Till March 2020 Sonu Sood was known for his negative roles in Hindi movies. In past few months he has became a household name across India as he helped migrants, airlifted students from abroad, initiated a jobs portal for migrant unemployed youths and arranged medical aid to the needy.
As per Sonu, he and his team of 60+ people including his friend Neeti Goel, a Mumbai-based restaurateur, his chartered accountant Pankaj Jalisatgi and his colleague Harsh Sikariya has helped more than 20,000 migrants move safely out of Mumbai and reach their respective hometowns across India.
All started with a small gesture of providing food to those stranded at a railway station turned in to a major well orchestrated movement helping thousands of people.
During the food distribution Sonu and his friends realised that the real need is to provide transport to stranded people. Soon they launched an initiative with hashtag #GharBhejoAbhiyaan that helped thousands of migrants reach home. The team later launched #PravasiRojgar to help migrants find a job and manage their livelihoods. His Twitter handle became a wishing well for the needy to ask for help and receive a asserting and assuring message in return.
The team Sonu and his friends built have operated professionally, making a point to try and get in touch with those asking for help.
He revealed the absolute number of requests he receives on an average during a day across all social media platforms by sharing one day’s communication size in form of 1137 emails, 19000 Facebook messages, 4812 Instagram messages and 6741 Twitter messages.
What worked here is, a movie star chosen to work for a noble cause as an opportunity, established a direct emotional connect with people in their language, on an easy to use social media platform like Twitter. In marketing theory, it was a brand’s direct connect with its intended audience resulting in multiplied brand equity.
There was a need, a right opportunity was taken, correct media vehicles were used, a thoughtful communication strategy with ‘Emotion and Empathy’ at core was crafted for the intended audience and all this was backed by a professional standard, technology driven listening and responding setup. Everything was precise and perfect.
All of us put efforts to make a task, commercial project or a social activity successful which gives us rewards in terms of self-satisfaction, appreciation, name and fame. Eventually the benefits brand Sonu has started receiving are substantial and much deserving.
Sonu received the Special Humanitarian Action Award by the United Nations Development Programme for his noble efforts to help people in challenging times on 30th September 2020.
Indian brands like Pepsi, Lay’s, Tata Tea Premium, Stayfree India, Edelweiss Tokio Life, Godrej Interio, WhiteHat Jr, and ZEE5 have approached him to become their brand ambassador.
In terms of social clout gain, as on 15th October 2020, Sonu Sood has 4.3M+ followers on Twitter (Gained from 1.16M in June 2019 and 1.19M in April 2020), 13M+ followers on Facebook (Gained from 2.5M in April 2020) and over 7.5M followers on Instagram (Gained from 1.1M in September 2019 and 3M in May 2020).
Sonu Sood has set a great example of how a brand can be built with right use of emotion and empathy. He has to continue doing charitable and humanitarian initiatives, choose appropriate roles in acting and remain in news to maintain and capitalize further on earned brand equity.
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