Background

The Indian quick commerce industry is projected to achieve a 10X to 15X growth by 2025 resulting in a market size of $5.5 billion, belittling its big brother, e-commerce, which is only expected to grow 3X by 2025.

To leverage this opportunity food delivery behemoths Swiggy and Zomato had entered the category with their Instamart and Blinkit sub brands respectively as had Reliance (an industrial conglomerate) with Dunzo.

The Super Bowl of cricket the Indian Premier League (IPL), the most watched content in India, was the chosen as the battleground for Top of Mind supremacy in Quick Commerce.

For new entrant Zepto, with 1/3rd media budgets of Swiggy Instamart (the Q-commerce leader), this was a fight for survival in the industry.

Creative Challenge

The objective of the campaign was to build brand salience for Zepto, a grocery delivery service that always delivers on time. This reputation for on-time delivery is a bit of an anomaly in India, where people are subjected to delays and long waiting times for everything.

Solution

Capture the reality of India’s relationship with time: Reframe Indian Standard Time to how we actually see time: Indian Stretchable Time. Thus, weaponising Zepto’s 10-minute delivery promise to not just reposition the competition but deliver a social commentary on the entire service industry.

Execution

We latched on to service industry situations where time is crucial but is often taken for granted leaving customers infuriated and helpless to create a series of films.

To make the idea of stretching time more impactful, we cast famous Indian classical singers to play different service roles. Kailash Kher played a waiter, Shankar Mahadevan played a person behind an airport check-in counter and Usha Uthup played a nurse. These singers are renowned exponents of a style called Hindustani classical, which is known for vocalists stretching notes (called alaaps). We used this ability in unexpected scenarios to make them stretch time.

The films depict typical instances of people stretching time in India. We see customers waiting in a restaurant, airport and clinic, where someone asks the staff how long it will take. In each film, the staff is played by a famous Indian classical singer – Kailash Kher, Shankar Mahadevan and Usha Uthup. They begin to answer the question, but keep stretching the time in their signature singing style. A voiceover comes in to say that if you’re fed up with people stretching time, order on Zepto, which always delivers on time.