Ravi Prakash Vora has close to 12 years of experience, most of which were spent building brands in the competitive Indian FMCG space. Before joining FlipKart Ravi worked at Unilever on foods brands like Brooke Bond, Annapurna and Kissan. He was a key member of the team that re-launched Brooke Bond in India and was also instrumental in re-engineering and improving the profitability of the popular foods business for Unilever. At Flipkart, Ravi has been involved in setting up the marketing function and has spearheaded campaigns like “Fairy tale”, “No kidding, No worries”, “Shopping Ka Naya Address” and the new “Flipkart It”. In an exclusive interview with India Digital Review, RP Vora discusses his plans about leveraging internet marketing for FlipKart.
FlipKart has been using digital for both building the brand and acquiring consumers. How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in FlipKart’s plans to reach out to consumers?
In the current scenario, internet is pretty small right now and the larger share of the TG is still available offline. Our RoIs are still working out better on traditional mediums. However, going forward, in the next two to three years, digital consumption and spends will go up in India and, for this to happen, both quality and quantity of content needs to grow in India. Once that is achieved, we foresee the overall industry spend on digital standing at around 15 to 20 per cent in the next two to three years.
In your category, performance based advertisement works the best. With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?
We have done quite a few experiments and are trying to see the usability of different mediums and channels on the web. Currently, there is a system that exists in the offline world that examines how our spends are changing the perception and attitude towards the brand. We are experimenting online and trying to build a place where the credibility of spends are there. Once we see a direct relation between the spends and the consumer perception being shaped, I think we will increase our focus on digital.
FlipKart has done a lot of initiatives on TV as well as on print. What are your visual brand building plans on the internet?
Currently the medium has its constraints with the number of people accessing and spending time on this. It has to become a large enough medium in terms of consumption to compete with TV. Though people are buying online, a large proportion of their time is still spent offline. Having said that, today, the TG for most online companies is people living in the metros and slowly it is becoming important for a brand to be built online also. And we can see that in other business segments as well. The telecom industry, the auto sector etc are already increasing their spends online.
Your present TVC that is on air right now. Do you plan to extend on the internet?
Oh yes we do. You will see the same campaign on different channels across the internet.
Do you feel that online companies should build their brand on traditional media and acquire customers online? Is brand building possible on internet?
I don’t think that it’s a rule. One can do this purely on the internet. From a brand preference point of view, if your message is complex, the traditional medium works better as there are some restrictions in terms of innovation on digital. But that doesn’t really mean that traditional media is imperative and is a must for building a brand.
How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India?
Social media has guaranteed a large reach for us. Today, one of the primary reasons that people are coming on to internet is Facebook. Our objective on social media is to build a deeper engagement with our audience on these platforms.
What answers do you seek from your digital advertising agencies and digital media partners while promoting your brand on internet?
We give them clear directions on what we see this as either a brand building or customer acquisition exercise. For example, if we are advertising a new category of ours or say we are communicating about CoD on TV, we ask the agency to deliver the same message online using same creatives. Or it could be a complete performance based campaign, depending on the message and objective.
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?
I don’t think so. I think that it is a very easy medium to understand and complexity of measurement is much higher in the traditional medium. There, one has to rely on third party data and reports. On digital, you can keep a track of things yourself. From an RoI point of view, online is also very attractive. If a company is planning to grow from a small to a medium sized company, online marketing is attractive. Online can give a company the initial scale and then to expand to the mass, one needs TV or print.
Our present objective is to get people who are not online, to shop online and hence traditional media makes more sense for us. In the initial three years of FlipKart, we didn’t do any ads on TV or print and were purely on internet.
How do you see your marketing objectives aligning with what the online medium offers from two years down the line?
I see internet media overtaking traditional media in the next two years for us. By then we would have reached out to the audience who are not online and may be converted them. So it’s pretty much dependent on the objective of the company. We were entirely on digital in the first three and a half years and then we realised that we need to reach the mass and that is when we migrated to traditional medium. Now, as we have a certain number of people coming on to the site daily and transacting, we are again looking at internet as a very strong medium for our future growth.
