In 2015, Samsonite launched its value-segment luggage brand Kamiliant by American Tourister. Now a decade later, the leading luggage brand has launched its first TVC campaign, "Naam hai Tamannaah, kaam hai tabahi," featuring actors Tiger Shroff and Tamannaah Bhatia.
Looking back at the origins of the brand, a big change was seen in consumer’s mindset, who now looked to travel beyond their traditional holidays at their grandparents or relatives’ homes. These travellers were looking to purchase and own a branded piece of luggage, for the first time, for themselves as individuals, whereas luggage was seen as a family purchase earlier.
However, Samsonite had two brands in its portfolio – the premium luggage brand, Samsonite and the mid-premium, American Tourister. This led to a realization that the price-points of both the brands made it inaccessible to a large number of consumers. As a result, Kamiliant was brought into the Indian market to cater to the mass with the proposition of being resilient, reliable, durable, affordable, high quality, stylish and provided the assurance to deliver just like an international brand would.
A big play for Kamiliant was distribution with the brand widely distributed in almost 6,000 outlets across the country. However, when the company looked at what more could be done with the Kamiliant brand, there came a realization that despite lakhs of pieces being sold every year, many people weren’t aware of the brand.
Creating Awareness For Brand Kamiliant
Anushree Tainwala, Vice President - Marketing, Samsonite South Asia says, “We went out and had in depth conversations with consumers and realized that people who've been using Kamiliant for years didn’t even know what the brand is about. They've just been buying it on the promise of American Tourister and the trust that they have on that brand. This had us thinking that the time has come, where we've reached a scale, to really push the lever on this brand.”
She continues, “We want Kamiliant as a brand to be positioned in a way that a consumer is actively choosing Kamiliant as opposed to choosing it as one amongst a bunch of brands they are considering. Keeping this in mind, we decided to push more investments behind this brand as well.”
As the first port of call was to create awareness, the company on-boarded actors Tiger Shroff and Tamannaah Bhatia as brand ambassadors. The campaign, which has a two part TVC series, highlights Kamiliant's ability to endure toughness. Humor is a hook that works well with the Indian audience, and the brand used this to showcase the durability of the product as this is a key criterion for the category and this consumer cohort of Kamiliant.
The first film unveils as an action film with an iconic fight scene recreated, a bomb in the suitcase explodes but the Kamiliant bag remains completely intact—scratch-free and undamaged and places the product in a tongue-in cheek manner. The second TVC is a spoof of popular and widely appreciated Indian period films with the luggage appearing as part of the scene.
Tainwala says, “Tiger is an action hero with strength and physical prowess which our product promises. At the same time Tamannaah represents style, glamour, fashion, aspiration value that is associated with our product as well. Both came on board last year and we have effect in our BTL efforts which was our focus was last year. This year we decided to take the leap and go ahead with the ATL campaign as well on the brand.”
The campaign is amplified across television, digital, outdoor, and social media platforms. For television, the brand is looking at connected TV and also leveraging IPL to reach mass audience. She states, “The objective of the campaign is to achieve awareness as we are starting from a very low base. Our IPL budget is never going to be as big as what other categories spend on IPL. So, the campaign has to be clutter breaking.”
The BTL campaign focused on the three main points of sale for the brand - General trade (dealer outlets), Modern trade (hypermarket partners) and E-commerce. She adds, “Being an MNC, our focus is on making the best product for our consumers, and let the consumer be the judge of what works and what he/she would like to buy. That's only possible when you have an even playing field; having brand ambassadors on board helped us level the playing field in a way to present our product and offering to the consumer to let them make a choice on which brand they would prefer to buy.”
As a category, luggage lends itself well to influencer marketing. However, with tons of travel influencers, the content looks increasingly similar across creators. Tainwala states that as the current campaign is to drive awareness, she is looking at reach and not at influencers driving sales. Taking the tongue-in-cheek approach again, the brand has tied up with a host of influencers – macro, micro and nano content creators - to create humourous watchable content by recreating iconic cinema and TV moments. Talking on her expectations from the campaign, she states, “A 10 percentage basis point improvement in awareness number, I will say the campaign is successful.”
The D2C Clutter
A big challenge has been the entry of multiple digital D2C brands in the luggage category and Tainwala says creating a differentiator for the brand in the clutter is important. She says, “The D2C brands follow a very common marketing code as their visuals, brand language looks similar. Our campaign is funny, almost ridiculous and that's how you make it sticky in a consumer's mind.” Another challenge has been deep discounting offered by the new entrants in the value segment of the market. “The value segment of the market has become a bloodbath in terms of pricing. As a company, we're clear that our focus has always been profitable growth. It's never been growth at all costs. If that means it comes at the cost of some sales growth, we're okay to let that go and continue doing the right thing and focusing on our profitability.”
With e-commerce emerging as a channel, Tainwala says that though the focus remains equal on all channels, the company is not looking at getting disproportionate growth from e-commerce, and the channel is looked at as “a double edged sword.” “It comes with some cost to your brand equity which we are very careful about. Whilst, we will engage this channel as it is where consumers are shopping today, including quick commerce, but we are not looking at getting a majority of our sales or growth from e-commerce.”
The Year Gone By
2024 was a difficult year for Samsonite with a slowdown seen in the growth experienced after Covid-19. On a positive note, the first quarter of 2025 has seen improvement and positivity in consumer sentiments.
Post Covid-19, many people invested in luggage, as part of the replacement, which led to a big spike and though travel still remains high, the purchase has tapered down. Another fundamental change in travel post Covid-19 is that people are now taking more number of shorter trips and also a huge segment of population are travelling now, who never really traveled for leisure or fun before.
Looking at the overall company, the biggest chunk of sales, almost 60% comes from the mid-premium brand, American Tourister, 20% from the premium brand Samsonite and the remaining sakes coming from Kamiliant.
Looking ahead, Tainwala is optimistic about the brand Kamiliant. She says, “I definitely see Kamiliant being the biggest player in the industry in the next five years. It's ideally positioned in pricing for the consumer it's talking to, and where the growth is coming from.” She adds, “As a company, we have three really strong brands that operate in very distinct segments of the market. There's no ambiguity in terms of an overlap, whether it's a communication strategy product, strategy, brand strategy. It's all very distinct and clear. Each brand is talking to a consumer segment that's growing. Doing more of what we are doing and sticking to it will definitely help us get the growth and mindshare of the consumer.”
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