What do you do if you are an accessory brand targeted at the capricious youth market, but have to ensure you fly off the racks with unfailing regularity?
Launch a new design every quarter, kill the look that isn?t working, and get Bollywood beefcake John Abraham on board. Simple?
Not really, but that?s exactly what Titan Group?s Rs 176-crore brand Fastrack has been working on for the past three years to stay right at the top of the heap. Did they succeed? You bet they did.
Their collection-driven approach-the brand has its own dedicated three-member design team headed by Neil Foley working on this-with shorter product lifecycle (maximum three to four months) is paying rich dividends. Post re-launch in 2005, the turnover for both the watches and the sunglass categories under Fastrack grew almost four-fold between 2004-05 and 2006-07, to stand at Rs 175.66 crore in 2007-08.
?The spike came in the first year itself, when we sold 14 lakh watches and sunglasses, although in value terms the growth may not have been so perceptible, because we had also slashed the prices (an average of Rs 500 across all price points),? informs Simeran Bhasin, marketing manager for Fastrack, who adds that it was a smart combination of product and pricing that really pulled the trick.
According to industry sources, the total size of the sunglasses market in the country is estimated to be around Rs 500-550 crore, of which nearly one third is targeted at the youth segment. A huge portion of this is unorganised, while in the organised space, besides Fastrack, there are just a just one other well-known brand, namely the Luxottica Group?s Ray-Ban. However, Ray-Ban is priced almost double that of Fastrack glasses. That?s their positioning. The rest of the unorganised space in the youth segment (almost 50%) is taken up by the un-branded polaroids.
The watch range of Fastrack, likewise, is competitively priced at Rs 595, going up to Rs 2,495, making it an easy pick for the target demographic of 15-25-year SEC AB audience for whom looking good is high on the agenda.
The total size of the watch market is Rs 2,000-2,400 crore, of which the youth market alone would make up for the biggest chunk (68-69%) in all segments (mass, mid and premium). A large chunk would be the under Rs 500 unorganised segment, according to Bhasin.
Interestingly, when the brand platform for Fastrack was being refined in 2005, the agreement for the eyewear brand with John Abraham had run its course. But since Fastrack by that time was already on a run, the deal with Abraham was never revived, despite all the good work done by him.
About the need to reposition Fastrack, Santosh Desai, who is a consultant for Titan Industries, says, ?There comes an inflexion point in the lifecycle of any brand, caused by any kind of a change-either the change in the market, the consumer or your strategy-when you have to take a hard look at the brand and decide its new destination.?
Fastrack was meandering in several directions at that time. The company, therefore, felt compelled to pull it back a little and define its future path. ?A combination of factors worked, besides the fact that the communication drew straight from the roots of the brand,? says Desai. ?There is a perfect match between what is communicated and is delivered.?
In Desai’s terminology, there is an ?effortless cool? that?s unique to this brand. ?So many brand try and follow others, but the sign of an iconic brand is that it leads the consumer and connect with them and that’s what this brand is trying to do with its current communication,? says Desai.
Therefore, continuing with its old theme of ?How Many You Have?? The campaign draws from the never-say-die attitude of the youth, but tells the story in a fun way.
Accessorisation, according to Satyanath, is important for a community of consumer that lives a campus life, where they have to subscribe to a particular dress code, within which, the only differentiation that’s possible is through watches, sunglasses or costume jewelry that women wear. ?Fastrack products have a certain quirkiness that they very easily relate to,? he adds.
The new creatives by Lowe, Shut Up and Move On or SUMO, present an allegory of a jilted lover, who carries on with life chin up. This multiplicity platform lends itself well to an accessory brand looking to wow today?s have-it-flaunt-it generation. ?Fastrack as a brand has been built on the platform of multiplicity. The ?How Many You Have? campaign as well as the new SUMO campaign capture the youth?s desire for change, which is closely linked to the category truth of accessorisation,? points out Bhasin.
?This is the language of today?s youth,? says Vikram Satyanath, the team head on Fastrack at Lowe, Bangalore. ?They don?t get heavy about things, they can mock themselves and that?s the tonality of our advertising.? And to keep pace with it, you have a logo that is so fluid that it suggests a claw, the spanner, the amoeba, whatever the consumer wants it to be.
About the reasons for the new positioning, he says, ?Titan saw an opportunity in expanding this brand by making it affordable. So all the elements of the marketing mix were used with a specific focus on an increasingly large consumer base, which happens to be the youth and a lot of effort was put into product differentiation.?
By all reckoning, another factor that?s worked for Fastrack is the ad spend and judicious mix of media. Unlike other consumer brands, nearly 8% of the media budget of Fastrack went into digital media in 2007-08. This was mainly used up in building youth communities through blogs and social networking sites. The re-launch (including logo change) itself cost nearly Rs 3-4 crore. ?The two big costs that we take are on TV and outdoors,? says Bhasin.
Eventually, developed by Maxus Interaction in Bangalore, an interactive website (www.fastrack.in), the use of communities on social media sites like Orkut and Facebook, search marketing, viral videos, contests and mobile campaigns all contributed to keeping the buzz alive about the brand.
It helps when you have the reach of Titan. The company?s branded formats for retail, such as Titan?s highly visible 14 prescription stores, Titan Eye+ also have a display area for Fastrack sunglasses.