Vedanta Wake Up! is a company that offers budget stays. It operates majorly in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu and slowly spreading its arms and legs in the state of Karnataka. Its bigger comptitors include OYO rooms, ZO rooms and Zostel, who due to a slightly different strategy, have built their presence across India in a very short span.
We came on board as their creative partners to develope their branding and communication design. Our biggest challenge was that the brand could move one state at a time which clearly meant there was no way of catching up with the biggies.
So, instead we decided to strenghten our brand recall regionally. When it came to designing the brand identity for VWU!, we explored various possibilities in terms of what could become the base to build the brand on. After a lot of brainstorming sessions with the sales and marketing team of the brand, the one strong space that we all loved was 'EXPLORATION'.
We decided to salute the spirit of exploring that keeps one going, the idea was to build a brand around that spirit (like Red Bull) and not just to make the brand name famous.
There were some early attempts made, which looked promising, but we certainly were looking for something even bigger, something more open, something 'unexplored' in the category.
Here's how our journey on the whole looks like :
Some of the early attempts :
After many rejections and brainstorms, we arrived at something really interesting
After setting up the basic branding elements, we had a real task of increasing awareness and foot falls to the properties. Our media strategy essentially focussed on the social media, since FB, twitter and instagram is where we knew we would find our audience and it was also easy to connect with the booking portals.
Some reminder campaigns around the festivals
One of the interesting elements was the e-postcards. Postcards is something now everyone prefers to put in the list of 'outdated' or 'once upon a time..' items, we decided to bring them back to life! E-postcards became a sweet way to announce our city launches, every time VWU! reached a new city, it would send a postcard to everyone from that place :)
And then came a Eureka moment for all of us. While working on a small series of cartoon that we'd thought of making a brand property, we got our brand endorser, PURU! He was young, a mad travel enthusiast, he'd always carry a small backpack with some spare clothes to work, so that he could escape from the daily chaos at any moment.
Puru became an interesting way to tell stories, he stood for everyone out there who loved exploring, who would make any excuse to get a day off!
Along with the digital campaigning, we did some real on-ground activities, like sharing the tiffin with the underpriviledged people, offering free stay at the properties during the floods in Chennai, etc. We didn't stop at that, we also launched a property called 'TRAVEL-HER' to enable enthusiastic women around the country to explore on their own.
