Tata Tea's new Jaago Re campaign urges India to pre-act, not react

Tata Tea is encouraging ‘Preactivism’, a behavior of timely activism which happens before, to prevent unfortunate things.

The film brings alive the need for ‘Preactivism’ in a hard-hitting, pertinent manner. The female protagonist drives this conversation with a compelling storyline that showcases the current reactive nature of people - rallying for an issue once it has happened or taking to on-ground and social media after something bad has happened. 

The Jaago Re 2.0 campaign will draw attention to the need to pre-act. This campaign is not about the issues. Issues are only familiar examples; this campaign is focused on landing the thought of ‘Preactivism’ and facilitating a change in current behavior. The campaign will have multiple phases with the current phase focusing on seeding this new thought and making ‘Preactivism’ a mainstream conversation. In the subsequent phases, Tata Tea will continue to drive ‘Preactivism’ through on-ground initiatives, walking-the-talk as a brand that is rallying for change.

The first edition of the Jaago Re campaign focused on various topics ranging from corruption and bribery to voting and women empowerment. Over the years, the campaigns have been instrumental in igniting a social revolution of sorts by provoking an entire generation of Indians to wake up to socio-cultural issues affecting them. Jaago Re campaigns have always questioned people’s apathy towards social issues.

Commenting on the new Jaago Re campaign, Sushant Dash, Regional President - India, Tata Global Beverages, said, “Jaago Re has been a path breaker in many ways. It set the way for brands embracing social change as part of their DNA. However, over the years, as with any innovation or new thinking, the space has become crowded.  Hence, we needed to break the mould again and showcase our thought leadership. So we went back to the consumer, to the youth. We realised Jaago Re has helped move the needle. From complete apathy, as a nation we have become reactive. However, the need now was to move from being reactive to instilling a sense of ‘Preactivism’ in people. We wanted to create a new paradigm shift that would be relevant to people of all age groups and demographics, to continue this journey of social change in India. ‘Preactivism’ is a new dimension – not reflecting on culture but creating one. This is hopefully the start to another new wave of social uprising that India will see.”

Remarking on the thought process behind the TVC, Amer Jaleel, Chairman & CCO, Mullen Lintas, said, “Jaago Re has led the conversation on ‘brand activism’ and sparked the wave for not only other brands to participate, but also inspired the youth to be part of the change this country has seen in the past decade. Thanks to social media, there seems to be a lot of outrage, opinions and even solutions arising, but all of this comes quite late -- it happens when there is a tragedy or an incident. This insight led us to realize that the second edition of Jaago Re needed to be at the cutting edge of this new consciousness. We therefore progressed to ‘Alarm Bajne se Pehle Jaago Re’. To do this, we took a deliberately hard stance to provoke people that ‘sleeping’ through our daily existence and only ‘waking’ when something drastic occurs is not what we should be doing. What we need to do instead is anticipate the ‘alarm’ and wake up much earlier, so as to prevent tragedy.”