added to over 1,000 playlists on various music streaming apps. The song received coverage from Rolling Stone magazine and major Indian dailies and popular online portals.
What was the key idea behind the campaign?
The goal was to establish Puma Suede as the symbol of street culture in India. One had to search hard to find what could be branded India’s street culture. So we decided to make the street easy to find and call it Suede Gully. The collaboration between Divine and his friends — rappers, dance crews, graffiti artists, visual artistes and street fashion gurus — helped create India’s biggest street collaboration across four cities and in as many languages. The central thought was captured in the words, “Mere joote mein tu chal ke toh
dekh” (try and walk in my shoes).
We split our campaign into three phases — the prelaunch, launch and propulsion and intrigue phase. We conducted shoots at various locations in these cities to create buzz and then launched the campaign with popular artistes from different regions sharing the video on their social media channels supporting the underground movement. For example, Papon from the east and Vishal Dadlani from the west endorsed the video. Once launched, the song was played as a featured item in music portals such as Gaana/Saavn and a lyrical video was put on YouTube. The intrigue phase included getting articles about the collaborating artistes and the stories behind them published.
What was the industry response to the campaign?
The song was awarded ‘Track of the week’ by BBC Asia Network. Thanks to the campaign, the world danced to the new anthem of India's street culture with the song getting traction from the US, the UK, Japan and Australia etc. Again, we had the likes of Disha Patani grooving to the words on videos shared online. And there are talks of the street movement getting its own Bollywood movie. The whole idea was about multi-layered content — so we created content with help from influencers, editorial teams of various publishers, from our own Suede legends and then disseminated it at the right time to garner maximum effect. Since it was India’s largest street movement, shot on a large scale across four cities in four languages, getting and co-ordinating everyone and everything together was another challenge faced during the execution phase.
What were the execution challenges?