COMCRAFT Advertising & Marketing Pvt. Ltd., Kolkata, has been awarded the Gold at RMAI FLAME Awards Asia 2026 in the category of Brand Activation & Experience — Promotional & Activation Campaign of the Year, for Nutrela TRIDENT: a simultaneous consumer pull and trade push rural market development programme executed for Nutrela Soya Chunks, a flagship brand of Patanjali Foods Limited, across five districts of West Bengal in 2025.
The FLAME Awards Asia — presented by the Rural Marketing Association of India (RMAI), the apex body for rural marketing professionals in India — are among the most credible recognitions for excellence in rural and emerging market communications across Asia. Results for FLAME Awards Asia 2026 were independently tabulated by EY.
The Gold validates something COMCRAFT has long believed: that rural market development done well is not a promotional campaign with a larger footprint. It is a strategic architecture — one that integrates consumer pull, trade push, and permanent visibility into a single coordinated programme, where each element is designed to make the other two more effective. Nutrela TRIDENT was built on that conviction.
Nutrela — the brand that created the branded soya chunk category in India — had presence in West Bengal, the single largest branded soya chunk market in the country. The challenge was not awareness. New entrants had won shelf space through margin incentives; retailer advocacy had eroded; the consumer pull mechanism had broken down. A generation of rural consumers had grown up without ever encountering the brand as an active presence in their lives.
The brief was re-engagement. Structurally harder than a launch — because a re-engagement campaign has to displace an existing wrong perception before it can build a new one. COMCRAFT's response was Nutrela TRIDENT: a 120+ day simultaneous three-prong programme across South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas, East Medinipur, West Medinipur, and Howrah. Nine branded van units operating every day across the five districts — activating villages, Mid-Day Meal schools, and local markets simultaneously. District-level mandi activation running one month behind the van programme, so that retailers encountered the brand at their wholesale market only after their own customers had already started asking for it. And 1,40,000 sq ft of permanent visibility — wall paintings, digital wall paintings, wall wraps — placed across village lanes, connecting roads, and district commercial zones, so that every person the activation had reached would continue encountering Nutrela on every journey they made long after the vans had gone.
"I am very happy with the way the campaign has been executed on the ground."— Trade Marketing Head, Patanjali Foods Limited
What the FLAME Awards Asia 2026 Gold recognises is not simply the scale — it is the strategic architecture that made the scale coherent. Consumer pull as the prerequisite for trade push to work. A consumer who asks for a brand by name at the point of purchase gives the retailer no choice. When product moves off the shelf, the retailer pulls from the wholesaler. When retailers pull at the mandi, the wholesaler starts pushing. Brand activation and trade marketing — not in sequence, not in silos, but designed together and executed together. That is what Nutrela TRIDENT was. The award is confirmation that the approach is sound.
Campaign at a Glance
| Metric | Scale |
|---|---|
| Duration | 120+ days (July – November 2025) |
| Geography | 5 districts of West Bengal |
| Activation Vans | 9 branded units, deployed simultaneously |
| Villages Activated | 496 |
| Mid-Day Meal Schools | 399 |
| Local Markets | 496 |
| District-level Wholesale Mandis | 5 |
| Live Consumer Impressions | 3.22 lakh+ |
| Permanent Rural Brand Visibility | 1,40,000 sq ft |
Nutrela TRIDENT was not a media buy, a creative brief handed elsewhere, or a partial execution mandate. Every element — from initial rural market research and district-level consumer profiling, through strategy, creative, van fabrication, field team training, daily GPS reporting, mandi activation, visibility surveying, and outcome documentation — was conceived and delivered by COMCRAFT. The team that designed the programme ran it on the ground. That continuity of ownership is how accountability and quality hold across 120 days, nine van units, and five districts simultaneously. In experiential marketing at this scale, the gap between strategic intent and field reality is where most programmes lose themselves. Closing that gap is the work COMCRAFT is built to do.
This recognition belongs, in the most direct sense, to the people who made it real. The promoters who activated village after village through summer heat, monsoon, and festive season. The field supervisors who maintained standards and accountability across nine simultaneous van units, day after day. The coordinators who managed logistics, route planning, and reporting across five districts at once. The execution partners and ground staff who sustained 120+ consecutive days in the field without losing consistency or quality — these are the people behind the number 3.22 lakh.
COMCRAFT also acknowledges the trust extended by Nutrela and Patanjali Foods Limited — particularly the Trade Marketing function — whose willingness to commit to a ground-level, market-by-market approach rather than a conventional media-led campaign made Nutrela TRIDENT possible in the way it was designed. And to the COMCRAFT strategy, operations, creative, accounts, and leadership teams — this is confirmation that the approach is right.
A detailed case study covering the full architecture of Nutrela TRIDENT — the strategic framework, the three-prong execution model, the mandi activation logic, the visibility infrastructure, and the measurable outcomes — will be published on COMCRAFT Active shortly. This page will link to it on publication.