Growth of local/regional cuisines in India - Why should we promote and invest in it?

The times are changing swiftly and the attention span of consumers is reducing slowly and steadily with each passing day. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that today’s consumers are spoilt for choice. And, amidst shiny products coupled with a fast reducing consumer attention span, it gets really difficult for a brand to ensure that its product remains relevant. This is where experiential marketing comes into the picture. Experiential marketing is a futuristic concept that is entirely focused on curating amazing experiences for consumers. It is all about speaking to consumers in their language, both literally and figuratively. It gives a new meaning to the phrase - Consumer is king.

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing is a millennial concept. It involves brands engaging directly with their consumers to grab their attention. According to Campaign, the 2017 Freeman Global Brand Experience Study found that more than one in three CMOs expects to set aside 21 to 50 percent of their budgets for brand experiences, including events, trade shows, sponsorships, exhibits, permanent installations, virtual or augmented reality experiences and/or pop-ups. EventTech 2017 witnessed leading marketing specialists making grand plans to change the way the world views their products in 2018 with the help of experiential marketing. At the same event, it was observed that companies are spending more than 11% of their budget on experiential marketing.

Is it the next generation of marketing?

One unique thing about experiential marketing is that it does not follow the usual ‘one campaign fits all’ strategy. In order to generate sales, and to make your voice heard in the market, you need to be highly creative. As experiential marketing is all about directly engaging with your customers, your idea can make or break your brand. Off late, we have seen quite a few companies gone crazy with their experiential marketing ideas. One of the campaigns that come to our mind is the OnePlus campaign launched in India, which was experiential to the core. The brand carried out a number of engaging exercises like popups, photo walks, fan meets to grab eyeballs and make OnePlus a popular name. Another creative campaign that was highly personal and hugely successful was the Ikea sleepover campaign. Now many of Ikea’s fans have nurtured a desire to have a sleepover in Ikea. Ikea selected 100 lucky people to have a sleepover there. They provided them with sleeping masks, hot cocoa, movies, massage, and other cool goodies. Needless to say, the campaign earned Ikea a lot of brownie points. Homeshop 18, in order to attract its customers, has installed India’s first virtual, mobile-aided shopping experience at Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport at New Delhi. Users here can check out cool products and shop them immediately by scanning their QR codes on their cellphones.

At Dineout, we also experimented with experiential marketing. We organized an annual event in February 2017 in 8 major Indian cities - Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad. The Great Indian Restaurant Festival, allowed people to avail a flat 50% discount on menu prices at more than 2000 premier restaurants in these cities. In 2018, owing to the amazing response this festival received in Year 1, we decided to run #GIRF2018 for the entire month of February, so from 1st February to 28th February, the food lovers in the cities mentioned above had a gala time sampling cuisines at half the price.

Similarly, for Gourmet Passport, our exclusive subscription program which offers 1+1 on Buffets, Main Course and Drinks at the best restaurants across the country, we have taken the concept of experiential dining to a whole new level. We regularly host “Dine with Rocky” events for our members which are curated by Rocky Mohan, founder of Gourmet Passport, cookbooks author and the man behind the legendary Old Monk Rum . Designed to give the food connoisseurs experiences that turn into unforgettable memories, these events are hosted at uber premium restaurants where each guest is personally hosted by Rocky Mohan himself. Dine With Rocky events presents an opportunity to the restaurants to showcase their culinary excellence and also provide hospitality that they are known for. It is a platform for like-minded people to interact and share their common passion for food and love for finer things in life.

Experiential marketing aims at creating short but meaningful activities for people, thereby creating a bigger and long-lasting impact on their minds. Needless to say, a lot of work and resources go into the planning and production of an experiential event. In the end, it just boils down to what sells and what appeals to the consumers the most.

In order to survive and flourish in today’s restaurant scenario, a comprehensive marketing strategy is the key to crack the competitive lock. It helps in building a brand identity, create awareness, drive customer engagement, and attract a globally spread audience. As per an Adweek survey, 25% of people have at least one restaurant app on their phone.

