India’s diversity - in cultures, languages, geographies, food habits and most importantly, socio-economic groups - poses a unique challenge to today’s marketers. They have to communicate their brand messaging effectively to the target audience with relevant culturally and linguistically nuanced messages. E-commerce marketing heads came together at a power breakfast on ‘Diversity Marketing – The next big challenge for e-commerce in India’ to understand the extreme diversity and complexity in the Indian market. The event was organized by exchange4media in Bangalore, in collaboration with Surewaves, a nextgeneration media company that is mapping, aggregating and consolidating audiences across diverse consumption markets in India. Anita Nayyar, CEO, Havas Media Group-India and South Asia, moderated the discussion
THE DISCUSSION POINTS
Marketing challenges faced by the e-commerce marketer and what media mix has helped address the challenge.
The importance of addressing diverse consumers differently to drive the organization’s growth
Interesting patterns observed across diverse consumer groups... and whether those insights led to any path-breaking marketing innovations for the brand
‘Diversity isn’t only in markets, but within target audiences as well’
By Anita Nayyar,
CEO, Havas Media Group India and South Asia
(Roundtable Moderator)
Given that e-commerce is the sunrise industry in the country today, it was an excellent opportunity to moderate this session on Diversity Marketing with an esteemed marketing panel from the sector. The interesting bit was the diversity of the panel within the e-commerce industry which constituted marketing professionals from Quikr, Zivame, Bluestone, Portea, Redbus, CapriCoast to Bharat Matrimony. The interaction across these diverse product categories was extremely enriching with a lot of learning coming in on the categories which have millions of dollars riding on them. It is certainly nothing like the dotcom bubble that burst in the early 2000. E- commerce is here to stay. It has completely changed the way the Indian consumer is looking at the marketplace and online shopping. Whether it is the buying and selling that takes place on Quikr, marriages that happen through Bharat Matrimony or lingerie that gets bought on Zivame, each marketer had an interesting challenge to combat. For instance, the challenge of getting more women as audience on Quikr and penetrating deep into more than 100 markets or targeting couples on Blackstone and CapriCoast and straddling across audiences for Portea. While the discussion was on diversity marketing, an interesting segmentation emerged not only from market perspective but also from the perspective of audiences, communication and its contextual importance. Interesting product innovations like Quikr Nxt and voice call, Valentine’s Day jewellery with sound waves engraving or the Fitting lounge from Zivame or the tracking app for women travellers on Redbus, the modular kitchen product from CapriCoast and the slicing and dicing of audiences across markets, religion, etc., for Bharat Matrimony to cater to specific customers clearly outlined the measures and steps being taken by these marketers to address the consumer. At an overall level there is diversity not only in markets and consumers but diversity within target audiences as well (men and women for Quikr and Redbus) need-based perspective (CapriCoast) to psychographic diversity (Zivame)to ailment-related diversity (Portea) and region/religion/caste (Bharat Matrimony). It was a truly enjoyable and enriching interaction.
Here are excerpts from the insightful debate.
Vatsala Kothari: The challenges we face at Zivame are category-specific and unique to India because lingerie in India is literally a taboo word. We not just had to create awareness about our company, but about lingerie as a category itself, break open the category and make it mainstream. Television was the most effective medium to reach out to larger audiences in a bold way where women said Bra, Bra, Bra in the advertisement. We wanted it to be okay, first, for women to accept the category openly. Social media has also worked for us in terms of some campaigns – it has helped us spin off content that is still lingerie-specific but in a way acceptable to Indian society.
Vineet Sehgal: Our early advertising and communication was focused on simplicity and targeted the early Internet users. The challenge is how do you drive and at the same time break the perception that this platform is only for selling old products? And also, how do you drive relevance of the category and change category perceptions – that we are not just about selling old stuff but there is so much more customers can do with us? Initially we used Digital to build the category but now use Television for its mass reach. In our category you have to stay top of the mind, we also need to be present offline, so we use Outdoor as a reminder medium. Digital is a big part whether SEM (search engine marketing) or e-marketing which drives the performance part.
Kaushik Tiwari: Ours is a unique model. We are a regional-based business so regional television plays a very big role for our markets. For example, regional television is very strong in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telegana but in the East and even in Gujarat, regional television fails us. We have been trying digital networks on video and find that this is doing well. We didn’t change the core of the brand but got it aligned to the digital audience.
