Bengaluru-headquartered startup Happilo witnessed a 4X growth during pandemic and Vikas D Nahar, Founder & CEO- Happilo, says the current focus is on attaining leadership in over 50 cities in India & strengthening the brand resonance with dry fruit.
Edited excerpts of a conversation with Nahar:
What has the journey of building Happilo been like?
Happilo was founded in 2016 with the ambition to build one of India’s premium and healthy snacking dry fruit brands. Happilo was the first brand to launch dry fruits on an online platform. During the pandemic, Happilo saw year-on-year growth of 4X because people were looking for healthy snacking options online and Happilo had the right product at the right time.
Post Covid, Happilo is present in almost all e-commerce & quick commerce platforms and is present in over 10,000 modern trade and general trade stores. We are focusing on building our website presence and building higher visibility on ATL mediums by investing in creative strategy and media spends. As of today, we are available in over 50 cities & have positioned Happilo as a fun Dry fruits snacking brand.
The brand also diversified its product portfolio to cater to the ever-evolving demands of consumers by launching an array of new offerings based on dry fruits and nuts as the base ingredients. The brand will further strengthen its presence with 10 stores in this financial year and also launch in other global markets.
This year’s focus is on attaining leadership in over 50 cities in India & strengthening the brand resonance with dry fruit.
How did you develop the marketing strategy for Happilo and what channels did you use to reach your target audience?
Our overall marketing strategy is to build reach for the brand and give Happilo dry fruits & snacks a higher share in the healthy snacking industry. We want to build this on the back of market penetration and product penetration approach. We are constantly reaching out to more markets and introducing products which give multiple occasions within the day to consume dry fruits.
We keep a certain percentage of last year’s revenue as a marketing budget and hence our budgets have also grown multi-fold. Our focus is product penetration, increasing consumption and high brand trails in metro, mini metro and Tier-1 markets. You can expect the launch of new and interesting products made of dry fruits, and a higher number of brand stores. We also plan to make the product available in smaller kirana stores and create a higher international presence of the brand.
We will continue to invest in media based on seasonality and build reach and frequency. We have started our season with IPL partnership which is a 360-degree campaign including the Happilo & Royal Challengers Bangalore partnership and we will do high decibel campaigns during the second half of the year keeping the key markets in mind and we will take a heavy ATL approach.
What role does brand positioning play in your overall marketing strategy?
It's a fun, energetic, quirky and enthusiastic brand which brings superlative emotions and makes you feel happy and satiated. The brand positioning drives multiple use cases and occasions to our audience to consume Happilo Dry fruit snacks.
While other brands in the category are trying to build dry fruits as a healthy snack, we believe that Indians are already aware about the food item’s nutritional value. Our focus is to build this category for GenZ and Millennials to bring about a behavioural change and induce daily consumption. We achieved that by revamping dry-fruits into tasty satiating snackables, hence providing an alternative to unhealthy munching options of the world. Our products taste better, and are guilt free options for snacking, and moreover are fun-foods to consume. In order to communicate the same our brand revolves around the Jester and Magician archetype.
What are some of the biggest challenges you faced while building and marketing Happilo, and how did you overcome them?
When I planned to establish the brand, the initial challenge was to figure out the capital since I had started the company with extremely low funds. Through a government scheme beneficiary, I was able to secure a loan amount without any collateral. The business then started off and went smoothly until we hit the pandemic.
During Covid-19 and the first lockdown, we had inventory lined in the warehouse and as an employer and entrepreneur, I had a lot to look after the interests of my employees and vendors. Happilo did not lay off any employee and neither did we make any salary deductions. When normalcy returned, we were available both online and offline, increased our manpower by 3x times compared to pre-covid levels and our revenues increased by 4x during the Covid period.
What's your approach to digital marketing, and how has it evolved over the years?
Our approach on digital marketing is to increase the audience via segmented reach based on our audience profile and capture that audience first and then keep expanding the audience base geographically. We are also including influencer’s in this year’s strategy as we have seen impact coming via influencer’s campaign. The most effecting channel for Happilo has been YouTube.
You have collaborated with RCB as the snacking partner, why RCB and how do you intend to leverage this association?
Royal Challengers Bangalore is one of the top teams in IPL and they have a strong presence in social & digital. Overall, the followers’ base, fan following and the content game of RCB is one of the best. Happilo’s audience is primarily in metros and mini metro cities and this audience is very digital savvy, hence we have associated with Royal Challengers Bangalore. We are using this partnership in terms of building content across digital and TV platforms, meet and greet to gratify the consumers and our channel partners and Happilo exclusive outlet level activations. We believe the fan base and following of RCB will help aid in reach and overall brand love on digital.
How do you measure the success of your marketing campaigns?
As we are in a high growth phase for us the reach and frequency is the most important criteria. We look at growth of traffic on our platforms and growth of brand keyword searches. An increase in brand trails is most important matrix that we consider.
How are you looking at brand and product line expansion? Are any plans in the pipeline?
Happilo started with core Dry fruits & Mixes range and now expanded in Dried Fruits, Dry Fruit Bars, Brittle, Barfi, Peanut Butters, Spreads, Flavoured Peanuts, chickpeas and Makhana. Overall idea is to give multiple occasions to a person to consume Dry fruits & snacks and help us increase the wallet share.
How have you leveraged your association with actors Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra?
After establishing the brand via cricket and IPL, we shifted focus to celebrities. We roped in Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra and the couple did justice to our Diwali 2022 campaign. We launched three films with the duo under the campaign, all designed by McCann. With the right media mix, the campaign increased our awareness scores to more than 82% as per the quantitative study. Our focus is to ensure that 70% of our target audience engage with the brand at-least three to four times per month. Additionally, you can expect a brand campaign from Happilo this Diwali, 2023.