According to a research, 85% of those who search for food on their mobile phones go on to complete a purchase. In 1995, less than 1% of the world population had an internet connection. Today, over 3.6 billion people use the internet. That’s more than 40% of the world population. Hence, marketing is no more a matter of choice; it’s now a necessity.

Though the competition among restaurants is fierce, marketing strategies and innovation help to improve your business strength and grab attention from growling stomachs everywhere!

“The landscape of restaurant business has been radically transformed by the emergence of digital technology. Building a long term customer relationship through an integrated marketing communication is essential for restaurants today,” shared Karyna Bajaj, founder of the award winning restaurant CinCin in Mumbai that uses various tools, social media being an engaging one to reach wider audiences. “Our offline activities like public relations, direct marketing and constant engagement with our loyal guests prove to be an effective tool as we are always innovating to build incredible guest experiences,” she added.

Some tips for restaurant marketing :

Get A Website: A website opens up opportunities for a much larger market of consumers. It makes it very easy for potential and even existing customers to find you. It also gives you the freedom to craft your identity the way you want and facilitates more control over how you want to interact with your customer.

Host Events: People love going out for events. In order to promote your restaurant and build a strong fan base you could organise a popular band to come over and perform or invite a popular comedian. There is nothing better than bringing a smile on people’s faces after all. There are many event-related restaurant promotion ideas that you can come up with. In order to make the best of it, publicizing these events on social media is a must. “In today’s time, especially in a city like Delhi you have to be very aggressive and proactive with your marketing be it on social or print media. You have to come up with different strategies every month. Your social media should be influential and should grab the attention of target audience. We have a very good marketing team which knows how to reach to the target group effectively and efficiently.  We threw an opening party which was covered by almost all the newspapers and magazines. The second most important strategy is to plan your expense well in advance. You must divide your funds and prioritise on the most effective marketing tools to reach the customers,” said Aryan Singh, owner of the Jugaad Bar, Defence Colony.

Never Avoid Customer Reviews: More than half of the population in the age bracket of 18-34 years gives priority to online reviews over the opinions of friends or family. Most of the times, people tend to air their bad experiences rather than the good ones. Instead of feeling disheartened, look upon it as a room where you can still improve. In fact, you must reply to the bad review as it adds to your credibility and your intent on addressing any shortcomings at your end.

Get a Place On Restaurant Discovery Platforms: Restaurant search sites like Zomato are widely used to search and find cafes or diners. Over the years, they have become the go to place for people looking to find restaurants online. This helps to connect with your target audience more efficiently.

Invite An Influencer To Talk About Your Restaurant: You can start with local influencers. Search instagram in your location with hashtags like #foodie or #food and get in touch with people who have good fan following. Invite your influencers and delight them with the best of your food, hospitality to an extent that they consider featuring your restaurant in their blogs or social media posts.

How and when Twiss came into existence?

Twiss was launched in UK in 2011. It is a combination of two fruits or herbs Complementing each other and giving new twist to its delivery in taste and that’s why we call it as great Twiss. Mango itself is a great testing food, but by adding lime we just made it taste better. This is how the whole idea took place and we launched the brand. The brand is now widely accepted and doing reasonably well in UK.

Tell us about your brand and the flavors it offers?

In the sparkling fruit juice category we have launched four products namely mango with lime, passion with orange, lemon with mint and apple with blackcurrant in 250 ml can priced at Rs 40. The shelf life of our drink is 18 months.

We will not say we are organic. There is a small niche of consumers who are talking of organic, but the mass consumer still consumes the normal products. Our products contain Argentinean lime, it’s not very limy, but it’s a very smooth. We have got our established product range existing in UK. We have got a pipeline of more quirky flavors meeting Indianised requirement.

Who are your target customers?

We probably target 16 to 28 years old. Primarily students from colleges, universities who have certain amount of disposable income or pocket money, which they easily shell out. As per our research the acceptability for our flavor and taste among youth is high.

What inspired you to launch Twisss in India?

