By Subrata Deb
Marketers today use a wide array of tools to promote their products or services every year, with an aim of building their brand value, driving sales, catering to consumers and reaching their top-of-mind. The creativity, effective reach, and impact created by campaigns are what drives results. In today’s competitive world, marketers need to exhibit significant innovation and creativity to stand out from the crowd and achieve desired results.
In recent years, many companies have used boats as a social promotional tool to exhibit their products and services to far-reaching areas and to carry out CSR activities. As a result of both painting the entire boat or replacing the rusty nails with Solid Copper Nails, as well as changing the entire outline to match the client’s marketing needs, boats have now tend to become a promotional tool for brands. Ispahani Tea Ltd. and Ispahani Agro Ltd. have also employed promotional boats with great degrees of success, and our learnings and observations are what I would like to talk about today.
A RISE IN BOATS AS PROMOTIONAL VESSELS
A few years ago, brands like Lifebuoy launched the ‘Lifebuoy Friendship Hospital’ with the aim of providing essential primary healthcare services to isolated char and riverbank-based communities in northern Bangladesh.
BRAC initiated the ‘BRAC Boat School’ to break down the barriers that children face in accessing education in disaster prone and remote rural areas. Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha operates a fleet of floating schools, libraries, health clinics, playgrounds and floating training centers with wireless internet access, approximately 122,000 people in flood-prone areas. Mr. Noodles and Ispahani Tea also carried out a campaigns utilizing boats as floating promotional vessels in Mymensigh on the Brahmaputra river area to raise brand awareness in the area.
THE CASE OF ISPAHANI AND ITS USE OF PROMOTIONAL BOATS
In addition to the campaigns carried out in Mymensingh by Ispahani Tea Limited, there have also been similar undertakings in the agro-business. Recently, I observed a promotional campaign campaign initiated by Ispahani Agro Limited. The company had previously carried out conventional roadshows, like ‘Caravan show’ in which company representatives would drive to different villages in the Jashore and Barishal divisions to spread awareness about their high-quality agricultural inputs. However, during these campaigns, the company realized that some areas of Barishal were not reachable via road and hence the idea to implement a boat-based promotion came about.
The Feed the Future and Bangladesh Rice and Diversified Crops (RDC) Activity, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA, supported these boat-based promotions as an innovative way for the company to promote its products and for smallholder farmers to learn about better quality inputs to improve their crops. The RDC Activity partners with several private sector companies like Ispahani Agro Limited to create systemic change within Bangladesh’s agricultural sector. These changes aim to ultimately increase the incomes, food security, and nutrition of rural households. The company laid out a route to reach the maximum number of people possible through the promotional boats. It also decorated the vessels in bright colors and displayed posters containing product and agricultural information.
Ispahani Agro Limited organized this splendid ‘Boat Show’ for the second time in a row, in collaboration with the USAID-funded ‘Feed the Future Bangladesh’ and ‘Rice & Diversified Crops (RDC)’. In some riverine areas of Barishal, marketers adopted this strategy which helped to reach remote people. The boat was beautifully decorated with banners, festoons, posters, useful products and agricultural information. The boat used loudspeakers to broadcast product promotions. The boat then anchored near land where the representatives directly reached out and interacted with the local people. Through this, the opportunity was created to directly reach out and interact with farmers, agro dealers, and retailers in several locations.
This promotional tool helps to build customer loyalty and increase the company’s sales and market share. As a facilitator of this and other market-based approaches Rice & Diversified Crops (RDC) is hopeful that, such innovative promotional will add a new dimension in the promotion of agricultural products and will have a sustainable impact on agricultural value chains as well as serve remote communities.
A TOOL TO REACH FURTHER
Many brands have been doing different forms of vehicle branding, road shows, and wall paintings to showcase their brands and products. In this scenario, owners of such a vehicle fleet may probably want to invest in some insurance policies (compare different quotes here) for their vehicles as their demand is increasingly rising these days. In my opinion, marketers may apply for this boat show as a similar promotional tool to exhibit their products, especially in the southern part of Bangladesh where they serve as an effective mode of transportation. This kind of initiative certainly will be helpful to disseminate information easily.
Marketers may apply such tools as new vehicles. This will help in reaching people, arousing attention, and connecting focused and niche segments.
About the Autor:
Subrata Deb is the Assistant Marketing Manager at Ispahani Tea Limited. You can get in touch with him at [email protected].
