Marketing has always had a key role to play in brand building for any organization. Marketing has evolved over time with the advent of technology and the rise of the internet. We increasingly witness the use of digital and social media to reach out to the newer set of audiences. The conventional channels continue to exist and have their own role to play, considering the diversity of the customers in India.
Droom has a very well -defined playbook for marketing. We know we are building a consumer brand in the internet domain and we are aware of the fact that most internet brands are built based on 2 key things: 1) their utility vis-à-vis competition and 2) the experiences they create for the users. For all our marketing programs, we look for these common characteristics: performance based, measurable, targetable, and highly viral. Another dimension of marketing at Droom is that besides colors, fonts, and all sorts of creativity, our marketing is highly data driven. We convert every marketing spend into unit cost, ROI etc. It is our constant endeavour to run cost effective and impactful marketing campaigns for Droom.
For 2018, we expect to spend Rs. 300 crores on marketing. This budget will be broadly divided into Rs. 100 crores for TVC, outdoor, activation and print; Rs. 100 crores for digital; Rs. 50 crores for deals and promotions; Rs. 25 crores for digital videos (in addition to digital overall); and Rs. 25 crores in various types of CSR/ social awareness related campaigns including road safety, traffic rules, buyer advocacy etc.
We plan to run 3 brand campaigns for Droom, 2 for OBV, and 2 for the entire set of ecosystem tools focusing on OBV, Eco, History and Credit. In 2018, we also plan to keep aside a separate budget in digital video campaigns. This has been done keeping in mind the success of our digital only film called ‘Bittuji Ki Beemer’ that was launched in 2017. This was a rap song of 3 minutes and was a big hit on YouTube and Facebook. You can expect us to launch more interesting digital videos in the year 2018.
Another unique campaign that we started in 2017 and will continue in 2018 is that we will create separate advertisements with same set up, same artists and same strategy for digital consumption, while producing TVCs. We have successfully done this in the past in the case of our ecosystem services ads that focused on OBV, Eco and History, where we created one set of ads for TV and slightly different set of ads for digital. We created 10 seconds and 6 second creatives for digital. The ads on television and digital were not same. However, both were shot in the same settings but had different dialogues for online. This was hugely effective for us.
Unlike other e-commerce companies, we spend more on social and we will continue to do that in 2018 as well. We have over 5.5 million community members in Facebook for Droom and close to 2 million for OBV and we plan to double this count in the year 2018.
We are confident that with our extremely focussed and marketing strategy, Droom will be able to scale new heights in the year 2018.
