Just 3 weeks away from when Tata Motor’s new car, Zica, would be available for purchase, the World Health Organisation declared the Zika virus a global emergency. As the world’s press covered this viral emergency, we quickly realised the problem we were now facing. While India wasn’t affected by the virus itself, it was clear that the public would associate Zika, the virus, with Zica, the new car.

The implications were potentially cataclysmic, any brand campaign we did now could be seen as totally insensitive to the global crisis. So Tata Motors was looking at the prospect of losing at least $82mn invested in R&D,
production & marketing, and a damaged reputation as a leading company which would impact all it’s brands. After all, who was going to buy a car named after a virus!

Faced with this nightmare scenario, instead of shrinking into the shadows – we worked with Tata to meet this challenge head on. Our task was to help Tata Motors salvage the situation by doing a rebranding exercise of Zica,
without changing the product or proposition.

Just 3 weeks until launch date, we had to address 3 core challenges:
• What to re-name the car?
• How do we ensure that consumers understand the name change?
• Ensure the car was associated with the new name and not the Zika virus.

So, we leapt into action and in just a few days, created a 3-stage approach:

1) Accept the problem honestly
We had to communicate, quickly, to all prospective consumers that we had to walk away from the original Zica name. The story is totally remarkable and we knew it would receive interest from press and customers alike.

2) Start building a new relationship with consumers
We harnessed the insight: ‘We remain emotionally connected with things that we create’ to craft a campaign called “Fantastico Name Hunt”. By allowing consumers to choose the new name of the car, we would begin the process of quickly re-branding it within their minds and based on their choice.

3) Maintain the momentum
We had a lot of people to message and not a lot of time to do it. So we designed a fully-integrated strategy, ensuring all those who were exposed to the campaign, would be re-targeted to ensure maximum participation
throughout the intense 2 week period.

In just 3 days we reached 48 million people across our 22 target markets. 640,000 engaged and 37,000 names were submitted – garnering $410,000 of earned media coverage along the way. Google searches for ‘Zica’
totally dropped and ‘Tiago’ surged, showing that consumers were on board with the change. But most importantly, the campaign was a success for the client. Our job as their media agency partner was to get people into the car and within 4 months of the Tiago’s launch, we received more than 120,000 test drive requests.

This is an astonishing 3 times more than any Tata car launch in the last decade!