Nita Kapoor, Executive Vice-President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs at Godfrey Phillips India, better known for cause marketing, shares a perspective on initially being called a ‘jholawali’ because of her firm stand on corporate social responsibility, benchmarking CSR, the group’s plans of expanding the tea category using the social model and more…
Q] Today, Godfrey Phillips is fast becoming synonymous with the Bravery Awards. Take us through your journey of being a causemarketing evangelist in a country where this concept is still nascent.
I have the advantage of having been on both sides of the business, in advertising, communication and the brand aspect too. The Modi family does a lot of philanthropy; however, one of the most frustrating aspects of it was we were unable to measure it, and link it back to the group. We are a restricted category, so we cannot experiment with our brands. Therefore, we decided to experiment with the Bravery Forum. Our challenge was to engineer this and link it back to the organization - on the heels of this we started Amodini for women too.
Our initial mistake was to treat it as a corporate seeding fund, which resulted in no connect to the organization. We corrected ourselves and started working with the stakeholders in the business. We brought Amodini back into the business.
Q] How do you integrate this back into the business?
You have to look at the complete value chain of the organization - all your stake-holders. You have to try to make a difference to their lives. We have two platforms - one is Bravery, which allows people to know what Godfrey Phillips is all about and the second is Amodini, which is directed towards our employees.
Q] What are the benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of CSR activities by Godfrey Phillips?
We borrowed a lot of studies from brands – for instance, we do the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) study, where your brand is marked on 14 parameters. This study tells you the gaps. We do a KPI for Godfrey Phillips. We also do the brand health check, which is the awareness level for your programmes. We use this for our projects, they very clearly measure the effectiveness and are very scientific.
Q] What are the significant trends when it comes to cause-related marketing?
We have learnt a lot. Some of the key aspects are:
• There is a lot you can do with your brands, organizational responsibility is very different from brand responsibility, brands can interface with end-consumers.
• I don’t think marketing can survive the way it is currently. Consumers will have an exchange with the brand for what the brand gives, but that is the transaction - marketing should make you fall in love with the brand.
• Brand loyalty is the alter ego for all CMOs; marketers need to make consumers fall in love with the brand, for this they need to understand consumers.
• Brand managers can’t say ‘My organization is interested in corporate responsibility, I am not’. Hang on, your consumers are - 70% of your consumers are in the darker world - they are ‘have-nots’. What are you going to do? Ask them to cons ume more ? You cannot, y ou have to learn to be real.
Q] Is cause marketing then becoming an imperative?
I would like it to.
Q] How have the CSR forums and activities helped Godfrey Phillip’s brand equity?
Brand equity has a direct relation with marketshare, given homogeneity of technology. Why will a consumer give you preference over others - how are you as a brand switching ratios? How are you withstanding competition and make them give up competition? We consider these as factors that strengthen brand equity. Since I cannot do it directly in our usiness area, let’s take the Godfrey Phillips Bravery Awards for example. I used to get feedback left, right and centre that it is a surrogate. Today we have people saying ‘Wow, what an experience’ –from an indifferent state of mind, we have an affinity ratio today. Over 10 years, 600 people have come forward for every show - these are all influencers, our own database has gone up to 8,000 people on record that we interface with. On the digital forum, we have 8,70,000 members, the rampup was fast. That is the recall that is happening; today - the Bravery Awards are fast becoming synonymous with Godfrey Phillips.
Q] What are the other aspects you emphasize on, given the fact that cigarette and tobacco products come under restricted categories?
We follow the laws of the land completely. We strengthen channels, sales and distribution and operation improvement. If you keep improving quality, your consumers will understand eventually.
Q] Are there any plans to strengthen the confectionery offerings from the brand, given that competition is high in this category?
We got into confectionery because it is akin to currency as a rounding-off facet. We got into this category as a need to round off currency. We have no plans to increase communication and marketing around this category. No investment will happen from our end. It is a considered decision.
Q] Are there plans to expand in the tea category going forward?
We are very small in the tea category currently, but we have some very good brands coming up. I am going to bring cause marketing into tea with Amodini; that is what we are going to build. We are not going to treat it like a traditional agency model, but our tea will possibly be built on a social model.
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