Hyundai i20 Elite attempts a 'musical' with car sounds, targets 'younger' audience

Hyundai has rolled out a music video featuring musicians Arijit Singh and Clinton Cerejo. While Singh has sung the song, every other note has been produced with 118 sounds from the Hyundai i20 Elite. The idea was conceptualised in-house at Hyundai, in partnership with Innocean Worldwide.

 

Three cars were provided to Cerejo to capture their sounds. The three-minute song is called ‘Drive Mein Junoon’ (above).  

 

Speaking with Campaign India, Rakesh Srivastava, senior VP sales and marketing, explained the idea. He said, “We do a lot of activations for our brand – across malls, colleges and the likes. I went to a couple of colleges in Delhi and I saw the parking lots – a majority of the children were coming in premium compact cars with the Elite i20 having a major share. So, we figured that people who are buying the cars don’t look at the smaller cars, they want the best design, quality etc. and don’t mind spending a lakh or two more to flaunt it. That’s what made us want to promote our car to the younger audience.”

 

He added, “We saw our parent company’s ‘A Message to Space’ last year. It turned out to be one of the most watched videos. We saw that as a strength across our organisation and wanted to create a video that would generate similar buzz. We wanted to give music to the audience. So we thought of this idea. We got in Arijit Singh, who is just 28, along with Clinton and paired them with Hyundai."

 

On taking the YouTube route, Srivastava said, “Though we’ll be leveraging the video on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other cross promotions, we want the video to be only watched by people on YouTube. The average Indian male is consuming six hours of YouTube monthly. YouTube is the fifth largest watched GEC in the country. We already had a strong presence on the channel. So we thought of making it larger than life."

 

He added that the team also met with Google to make it 'larger than life', besides seeking other external inputs.

 

Puneet Anand, GM and group head, marketing, Hyundai Motor India, said, "Hyundai Motor India is a modern and youth-centric brand and under its modern premium brand direction celebrates the success of the Elite i20 embodying the spirit of the Indian youth. We believe art, culture and music is a common asset and a universal language that influence and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds. Digital is the most engaging and interactive channel; video content consumption is at an all-time high in India, the idea was to create branded digital content like never before which would have high shareability."

 

He added, "We chose music as a medium to connect with the audience because it creates an emotional connectivity with the brand through positive association. Music also acts as a personal identifier for an individual and can create a ‘Halo effect’ for a brand that associates with it because it creates an emotional connection with the consumer through the power of music they love. Which makes music a potent marketing tool since the association that a consumer forms often translates into influencing their decisions."

 

This is not the first time a brand has used car sounds to create a soundtrack. In 2014, TBWA Raad had created a soundtrack with Universal Music for Infiniti Middle East, titled Chromatic.

Asked whether the idea was inspired by a similar exercise in another market, Anand said, "There is so much inspiration available in India, why do we need to find it outside. Indian youth is taking this country forward and if we look at the media consumption trends and analyse them we will see two things. One, todays automobile user prefers to study the product digitally, which makes it easy for us to influence them there. And two, the videos are rapidly gaining popularity as a communication tool. To this we add the universal appeal of music and stars like Arijit Singh and Clinton Cerejo and we believe that we have a winning combination, much like Elite i20 – India’s favorite premium compact car."