With the focus of providing value to consumers through convenience, rewards and information, Shirish Handa, Sr. Vice President – Marketing, Fun Cinemas is strengthening the brand’s patronage in a category which is now getting competitive.
Q] How are you differentiating Fun Cinemas from the competition? What is the USP of your brand?
The biggest challenge that the industry suffers from is parity. At the end of the day, barring some occasional exceptions like having reclining seats or easy location access, broadly there is very little to choose from between cinemas. The multiplex industry gets entertainment tax exemptions but today the industry is entering into the phase of maturity where all these sops have gone. So true blue competition in the market has become a reality now. And we have found that in order to have a competitive advantage you need to engage and build a relationship with the customer. And that is why we have created a few programmes that will give value for the customer’s money. Value, not in terms of low-pricing, big discounts or irrelevant lucky draws but value in the form of assured returns that are tangible, bring moments of delight and provide information/updates.
First is the fun rewards programme which is like a loyalty programme where the customer pays a nominal fee, becomes a member and earns points each time he buys tickets from the box office. Also as one accumulates points by watching more and more films, they can exchange them for gift vouchers, tickets, food and beverages, events, etc. The second one is sure-shot fun where every transaction on our website comes with a guaranteed prize. When the customer buys one or more ticket from our website, he gets to play a game of ‘sureshot fun’. Each time he plays, he wins a prize in the form of free popcorn, free beverage, a surprise gift, discount on ticket or an absolutely free ticket. And lastly we’ve are utilising social media with over 16,000 likes on our Facebook page. It is a small number when you compare it with big brands but the members are very active.
With these initiatives we now have a certain database of consumers with clearly defined demographics and behaviour patterns. Also because of our loyalty programmes our repeats are better. So that is of advantage not just to us from a business point of view as a differentiator but also to our client and advertisers who can get a higher frequency for the message.
Q] For how long have these initiatives been on?
We started our fun reward programme from Bangalore three years ago. But for our other centres it is only a couple of years old. Out of the total 14 centres where our fun rewards programme is on, each are in the range of one to three years. Sure-shot fun is also around two years old now and our social media initiative is a year old.
Q] How would you number the response achieved from these initiatives?
Total number of members for our rewards programme has gone beyond three lakhs now with 50,000-60,000 active members. So that is the kind of database we are talking about of consumer who interact with us on a week to week or day to day basis. Out of our total box office sale, 10-15 per cent is coming from fun rewards.
Q] What is your key approach on social media? What is your objective?
Our approach on social media is chiefly information-based because information is value on social media. We’ve noticed that members from small towns are more active on social media than people from metros. The metro population is already bombarded with a lot of information but in smaller cities there is a huge need for information. In metros consumers get to know about movies through huge advertisements by the distributor himself and updated listing columns, where as in smaller cities the newspaper listings are erratic and basic information like timings of movies, etc is also not available properly. And therefore our approach on social media is to provide information in terms of when which movie is likely to come, which movie is playing where, etc. So there is a sort of active query handling that happens.
We are not necessarily incentivising on social media. There is a lot of incentivising on social media going on these days just to drive in footfalls and eyeballs. We are not in the business of making a big social media group and doing some sort of commercial exploitation of it. That is not our plan. I am not going to spend money doing contests just to get one lakh member base on my page, there is no point. We have a nice active group such that it is tough for our internal guy and the backend agency to keep up to it but it is our priority that our members should get replies twice a day.
Q] What are your plans going forward? How do you plan to take these programmes to the next level?
The first thing that we are trying to do is to partner the fun rewards programme with two or three brands from different fields on an ongoing basis or at least a mid to long term kind of association where consumers from this brand get value from another brand. So far we’ve been inward looking as we wanted to create a base and wanted to focus on serving our customers rather than exploiting the numbers. But now we think there is a requirement and we’ve even got feedback from our customers of availing more value outside of fun cinemas as well. So that is the plan for this year.
We are also planning to introduce something called as fun rewards money. With that, fun reward members can actually pre-buy certain currency of fun cinemas. There will be a certain package that will be created for them for a certain package and along with the members would get merchandise from us as a free gift of comparable value or more. We had tested something of this sort with two brands last year and they have worked quite well. It creates a good buzz apart from the sound loyalty led business. We are going to bring it in a big way by the second quarter of this financial year.
With regard to our social media initiative, we are looking at a number of 30,000 fans by the end of this financial year, conservatively. We are not in the business of making huge numbers but the important thing is that we don’t want to go down in our frequency of communication even when I am talking about doubling the member base.
Q] What is your view on the multiplex industry in the country today and the kind of marketing activities that are on?
The industry is in a decent phase right now. I will not say it is very bullish because the last year’s slowdown and recessionary trend shook a lot of people up. Although, I don’t think entertainment requirements of people had gone down but with tight financial situation the production quality and supply went down. Also a lot of developers had gone slow on their projects. Even right now, a lot of real estate boom is happening but new malls or new projects are not coming up. Whatever was in the pipeline is being completed so there is a certain amount of caution with which the expansion is happening. However, double digit growth is something that will happen as this is a relatively new industry.
The industry is still in a stage where if you manage to build a good looking property at a right location, it is bond to work. But in a lot of catchment areas, especially Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore the industry is getting more and more competitive. If people don’t start making differentiators in their marketing efforts they are going to face problems. A lot of chains are working closely with film studios as an extension of their marketing initiatives and to create some value around the movies. But we do not have that kind of an approach. We want to make on-going properties, irrespective of movies or studios, that will add value to customer experience.
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