Collaborating For Success: The Shell Way

Shell Lubricants’ recent campaign, ‘Power of Partnerships’ draws a parallel between ‘Bat Doctor’ Ram Bhandari and the global lubricant supplier; the analogy being that both, Bhandari and Shell, work hard to meet specific requirements of their customers. Gareth Flood, Chief Marketing Officer, Shell Lubricants India tells us more about the campaign and the brand’s ambition to capture a 15-20% market-share within the next two years

- Samarpita Banerjee

Q] Why did you choose cricket as a theme for your latest campaign?

Last year, we launched our brand promise, ‘Together Anything is Possible’ for our B2B offerings, which make up a large part of our business. The ‘Power of Partnerships’ is an evolution of that brand promise. It’s the umbrella that we will take to the market, to talk to customers about how we can bring together our core strengths around our people, expertise, technical knowledge and products. The B2B business can be very technical, so the campaign is also about using an analogy. We tried to do something different by humanizing the offering and giving it a story that customers could relate to. This is a global campaign and India is the first market we have launched it in, implying the country’s significance for us. While we will have different campaigns for each market, we chose cricket as the theme in India because it’s almost a religion here. The analogy we used was that cricketers are like our customers and we are like Ram Bhandari, the bat doctor. Just like he is a trusted partner to cricketers, we play a similar role in our customers’ lives. Our aim is to collaborate with them and come up with bespoke solutions from our suite of products and services to meet their requirements. So just like Bhandari makes bats for cricketers based on their specific needs, we also supply customised products to construction, mining, agriculture and manufacturing companies.

Q] Lubricants can be a very tough category. How difficult is it to market your products to customers?