Guest Article: Nishanth Chandran, Founder & CEO, TenderCuts says that if brands evolve as per the needs and requirements of its consumers, they can certainly tide over the most difficult times and effectively adjust to new realities. 

The year started with a lot of promises where we intended to expand in the markets that we are currently in. There were aggressive plans put in place to reach out to a focussed set of audiences in the vicinity of stores that we were planning to launch. Our marketing was driven with a singular purpose to drive awareness on high quality, hygienic and fresh meat & seafood at the doorstep.  The messages were clear, the plans were afoot, and our unique omnichannel route had paved way for a considerable market share in the area of our presence. But the lockdown and restricted movement made us to rethink and come out with a proposition that would satisfy our customers and at the same time help us to reach out to a wider audience. Right at the very beginning of the lockdown, we ushered contactless delivery which was a significant step ahead in our operations which also gave confidence to our customers. 

Our messaging helped our customers understand that the meat and seafood they buy at TenderCuts is always fresh, hygienic, and safe. Safety became a parameter which was aimed to deliver confidence to our customers and help them relate to the brand TenderCuts. We went aggressive on the digital medium to drive messages of safe and hygienic meat at the doorstep. Multimodal digital properties were created that helped re-energize and focus our communication approach. This focused communication and aggressive digital media engagement enabled a 300% growth in customer acquisition and sales. Another aspect that we directly focused on is communicating the availability of the products that the customers prefer. We used messaging and other avenues in conveying the availability and opening of orders for the next day for our customers to make complete use of, owing to the restrictions in movement and time. We had seen a significant growth in customer confidence and observed people moving to organized retail safely from their homes. 

When it comes to reaching customer satisfaction there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that can be followed and a brand should constantly be abreast with the changing requirements of a customer. With work-from-home becoming the norm, and demand for healthy diet growing significantly, we introduced special ready to cook categories to help our customers free up their time at home. Once again this was lapped up by our customers extensively and we had observed a remarkable trend where the procurement of ready to cook products had seen a huge spike. 

Additionally, we also launched the ‘TenderCuts Elite Subscription’ programme that offers free scheduled delivery, exclusive benefits and offers like 5x rewards and free samples for our patrons & regular customers. 

We had also introduced many value added categories like snacks, egg based products, spices and added more SKUs in our existing categories to provide a one stop destination to our customers for all their fish & meat related needs. Moving into the future branding plans, we are looking at 360-degree campaign in Hyderabad this month with bus shelter branding and auto branding in prime locations. We are also doing various digital, radio and print campaigns to reach out to our consumers.

In conclusion, we can say that crisis is an opportunity to bring across new innovations and processes. If brands are evolving as per the needs and requirements of its consumers, they can certainly tide over the most difficult times and effectively adjust to new realities.