With their latest campaign, the Mundi dance, OLX is trying to target the 20-somethings. Gaurav Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer of OLX India talks about how focusing on consumer insights gives the brand an edge over other players
By SAMARPITA BANERJEE
Q] Tell us about OLX’s latest campaign, the Mundi-dance.
Most of the OLX campaigns are based on societal insights. Right now, with the school and college season, people are either coming back from summer holidays or are going to join a new session in colleges. When it comes to the younger consumers, most of them want to own the latest things in the market. And it is not necessary that most of them will have a lot of money. That’s where we thought that we could help them. The ad is also aimed at first-jobbers who have a bit of extra money and would now like to have a better lifestyle, with the latest gadgets and other things. That’s where the societal insight came to us. If you see the ads, the categories we are trying to project are two-wheelers, bikes or consumer electronics that makes sense for this TG of firstjobbers and college students.
Q] Is OLX as a brand targeting the younger audience now?
The younger audience has fewer inhibitions about new mediums or experiences. Also, for us, 18-35 is the primary audience. All the advertising we have been doing, the go-to market strategies that we have adopted, will continue around this TG.
Q] During the World Environment Day, you highlighted that environmental benefits of using OLX amounted to some 3.3 million tons of CO2 in a year. How did you achieve this?
We have been doing this for the past two years now. We believe that as a business if you don’t make an impact on a macro environment, you cannot be a successful business. Thankfully for us, we have been able to do that and have created an industry out of nowhere. India is going through a consumerism phase where people are buying a lot. However, at some point, they were only buying and not selling. A product with a good shelf-life, which could be relevant for a lot of people, would lie in a house unused. This can put an insane amount of pressure on the resources of the country. That’s where OLX played a huge role in making sure that the resources live through different people. We joined hands with the Center for Environment Education which is supported by the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. With their help, we came to know that we had been able to curb around 3.3 million tons of carbon emissions which is a massive number.
Q] OLX was recently brought under the ASCI scanner for an ad that was termed misleading. As a brand, are you more conscious about what you are giving out in terms of communication?
We are always quite conscious about our communications. None of the complaints have been upheld by the ASCI because they understood what we had done was within the realms of the regulations. And even the subjective elements which are outside the realms of regulations are not being damaged by OLX. But as a business, we don’t really talk about things that are not in the right spirit.
Q] OLX recently came up with an animated and interactive Twitter chatter dashboard. What was the thought behind the initiative?
There are so many mediums for us to reach out to our target audiences. Along with TV and radio, there are new age mediums like Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. Our endeavor is to see what a medium can do for me as a user and how can I benefit from the medium. The Twitter dashboard was used as a platform where people could tweet about the things they wanted to buy. We had a day that was called the ‘Dream Come True’ day when people were tagging what would they want to buy so that their dreams come true. We also proactively tweeted about the things that they wanted to buy and were already present on OLX. That was the whole idea. Lot of these hashtags trended and some other businesses also started using the hashtags as they were relevant for them too. We got about 6000 odd relevant unique tweets from the initiative.
Q] What is OLXs market share?
We have about 80% market share in the consumer-to-consumer online classifieds sector in India. So you can say we have almost a monopoly. When it comes to categories, cars, which is the largest category in terms of offline along with real estate, we hold about 85-90% of the second-hand car marketing of the country. Out of the 3 million cars resold in the country annually, we have about 80-85% marketed on OLX, which makes us the largest car aggregate. When it comes to bikes and mobiles, we are the largest mobile phone and bike aggregator in the country again. We get close to about 3 billion page views a month, almost 100 million page views a day.
Q] OLX releases most of its campaigns in vernacular languages too. How has that helped you reach out to a larger audience?
In 2014, we started with this ethos of treating India not as a homogenous country but a heterogeneous one. This has led to a five to six times increase in the brand recall. Our media throughput has gone up by more than 100%. So say if we were spending Rs 10 in Tamil Nadu earlier, we are getting double the traction for the same amount of money. The brand has now become well-entrenched in the minds of consumers in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal, Kerala and Maharashtra. It just helps us understand the market much better. I think that’s the only way of relating to Indian audiences.
Q] What differentiates OLX from other players in the category?
Firstly, its just the platform ethos. OLX has the largest concentration of buyers and sellers on any platform in the country. If you buy or sell any used goods, you will be over here. That’s just because of the network effects that we enjoy. Network effects help you sell faster and easily. You have a multitude of choices on buyer and seller perspective. Secondly is the brand equity. ‘Bech De’ at OLX is almost becoming part of the popular culture. For example, during the World Cup 2015 India vs Pakistan match when the Mauka Mauka campaign came up, there was a guy who sitting at the stadium when India was close to winning. He just held up a placard that said ‘Sell those fire crackers on OLX’. This went viral. We did not do this, people did it for us. And that’s the biggest advantage we have as a business. Thirdly, we are a user generated content (UGC) platform where individuals are creating content. A lot of classified players do not have UGC content and you will find the same content on eight different sites, which doesn’t differentiates you at all. But on our platform, it’s 100% UGC which gives us content differentiation.
Q] What does your marketing mix look like?
On offline marketing, TV takes away the major chunk. But offline and online are now primarily 50-50. So, TV is the largest medium where we will be putting our money in. But we experiment a lot with other mediums too.
Q] What are some of the emerging consumer trends?
In macro terms, sharing economy is becoming a big trend. We are a part of sharing economy where rather than owning something, people would rather share or rent. Airbnb and Uber are great examples of this model. These industries are disrupting the existing industry. Uber and Airbnb today are the largest transportation and accommodation companies in the world respectively without owing a single taxi or apartment. Similarly, we might be the largest, second-hand good industry in the country, we don’t own anything. It’s all people-oriented. Also, a lot of offline, smaller businesses are coming online now to buy and sell. From a marketing perspective, I think video is going to be huge. We are putting a lot of our time and effort in learning how can we leverage upon this medium. Even platforms are making it easier with data compression to make sure that people continue with more videos and less data consumption.
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