Sunil Kataria, Chief Operating Officer, Sales, Marketing and SAARC, Godrej Consumer Products Limited, talks about the company’s marketing efforts and recent innovations, what is does to penetrate Tier II and Tier III markets, and use of regional and local Print media
By Saloni Dutta
Q] GCPL has been quite active throughout the year with different product launches and campaigns across its portfolio of brands with the most recent one being Cinthol+, and others like Good Night Paper card, new range of Aer, Hit Anti Roach Gel, etc. in the personal wash, hair care and home care category. What is intrinsic to marketing initiatives by GCPL?
For the last three years, our focus has been on the innovation journey of GCPL and that has become core to our entire marketing story. We have set targets for ourselves. So we had new launches across every category that we are in. Within innovation, we are very clear that the kind of products launched have a very strong differentiation; it could be a new format altogether or providing a new benefit; interacting with consumers we have got the pricing also partly focussed in that. So we spread ourselves across mass and premium, winning some penetrative category. Lastly, we have backed it with investments.
Q] How big a challenge is it to move from the freshness image and move into a new product category with the new Cinthol+?
Cinthol Confidence+ has this unique strength of protection along with deodorizing. Now that we have skin protection, we move into germ protection, but carrying the benefit of instant deo with it. Overall, Cinthol at each stage has been pretty successful and the journey of premiumization which we started around two years back with Cinthol is well and truly under way. The extensions we have launched with Cinthol Cool or Cinthol Confidence+, all at the premium end, are pretty much giving us good results now.
Q] What is the broad contour of your media mix for various brands under GCPL portfolio? What is the media mix you employ for regions which have low digital penetration and issues like power outage, etc?
The media mix varies from brand to brand and priority market. Each brand has clearly defined priority markets of its own. Brands like Cinthol, aimed at youth and Godrej Aer aimed at the premium category in urban India, also Hit, which has a large urban skew, use a lot of digital along with the regular TV and Print. Then there are brands like Godrej Number One, Godrej Expert Hair Colour which have a rural skew. There obviously you have to look at local media. We do a lot of rural activations, and use Print in those areas, especially local print.
Q] Do you think Tier I cities have reached saturation point? Do you see focus shifting to Tier II and Tier III cities?
There is an interesting trend, which might be a bit of a hiccup. In 2011-12, the Indias and the growth story were very strong and FMCG was growing at 15% as a category. A lot of markets that were growing were middle India, which is primarily towns from 1 lakh to 10 lakh and in that Tier II and Tier III both come in. This middle India has actually seen a slowdown happening in the last 18 months. Metros have always been growing, and I think rural still remains a strong growth story. What I am seeing is a bit of a middle India challenge. I personally think that this is pretty much of an interim slowdown because the overall economy is under pressure over the last 18 months. The overall FMCG category has been a bit slow. There is a huge potential I see in middle India, especially in Tier II and Tier III towns. The moment the economy recovers, both Tier II and Tier III will do pretty well. Definitely the market sentiment has improved, but it will take time to translate into actual spends, hopefully in the festive season.
Q] How important is North India as a market for GCPL? How do you reach out to consumers in this region?
North is a very strong market for us but to be very honest, so is the South. Almost all regions are important and North and South both contribute pretty significantly to us. North is a very critical market and the good part is that our roots are spread across all the States of the North, and it is not skewed towards any part. So whether it is the UP market which obviously is biggest for everybody, Punjab which is again a strong market for us, or Delhi which is a large metro - it is a very broad-based growth market for us, that we get a uniform growth and it has got a good mix of urban and rural. While Punjab, Haryana, Delhi and western UP are very effectively covered by the GECs, one challenge is how we communicate to UP rural - it is not because of penetration today, because DTH is changing the game in those areas too, but the challenge is more to do with electricity. That is where for us the local and regional Print come into play. That is what helps us. We also use a bit of Radio and rural activation models.
Q] How does your marketing strategy differ in the Hindi heartland of India – states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh - when compared to what you do in Metros and other regions?
In metros, a lot of modern trade comes into play and a lot of marketing activities and campaigns are around consumer experiences. Visibility in store becomes pretty important. But in rural areas of States, the real focus is more than experience - actually getting distribution done and building brand salience. For distribution, we have created a separate rural organization in the last few years, and expanded our distribution to almost 55,000 villages, where we give direct services. And then we obviously pick up the priority brand in rural and do a lot of work with them. We have also started a rural programme called Pragati, where we have enrolled 11,000 rural wholesalers and these would be anywhere near 20,000 top strata towns and cater to smaller villages and the ones to which we are not catering directly.
Q] Over the years, GCPL has used Print as a prominent media vehicle. How does Print benefit the company’s marketing? How important is it in your media mix?
There is a lot of innovation happening in Print. We have really evolved in terms of Print and an example was our Godrej Aer campaign. We launched the product around 18-20 months back with a fragrant newspaper - copies which carried our advertisement and created a consumer experience of fragrance, a sensorial side to the product. With the market getting more fragmented, marketers have to be more micro in their plans in terms of segmentation and that is where regional media comes into play now. Regional Print gets value here by helping in micro-segmentation, especially as education has become an important investment in our economy in the last 10 years and literacy rates have gone up around 10%.
Q] What can one expect from GCPL in the year ahead? What is on the anvil?
In the coming months and year, you will see us entering into new categories or some new segments within existing categories and there would be a few launches too.
