What do all high-value customers have in common?

Guest Column: Rohit Jindal, Business Head, MyGate, writes about why and how brands are increasing their focus on residents of gated communities

by Rohit Jindal
Published - July 13, 2022
4 minutes To Read
What do all high-value customers have in common?

Most, if not all, marketing is the quest for the right customer. Whether you put up a hoarding at a bus stop, write a blog post or run a display campaign, the point is to acquire or build interest. This is as much a challenge in New York as in Berlin, but it is doubly so in a country like ours. This is because consumption happens mostly among the top 10%, which leaves ample room for spillage in any campaign you run. It’s a fact that we’ve come to accept as an industry. How often does your sales team report that most of the leads you brought them are simply people looking for a job, for example? The question is commonplace across organisations.

But what if there were a way to lower this exposure? 

A marketer’s dream

A recent report by Redseer Consulting points to the existence of an audience comprising the majority of this top 5%. In ‘Gated Communities: A $500 Billion Consumption Story’, Redseer claims that this audience comprises the 16 million families that reside within gated communities. It states that this group alone accounts for almost 45% of the total consumption in the top 50 cities in India. Even more, interestingly, the report shows that disposable incomes for this audience rival that of more advanced economies like the US, the UK and Germany. 

The fact that the families living in gated communities are relatively well off isn’t new. Even before eCommerce made it amply clear, marketers have known that their customers reside in these clusters. You’ll find even large brands sponsoring Diwali or New Year events that take place in a gated community. However, it has never been a scalable channel, which is why they’ve never been leveraged to their full potential.

Enter the digital gated community

As with all things, gated communities have been going digital, too. Communities now have their own app for maintenance payments, finding a maid, interacting with each other, managing guest entries and much more. 25,000 or 82 per cent of the market of societies that use such an app are on MyGate, the pioneer in the field. These 25,000 societies are home to around 3.5 million families – a quarter of the families that live in all gated communities in India.

Over the past 10 months, MyGate has begun engaging its users with content from the nation’s top brands. Over 1,000 have participated so far, including the likes of Flipkart, ITC, Jaguar, Samsung, IKEA, Swiggy, HUL, L’oreal, Uber, Godrej Properties and Fortis Hospitals. The reason behind the speed at which these brands have engaged with MyGate is not just the quality of its audience, but the depth of the campaign types it offers.

For example, the homes on MyGate receive approval notifications for lakhs of deliveries and guests every day. As soon as these are approved, brands have been making these audiences take note of the breadth of their offerings via a rolling set of creatives throughout the day. National brands, in this manner, can reach out to all their high-value customers in a very targeted manner with minimum spillage. For example, H&M announced the opening of its home decor store, H&M Home, in Delhi with an expanding banner on the app’s home page across the city.

Some brands have also chosen to go 360-degree with their campaigns. BlinkIt announced its branding change to over 1,000 gated communities with a digital campaign on MyGate as well as a large signage board at their gate. Domino’s has taken its food truck to over 100 large gated communities in Hyderabad for what it calls ‘No Cooking Fridays’, with MyGate users able to place their order via the app. Ryan International was quickly able to identify gated communities within a 5-kilometre radius of its campuses.

The wealth of these formats offers immense room for innovation and engagement with the right audience. As a marketer, you may have experimented with such ideas at a mall or an expo. Now you can do it at scale.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com

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