We think that the market is much bigger outside in terms of innovation, then we looked at India. We have done lots of research and found that in the sparkling drink category India has colas and flavored carbonates like Mirinda, Coke, Sprite, 7up among others, but the concept of sparkling fruit juice did not exist. There is only brand in the sparkling drink category that is Appy Fizz. This is the reason we thought that in India there is a good opportunity where no one is present and we felt we have something which is really good.

What about producing in India?

The question was where do we get it manufactured, eventually we decided to get it manufactured in India, so that we would have some cost advantages and it would be perfectly fitting with Make In India, Made In India and Made For India concept.

We source our fruits, which are quite global in nature. Mango is very much local product, but passion has grown in many places like Kerala and North-East region and we would like to explore the opportunity of getting it locally, which would save us on a lot of prospects. Around 70 percent of our products are domestically sourced and 30 percent are imported.

How healthy is the drink for diabetic prone Indian consumers?

It is a choice of consumer to drink or not. . Advice is, you drink everything in moderation and then you have your exercise ready to keep sugar in control. It’s refreshment drink.

Which are the cities you are primarily looking to target and what are your future expansion plans?

We are looking at cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi.

We have identified about 50 towns; the metros, tier I, II and III. We would like to tap almost all A and B category of retailers. Also, we are exploring the opportunity to tying up with some of the QSR's and ethnic local food chains where they serve spicy and aromatic food, which needs this kind of sparkling drink to go along with.

Internationally we are looking to venture into Gulf and Middle-East region.

What about your online presence?

We are excited about the big proliferation of e-commerce in India, especially in online grocery. Coming summer we will be dealing with Groffers.com and Bigbasket.com.

Any plan of launching your own e-commerce portal?

No not as of now. We will launch the consumer engagement app, but not the commercial app availing purchase option as we only have soft drink. Consumer engagement app will be launched to gain ideas on how to engage with consumers from a marketing perspective.

How do you see the Indian beverage market three years from now?

The market will get more innovative with appeal by PM Modi to the soft drink players to add two percent of fruit juice. More players will get into the market and will grow the category. There will be place for everyone.

Beverage market has grown by almost 14 to 15 percent since last three to four years. I expect that the growth will continue with more players coming in.The market is around Rs 14000 cr to Rs 15000 cr in India.

What is the target revenue?

On an average we are targeting Rs 20 cr of turnover by the end of the year.

Indian frozen food market is Rs 1,500 crore. What is your share in the market?

Presently, we are a very small player in the frozen food segment, but we are looking to attain 10 per cent share within next 2-3 years time.

Do you think that the QSR and the frozen food market are targeting the same customers?

The frozen food segment targets people falling between 15-60 age group and the QSR focuses on the young adult or the fast moving generations who like easy to grab foods.

What is the supply chain process at Tyson?

We have two manufacturing sectors – one is at Taluja (Maharashtra) and another is in Bangalore. We ship products across the country and we have made our presence in around 68 cities across India.

What is the cold chain process at your plant?

The biggest challenge in India is the cold chain infrastructure. Our company with the help of our partners have put across a wide network of cold chain infrastructure across the country. We aim to grow to 100 cities in the next 2-3 years time.

 What is your product placing strategy when people are becoming more health conscious?

Any food item that you choose to eat comes with a taste and then texture i.e., the mouth fit comes first and then comes the health. Though the health is in the mind, but the food has to be of taste grade. Tyson food is a US-based company and have got expertise in rearing, weaving the chicken. So we control the parent bird, the feeding programme and the vetenary services and thus the quality is best ensured focusing on the healthiness part of the food. We also follow very strict food safety and cleaning process in plant and in the supply chain.

What is the reason that ready-to-eat market is increasing its growth in the country?

The ready-to-eat market is growing very fast, especially in tier-II and tier-III cities as women’s are getting into jobs and they have lesser time for the kitchen. They need the same experience in a reasonable bracket and thus, ready-to-eat is on demand.

Frozen food is a healthy quotient or a comfort facility. What is your view?

Frozen food is both healthy and a comfort facility. It is a healthy quotient because you have preserved the freshness and nutritive value of the product. But if you look at comfort, then it gives you the convenience to store along with easy option to take out and use.