Horlicks and AR Rahman create branded music ‘Fearless Songs' for students to deal with exam pressure

With exam season here, Horlicks is aiming at making learning productive and fun for students with its new campaign ‘Fearless Songs’. Introducing a refreshing take on learning, the brand collaborated with music maestro AR Rahman to produce an interactive music video for kids.

During exams, kids often lose their ingenuity while learning under the pressure of performing better. Horlicks recognised this gap and focused on providing alternative learning techniques for kids through music.

‘The Fearless Songs’ journey, which began in 2018 in West Bengal, collaborated with singer Rupam Islam to make learning easier for students. In an interactive video, Horlicks and Islam demystified the intricate formulas of Chemistry by associating them with our daily lives.

After the success and response for the first song, Horlicks introduced the campaign nationally this year. The nationwide rollout tied up with AR Rahman, who makes a similar attempt with tenses this time. Rahman explains the present perfect tense through his composition with a HPP hack. The selection of topics for the songs (Chemistry formulae and tenses) is backed by research and these were shortlisted on the basis of Google search data for middle school children.

With ‘Fearless Songs’, Horlicks continues to advocate the confidence to tackle exams with better preparation. The idea stems from the fact that music plays a key role in unlocking learning and memorisation. With music, even the most annoying topics can be transformed into enjoyable songs, possibly helping kids to be more attentive and concentrate better. ‘Fearless Songs’ will help kids to shed exam jitters and greet each challenge with a fearless smile. The film has been created by FCB India.

The story is about a kid struggling with learning his English tenses and how he uses music to better understand the topic. The film starts with a kid sitting in a bus dazed and confused while trying to understand tenses from his course book. Then cut to a classroom where AR Rahman appears as an English teacher and tutors the child on a simple hack to remember the topic using music. The film makes a transition through the school with the kid becoming more and more confident as the whole class chimes in to help him learn. Finally, through a grand finale, the kid understands how tenses are to be used. The film has a musical feel towards it, which is highlighted with the presence of AR Rahman.

The Film:

Vikram Bahl

Vikram Bahl, Executive Vice-President, Marketing, GSK Consumer Healthcare India, said, “We at Horlicks understand the stress that students undergo during the exam season. After laying the groundwork to tackle exams with confidence last year with the ‘Be Fearless’ campaign, Horlicks endeavours to continue making learning more productive, this time using music. Hence, we collaborated with music maestro AR Rahman, who with his exceptional musical talent helped us create a composition on tenses, one of the top-searched topics by kids during exam time. He is the perfect fit for the campaign, considering his connect with the masses and with the brand in his growing-up years. We want kids to face the exam season confidently, by promoting smarter and alternative learning methods, which we believe help in better understanding and retention of tough topics and make kids more confident in tackling exams.”

Swati Bhattacharya

Swati Bhattacharya, CCO, FCB, said, “January to March are exam pressure months all over India; that’s 90 days out of 365 gone out of a child’s life. So the brief we gave ourselves was how could we bring the childhood back? By using music as an unlock to help the child prepare for exams, we helped reduce fear and made preparation more enjoyable. The fearless songs were written keeping the curriculum of children in mind, helping them not to memorise but understand and retain them better.”