Hasta La Creative!

The seventh in a series on DM Case Studies by Sanjeev Jasani, VP, OgilvyOne, New Delhi.

Business is a serious game. And CEOs don’t run!

CEO’s attend round table conferences, strategy summits and engage in high profile leisure activities like Golf, cricket, swimming etc. But somehow we don’t associate them with running. (There are a few exceptions to this of course but only a handful). And certainly not running in public with the masses.
The challenge here was to break this mindset (in this case, the CEO’s own) and get them to run in the Hutch Delhi Half Marathon (HDHM). Since this event was being organized for the first time in Delhi, there were no past experiences to refer to and this event itself would serve as a benchmark for future years. Further since it was being launched for the first time, it was extremely critical to set the tone of the event. And for that it was important to elicit participation from even the upper segment of the society. The database constituted of 100 top CEO’s who were also Hutch customers, held in high esteem by the society and seen as leaders in their fields.

The Idea: Shoes are sold in pairs. Period.

A single shoe is an incomplete story. Which almost calls out for unraveling. When we sent the single shoe to CEO’s, we expected them to turn around and ask for the other pair. And sure enough, they did. The programmed was designed to keep room for a follow up communication. We were aware that we were giving too little time for CEO’s to reschedule their busy lives and take out some time for the event, leave alone to practice. And therefore we sent them a reminder email and offered a RSVP number for them.
Out of 102 DM’s sent the exercise saw 34 CEO’s responding to the invite and 34 pairs of shoes were sent out. This gave us an exceptionally good response rate of 33.33% as compared to the expected 10%. There was a tremendous amount of word-of-mouth publicity that Hutch received amongst the high profile customers and decision makers.

In the larger context, Hutch was also able to establish a connect with its top end users and this exercise served as a platform for Hutch to build a relationship program with these CEO’s subsequently.
This entry won the GOLD at EMVIES AWARD 2006