Anshu Bagai is the Marketing Director of Tupperware India. Anshu joined Tupperware in 2004, moving from Sodexo where he was responsible for Marketing & Affiliations. Prior to Sodexo, Anshu was part of the start-up team at De Beers and was responsible for innovative marketing programs which helped position the brand at the top-of-league in the highly competitive jewellery market. In an exclusive interview with India Digital Review, Anshu Bagai discusses about his views and Tupperware India’s digital marketing plans.
How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in Tupperware’s plans to reach out to consumers?
Let’s talk about this medium overall. When we talk about internet and mobile, these are new evolving media and any brand wants to be a contemporary and thus connect with the younger audience. The youth is one’s consumers of tomorrow and every brand, according to me, has to invest in digital so as to target and reach the youth of this country. Otherwise, in 10 years, we will end up being a grandmother’s brand.
It is an interactive medium and it offers a lot of scope for innovation that the traditional media doesn’t. For Tupperware, our TG is SEC A and B women. Now how do we make sure that we reach them through a traditional medium like TV or print? It’s not possible and there is a lot of wastage that happens. There are a lot of measurements available too, but we have not yet reached that stage in India where measurement is so important in digital because the medium itself is evolving right now.
We also have an interactive website because many consumers want to know about Tupperware. On mobile, a large number of consumers want to know from where they can buy Tupperware through SMSes. When these SMSes come to us, we call those consumers and give them their nearest distributor’s number. Another set of TG for us is our salesforce and we generate out messages as well as product links to them through mobile. We are very active on digital and as we go ahead in future, we will increase our spends on digital more.
Tupperware’s latest ad campaign ‘She can you can’ has found good response from the consumers. Do you plan to extend the campaign online? Any activities planned?
This campaign is all about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We have a microsite where people can upload stories which the feel is extraordinary. With all these stories, we plan to come out with a coffee table book at the end of the year. We will also be having a series of print campaigns which will also be uploaded on the microsite.
Your activities on internet have been very content driven. Now, with new content forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?
Speaking of our present campaign ‘She can you can’, we have broadcasted two videos and making of both the videos are hosted on our microsite. We plan to extend it on other popular platforms from where one can catch the campaign and is stories. A lot of younger India is using digital products and hence videos are a great way to connect with them.
Mobile is being held as a great medium for brand communication, but still, very less amount is spent on the particular medium. What is your take on this?
Mobile has a huge penetration in India and the mass has moved on to this platform. But, not many brands are spending on this medium beyond SMS because apps are not meant for all phones and the scope f innovation on apps is right now limited.
However, this medium can become a huge revolution in the future in ecommerce. There are a whole lot of brands operating under a same category and hence there are not much differentiating points on them. What will differentiate them, however, is a MCommerce presence. Ecommerce is catching up in India and the way to make it reach the masses in the remotest corners of the country is through mobile.
How important is having an ecommerce presence for Tupperware in India?
We are a direct selling organisation and we have a sales-force of housewives selling Tupperware. Now, ecommerce would end up being a competing channel for us. So that is something we don’t want to get into.
How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India?
Tupperware is a direct selling brand and when the concept of direct selling was introduced in the US, it was all about social networking. When you use a brand and like it, you go and promote that very brand among your friends and you become the brand ambassador. So direct selling, right from its beginning has been social in nature. As a direct selling company, having a social network presence was a natural extension for us. We started Facebook less than a year back and we now have about 600,000 fans on our page. We don’t plant only brand information on the page because we know that people are not interested. We realised that entertainment and fun are the primary ways to connect and engage with people on digital. That is what turned around the fortunes of that page. We promote games and contests through our page, thus ensuring that our community likes the brand and the page actually goes beyond the brand. We are also there on LinkedIn regularly because office goers use our lunch boxes and hence LinkedIn was a logical extension for us.
Internet is said to be a measurable medium. What is your take on this? Have we overdone the measurement quotient and made this medium hard to understand for the brand marketers?
There is a saying which goes, ‘Half of my marketing dollars is wasted, I just don't know which half’. It becomes very difficult to analyse the RoI if we go into too much of metrics. As long as you know you are on the right track and your brand image is built well, that is more important than finding out the number of hits. Brand building is more of an art than a science.
What answers do you seek from your digital advertising agencies and digital media partners while promoting your brand on internet?
For me, any innovation that cuts clutter is most important. An average customer is bombarded with so much information that a huge majority of them is overlooked. When I brief the agencies, I evaluate them on the basis of how innovative and creative are they.
What is your assessment of the creative talent among Indian digital agencies?
India culturally is a creative country and as a result, our quality of communication is amongst the best in the world. However, on digital medium, the amount of work and money gone behind this has been less. The moment more and more brands start realising the importance of this medium, the quality of creative output will only increase.
How do you see your marketing objectives aligning with what the online medium offers from two years down the line?
This is a fast changing medium and within a few years, a lot of things will change. So it is very important for marketers to keep evolving and keep growing their marketing spends and learning in this medium.
