Campaign India catches up with Gauri Kirloskar, Managing Director, Kirloskar Oil Engines, to learn about the Kirloskar Vasundhara initiative and more...

In the lead-up to its annual International Film Festival, Kirloskar Vasundhara has undergone a brand refresh which includes a website revamp.

The website (https://kirloskarvasundhara.com/) looks to create engagement with a fact about the minute the user is on the site. The website also addresses the issue of animals being extinct with information about them on pages that have ‘broken links’. The website has been conceptualised, researched and written by Centrick Marketing Solutions.

Roy Menezes, partner and chief creative officer, Centrick, said, “To create this, the lines between brand, art, copy and tech vanished. It was the most collaborative and enriching experience of my career. Given how important 'time' spent on a brand is today, I'm sure the audience will love spending a few minutes discovering nature through this website. At Centrick, we always put experience, engagement and recall at the core of everything we do.”

We caught up with Gauri Kirloskar, managing director, Kirloskar Oil and Engines, to learn more about this initiative and the website revamp.

Edited excerpts:

Why did you look for a revamp right now?

Kirloskar Vasundhara was started 16 years ago primarily as a CSR initiative. At the Kirloskar Group, CSR is focused on the following buckets – health, education, and environment.

This idea of environmental awareness is something that we want to drive. Kirloskar Vasundhara was an offline festival that happened in and around the location of our plants. The website for it was very static. It was essentially a landing page which gave some information about what Kirloskar Vasundhara was about, and it hadn’t changed since it was built.

We had a large database of information. When Covid hit, things moved online, and we thought of using this opportunity to reach out to a global audience as well. We had a lot of film and photography content and also had access to people who did amazing work in the environment field. We felt that we had enough content to drive engagement.

We wanted to offer an experience which pulls users to the website continuously. What Centrick has done is collect facts for every minute of the day. Since they’ve built it, I keep going back to see the fact and it’s a cool engagement factor.

We also found that because this festival has been around for 16 years, and the site has been around for a while too, there are quite a few dead links. What they did with the dead links was quite cool. The error message was about animals being extinct and a fact about it.

How are you looking to market the festival?

We are going to use online opportunities to market it primarily. We are hosting the event exclusively through BookMyShow this year. We are hoping to also get a global audience this year through their reach.

For the local audience, we have local campaigning which is being done through the festival director’s contacts as well as our employees. Many employees within this company are passionate about this cause and spread it within their local network.

How many people attended the first virtual event last year, and what’s the target for the next edition?

We had an average of around 5,000 people a show last year. It was a learning experiment for us and we did this in partnership with OML and Insider.

This year is going to be the benchmark year, given the propensity of people to watch long-form content online, courtesy of the pandemic.

Outside of the website and the film festival, how is Kirloskar as a group taking on the cause? Are we seeing group companies also supporting it?

All the Kirloskar group companies support it.

Kirloskar Vasundhara is run out of the Kirloskar Proprietary. But the Vasundhara program reaches people across Kirloskar Ferrous, Kirloskar Oil and Engines, Kirloskar Pneumatics, Kirloskar Chillers and has employees participating voluntarily from these four companies.

What else does Kirloskar do to push the cause of saving the environment?

We run offline programs that are part of this initiative.

The way it started was primarily offline and the online festival was to raise awareness about the issues.

On ground, there are three offline programs that we run. One of them is called Kirloskar Vasundhara Ecorangers and this is where we train students and engage with colleges to run environmental programs within that area. We run awards and recognition within these too, so that they’re rewarded for the association.

We also run Green College, Clean College. This is a competition which is run across colleges and gets students to form teams to get college student engagement and raise awareness among them.

Thirdly, we tied up with a bunch of other environmental organisations and our employees participate in this as well, for a program called Ramnadi Restoration Mission. This is a river in Pune which was neglected and completely polluted. We are restoring this river.

Link to the article - https://www.campaignindia.in/article/an-environmental-fact-a-minute-kirloskar-vasundharas-mantra-to-drive-engagement-on-its-revamped-website/481551