Even as a study by The Boston Consulting Group suggests that nearly 40% of FMCG consumption is likely to be digitally influenced by 2020, currently only 10% of the overall ad budget of the FMCG sector is spent on digital.
This is because unlike some categories such as electronics, FMCG is largely bought offline. Additionally, there is very little control that brands have at the points of sale, with retailers owning the relationships with consumers. “These unique parameters make it difficult for marketers to link campaign success to product sales. But this also provides a huge opportunity to help brands establish a relationship with the consumer early on in the product purchase cycle,” says Prasad Shejale, co-founder and CEO, Logicserve Digital, a digital marketing agency.
It is this opportunity to connect with consumers through their preferred medium that is making brands like Dabur, Britannia, Heinz and others change strategy by opting for more mobile-based advertising. For instance, in a recent digital campaign, Heinz made use of reverse psychology by asking consumers to skip the YouTube ad. “The ad not only had a high completion rate of 32%, as against the industry average of 15-18%, but also had a brand recall lift rate of 52%,” shares Pratik Gupta, co-founder, FoxyMoron.
Dabur has identified a few digital power brands, such as Dabur Honey, Real and its bleach range, that have a strong urban connect.
“We have integrated honey advertising in top fitness apps and also with e-commerce buying platforms,” says Minoo Phakey, head, media, insights and marketing, Dabur. “We have used GIF banners for Real Mocktails to target fitness seekers. When the consumer swipes, the mocktail gets created. So it is not just engaging communication; we are also encouraging the consumer to finish the purchase.”
Mobile is strongly integrated in Dabur’s campaigns. “For all our campaigns on social media or other publisher websites, we see that more than 75% engagement happens on mobile phones, bringing in a considerable chunk of organic traffic each month,” she adds. In fact, Dabur uses mobile for its rural brands too, such as Vatika. The campaign uses feature phones through OBD (outbound calls). The ad is played on the phone and free hair tips and shampoo offers are announced.
Meanwhile, Modi Naturals uses mobile marketing, especially for the food category. “Our spends on social media are entirely on mobile. Within social media, we are spending on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads. These are primarily brand awareness campaigns where the cost per thousand impressions for image posts is around Rs 200 and for videos is around Rs 700 for our target audiences,” says Akshay Modi, executive director, Modi Naturals.The main challenge with mobile marketing is to evaluate the unique reach versus frequency incremental to traditional media such as TV and print, says Modi. “However, to overcome that, we are selective about our target audience on digital platforms to prevent spills.”
The emergence of e-commerce in food and grocery has led to a slight change in strategy. Increasingly, players are using redirect options in campaigns even on social media, in addition to point of sale on e-commerce platforms. Although digital has become a key vertical in the grocery segment, modern trade still accounts for 30% of FMCG sales. “Online is emerging as a new point of sale and mobile marketing now has direct impact on sales,” says Anand Chakravarthy, MD, Essence, sharing an example of how a digital campaign on YouTube and Facebook for Britannia’s Little Hearts, launched in July, led to an increase in sales even in the post-campaign period. “Since the target group is around 17-22, we used only digital advertising,” he shares.
To have a campaign result in higher sales, it is important to have bottom- to mid-funnel data sets — what the customer did after clicking the ad and after being redirected to an e-commerce player, and whether the actual purchase happened at all. “Currently, such data is not shared by the e-commerce players,” says Gupta of FoxyMoron.
