Endorse your brand with BigCity
Endorse your brand with BigCity

Big City Promotions is India’s premier tactical sales promotion and flexible incentives program agency. It is one of the most innovative experiential marketing companies, which creates high impact campaigns via travel, leisure and lifestyle incentives. Our very own Aadeetya Sriram got further insight about the company from Mr. Bharat Surana, Co-founder & Head - Alliances Marketing.

 

Aadeetya Sriram (AS): What is BigCity Promotions all about?

Bharat Surana (BS): We are a B2B BTL agency. We started BigCity Promotions in late 2007, with a team of 3 which now employs 95 people around the country and dozens of freelancers. We utilize our partnership with more than 10,000 clients, indulge them in our promotions via different mediums i.e. salons, movie halls, some enterprises, standalone etc. We are geared to promote brands around top 50 cities in the country concentrating on the urban side of the country rather than the rural. We are growing at a phenomenal speed, in excess of 300% growth year-on-year basis.

 

AS: What is the U.S.P of services provided by BigCity Promotions?

BS: The unique feature of the services we provide is compelling reward at low prices. We basically are a one-stop shop for their promotion solutions, we have an out-of-box thinking, and we never prepare ourselves for the brief, unless we know about the brand. We come across a client, we understand their needs and accordingly solutions to their problems are devised, so we treat each and every client of ours as our own. Anything which we do is completely tailor-made.

 

AS: What kind of clients do you have in your portfolio?

BS: Except for Auto and Insurance sectors, we handle majority of industry verticals such as banks (SBI, ICICI), FMCG (HUL, Reckitt), Raymond’s, Welspun, Nokia, and Blackberry. We handle network clients like Airtel, Tata Docomo, Virgin etc. We indulge in promoting 10-12 brands every month i.e. 250 promotions every year.

 

AS: What sort of services BigCity Promotions provide?

BS:  Spend-based promotions, top-up promotions, retention programmes. We did a joint promotion for Blackberry with Airtel, where anyone who buys blackberry phone and connects to blackberry services through Airtel, would get 3 months of unlimited movies at any select multiplexes. 

 

AS: How has the company fared financially over the years?

BS: Since our inception we attained returns of Rs. 80 Lac in the first year, Rs 10 cr in the second year.We expect to reach Rs. 30 cr within the next 2 financial years.

 

AS: How can clients avail you services?

BS: Our standard procedure is that we have our business development team; they have an interaction with our client. Our first objective is to showcase our services, range/spectrum of things we handle, provide them with the possibilities that we can achieve, create. Like with Wella, we did not have this product, we created it; same goes for Harpic, we created an army of toilet-cleaners spread across the country. We get the brief, our research team takes-over for the analyzing process and after thorough preparation in association with our alliance team, we provide our client with the best possible innovative ideas to promote their brand.

 

AS: What sort of training do you provide the personnel you employ?

BS: We train our concierge so as to have an understanding of what sort of customers do they need to entertain. Different clients cater to different class of people, such as a bank which has platinum card holders, is a niche-class segment, so the people to cater to their needs need to be thorough professional and organized. The level of interaction has to be short, whereas a client catering to SEC B and SEC C can be vernacular in general, so we require different people for them who attain varied training methods. The integration set-up has to be precise because we would prefer the call rap-up time to be as minimal as possible, so the staff has to be swift with its functioning, which reduces our cost, and delights our customer.

 

AS: How Big City is helping the retailers?

BS: We enable the retailers in customer acquisition, increase their average spend, maintain loyalty and motivate staff which in return results in profitable growth of the brand.

 

AS: What future plans do you have in the pipeline?

 BS: We will be launching our Mumbai office in the next two months; we aim to be present at top 8 cities in the country in terms of our sales & marketing people and research. At the moment we have a hub in Bangalore, and we deploy freelances in other parts of the country. We plan to make it zonal representation so as to widen our network. We are also looking at emerging countries as well as Tier II cities and we are contemplating venturing into Tier III city in the near future.

 

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