Anshul Khandelwal: We still face the same challenges that we faced when we started three years ago – trying hard to break barriers and build trust. Jewellery is a category consumers find hard to trust and so instead of looking at the whole ecosystem, we decided to look at only 5% of the market. This constituted the early adapters who were savvy online. We had to think how to gain efficiency and reach – television gave us 50% efficiency. We tried using specific programs, HD channels and this has worked and we have seen a huge increase in brand awareness, and top of mind scores.
Kavita Chowkimane: When you fall ill, you go to the hospital and our biggest marketing challenge is convincing people that you can get quality healthcare at home. This is a new concept and involves breaking psychological barriers. Allowing a new person into the home also means changing a set behaviour pattern. Our target group is varied – younger decision makers making the decision for their parents, older people who book the services for themselves and the NRI audience who books for their family in India. How do we get a media reach that reaches this group effectively and become scalable to meet the growing demand is our challenge.
Jidesh Haridas: We know who we are going after – new home/apartment buyers, and we know when they are in the market – three to six months prior to taking possession of their homes. The marketing challenge is in terms of spending a lot of money but an extremely high customer acquisition cost can’t be justified as most have lifetime transaction value of one. While we are currently purely digital, but we are looking at high targeted offline activations – tactical offline mix of outdoor and activations but not in spread out manner. It will be very specific, in the catchment area around the apartments.
Pallavi Chopra: The main marketing challenge is category creation – how to get offline users to come and buy bus tickets online. This still remains a challenge because only 15% of bus booking happen online and there is still a huge potential to grow. While we are strong in the South, we are aggressively targeting the West and testing the media. Our approach has been switch off one media, test the efficacy of it and then move on to another media vertical. This is done so we know which levers to pull to get what effect. We are also targeting non-AC bookers and women. We are aggressive on Digital as it gives good traction.
Vineet Sehgal: The biggest diversity challenge is men versus women. While women take decisions within the house, when it comes to buying and selling, the task is assigned to the men because women don’t want to share their contact details. We addressed this at a product level and launched Quikr Nxt which guarantees number privacy as you don’t have to share your number. It is a chat medium and we saw huge traction not just in business numbers, traffic but suddenly we saw a lot of women signing up.
Anshul Khandelwal: The problem we face is who do we talk to –men or women? As women are the consumers and influencers, we spoke to women when we started. We then realised that 60% of the transaction are being done by men as in some cases the credit card is owned by men but we also found that 50% of the transactions are being initiated and done by men. This is huge insight as we found men are comfortable at an online jewellery store. However, the kind of purchases men and women make are very different. While men’s purchases are occasion-led, for women it is about self-indulgence. We then did a brand exercise and realised that and realised our premise of brand idea is romance and relationships, and so now, we now talk to couples instead.
Vatsala Kothari: Lingerie is a neglected category. Women don’t care about the bras they wear inside as nobody is seeing them and what this led to was that 80% of the women actually wear the wrong size. Our premise was how do we make sure we give a customer the right fitting bra? We launched a fitting lounge in Bangalore as a pilot in our office where we invited women to get fitted with the help of a consultant. The women who got fitted resulted in more than 78% conversion rate of buying from Zivame. Now we are looking at scaling this up in a cost effective way and we have launched a mobile fitting lounge that goes to colleges to get students fitted with the right fitting bra.
Kavita Chowkimane: Where do you stop at a product level? What is the depth you need to get into and what potential do you see behind the product? At Portea, within respiratory disorders we don’t productize it as COPD and pneumonia but if a respiratory patient needs a different communication and personnel that’s where we stop the productization. It is also important to leverage analytics.
Jidesh Haridas: For us innovation is happening on the product side as we are trying to create a new way of moving into your home. Currently, we are not innovating in terms of communication and are targeting our core TG by harping on the fact that this can also be done.
Pallavi Chopra: Targeted or diversity marketing really works. We had one offer targeted to different segments and ran it as an experiment. We broke our consumer pie into two halves – one half was mass communication segmentation with the same offer and the second half of the pie into 20 segments talking to them in a language they would understand and we had a control group in place. The results were astonishing. In the mass segment we saw a lift of 21% in response rates, the targeted segmented pie we had lifts of 75%.
Kaushik Tiwari: Innovation on the media level is important but it is finally the content and creative idea that is critical to how you crack it. We took a bold step and instead of a pre-marriage scenario, we took a post-marriage scenario and talked to a couple who is married to tell their story. We also targeted women only and then took on a social issue – that most women want to work after marriage. This changed the imagery of the brand and the social content that we created went beautifully into our social media and we could leverage it.
Feedback: simran.sabherwal@exchange4media.com
