Tushar Malhotra, Head of Marketing, Bisleri shared key insights into the Bisleri @Doorstep app’s performance and the brand’s partnerships with various sporting teams and events.

The marketer also spoke to e4m about Bisleri’s inclination towards integrated marketing, and its latest offerings

Excerpts:

Can you talk about Bisleri’s marketing mix and the mediums your brand uses for its campaign? 

Today, the consumer journey is not linear. The consumer is switching from TV to Digital and is being exposed to out-of-home experiences such as events. Therefore, the marketing mix cannot be focused on one medium. When you look at mass amplification for reach, TV does come into play, but when you’re talking to the youth, it’s all Digital. What has also been working very well for us is our various associations. Be it sports associations or movie associations or reaching out to cohorts, especially in the south of India through our limited-edition packs with movies. We also follow an always-on strategy when we look at our out-of-home medium. We are not doing one-month campaigns where we carpet bomb and then remain absent for 11 months. For example, right outside the Delhi airport, we have a 40-foot hoarding where our campaigns keep changing. But the need of the hour is an integrated marketing campaign.

Bisleri came into the limelight for its partnership with ISL teams as part of the ‘Carry Your Game’ campaign. Can you talk more about the campaign and your other partnerships? 

‘Carry Your Game’ is a campaign where we are trying to build a connection between sports and hydration. When we launched ‘Carry Your Game,’ we launched it as a Digital video campaign. We had four brand ambassadors – the captain of the Indian hockey team, Manpreet Singh; World Boxing Champion Lovlina Borgohain; Paralympian Nishad Kumar; and Badminton ace Ashwini Ponappa. It was launched on YouTube and Instagram, and many influencers were involved in it as well. After which, we took it to the IPL, and there we formed partnerships with the Gujarat Titans, Mumbai Indians, Rajasthan Royals, and Delhi Capital. As part of the campaign, we introduced limited edition bottles, Visi Cooler ice boxes, and content with players. We also did branding on all our trucks, about 400 of them. Additionally, all our retail outlets were dressed in the ‘Carry Your Game’ campaign with IPL associations. The campaign was also taken to the Ultimate Table Tennis, ProCam Marathons, Commonwealth Weightlifting, and other sporting events. ‘Carry Your Game’ was born out of a digital campaign, moved into experiential 360-degree integration, and now it’s everywhere.

Bisleri was among the first few FMCGs to foster the D2C concept, and it introduced the Bisleri @Doorstep app. How has that been for you? 

Our e-commerce journey started during the pandemic at a time when we wanted to supply pure, safe and healthy water to our consumers. Since then, we have noticed that Gen-Z and millennials want everything at their convenience. Keeping that into consideration, we launched the ‘Bisleri Apne App Aayega’campaign in January. Our e-commerce is largely Gen-Z and millennial-driven with a large metro-based consumer. The business is doing well for us. We are almost doubling our business size year-on-year, and it’s becoming a good acceleration point for us to reach consumers directly at home. Additionally, we have moved towards a dark store model where we have service agents who are in high-traffic, high-volume pin codes, similar to a Hub and Spoke model which helps us in faster deliveries. Also, quick commerce is working well for us where we have expanded our presence to platforms such as Zepto, BlinkIt, Swiggy, and BigBasket. If I look at the combined ecosystem of our app and Quick Commerce together, the D2C model is bringing substantial business.

Could you name some of the interesting BTL activities and sales promotions that you have engineered to increase consumer engagement? 

First, I would like to talk about our South India Limited Edition movie partnerships, wherein we came together with movies like RRR, Vikram, PS1, PS2, Godfather, Waltair Veerayya, King of Kotha, and Jailer. One needs to tailor their communications to accommodate the culture. There’s a saying that you have to win in many different Indias, not just in one India. This is creating a lot of brand love among consumers, and it’s giving us good sales across our stores. It’s further fuelling excitement in trade because we are building that festival-like atmosphere of the movies in retail stores. Then, there is the ’Greener Promise Initiative,’ which is a sustainability initiative that we launched in March. We also developed our first sustainability report with the TERI School. Very few people know that Bisleri is a plastic-neutral and water-positive company. We recycle as much plastic as we consume, and through our initiatives in rainwater harvesting and water conservation, we also give back more water than we consume. The call to support sustainability is also being spread across different forums. We also have a programme called ‘Bottles For Change,’ under which we are tying up with colleges like Amity University, Manipal University, and Madras Christian College to spread awareness about the best ways to recycle plastic.