‘OOH an organic choice in our media planning’: Sagar Kocchar

What role does OOH medium play in your brand building and product promotions?

As a brand, our journey starts with identifying customer need gap and hence the relevant products that would satiate the same. Rebel Foods has always been evolving its core competency of churning out great recipes which can be scaled up, because the key challenge with food outlets is you may get a great recipe at one restaurant, but it may go down once things are scaled up. And once we are sure about the proposition and recipe, its only then we start scaling up as a brand where we figure out the best product-market fit for the product. To achieve the desired result, we have a great team of experts who work on multiple data-points, consumer data insight, product rating, NPS for the brand and so on & forth to make things possible for us to evolve.

We take a strategic approach to marketing, which comes around on the later stage once we are sure about our product-market fit. Being an online brand, we warm-up via digital marketing where we use a good mix of google ad words, SEO rankings, Affiliates, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. We, at Rebel, do heavy duty work on building social currency for each of our brands across social platforms like Instagram, Twitter etc. These are essential platforms for us to talk about our brand story, showcase content which bolsters the brand persona and helps creating community with whom we are able to seamlessly interact and engage thereby driving digital word-of-mouth for our brands.

In today’s age, there is no dearth of marketing channels with stated capabilities such as TV which delivers a high impact reach. But for a brand like ours which has a presence in select cities i.e. 20 cities, the spillage starts amassing. This is where we needed to don our thinking caps to find out a suitable media mix depending upon our campaign objective and attaining it efficiently. And in this, the OOH medium comes as an organic choice of the medium along with print and radio. OOH helps in planting our product offerings, as well as in creating an intriguing story for the brand communication. If done in a calculative and smart manner, the results are very promising. The beauty of the OOH medium is that one can pick a city to execute the campaign and create the desired impact and noise about your brand in a very efficient way. In fact, Behrouz Biryani started with the Mumbai market where we saw great results and started scaling it up to other markets. 

How do zero upon different formats and sites for your campaigns?

There is a lot of science and intelligence invested at the time of identifying the right locations and formats, for which we prefer hand-picking sites. We select sites targeting corporate hubs and residential areas because being closer to the consumption areas becomes extremely relevant.

Creative plays a quite vital role in the OOH marketing communication. How do you work around that?

To start with, one needs to clearly define the objective of the campaign. As a marketer, it is essential to communicate your offerings while also talking about the brand story, the one that differentiates the brand from others in the space. Otherwise it becomes another label on the site which doesn’t solve any purpose. For instance, Behrouz Biryani as a brand has a very intriguing heritage to it, as legends say a 2000 yrs old recipe from the Persian kingdom of Behrouz . The campaign line for this campaign was ‘The Biryani that was worth a war is definitely worth a try’ so it was a fairly strategic method to communicate the brand story and the tactical part of highlighting the key product offering of the brand. At iconic sites, we designed the innovation where steam was coming out from hoardings which really trended with our young consumers. We took an opportunity to amplify our outdoor campaign to digital, doing an activity called Spot the Royal Biryani.

With existing outdoor formats, were you able to narrate your brand story?

Yes, pretty much however it again depends on the campaign objective. Talking about the Behrouz Biryani OOH campaign where we could have gone overboard with a lot of story-telling, one needed to strike the fine balance between communicating what the brand stands for and its origin. And with outdoor formats, we were able to do it really well, highlighting the brand persona via the aura that we created on the creative, a sumptuous product shot and an intriguing campaign line.

Do you think OOH works better in collaboration with other communication channels?

Yes, it definitely performs better because it makes sense to kick start the 360-degree communication on all channels at the same time, as it offers healthy holistic impact. One media centric campaign can be executed in isolation to understand its impact. But as a marketer, we also understand the fact that our consumers are surrounded with a multitude of touchpoints therefore to grab their attention, it becomes even more important to ensure communication with different formats so that users may end up seeing the campaign on one channel or the other to create a constant recall in order to give boost to the brand image, as well as amplify the story build up that we are trying to push through that particular campaign.

How do you measure the efficacy of your OOH campaigns?

For a digital led brand such as ours, it is comparatively easier to measure the effectiveness of the outdoor communication than other offline brands because our brand category is impulsive in nature where the frequency of ordering from our TG is a lot more, where they order 6-8 times in a month on an average. Typically, at the time of our campaigns, we get to see the ROI of the campaign immediately with a good quantum of growth of the brand in the very same month. There are multiple other factors which demonstrate the effectiveness like organic search volume shoots up, overall delivery starts picking up across platforms so as a result, we see a good spike in our business at the time of running the campaign.

How open are you in using new formats and extended technologies on the OOH format?

There is always a need to keep pushing the bar and in today’s time all these new media formats come very handy. While these new-age media do add a feel-good factor, however it is imperative that they fulfill a particular purpose. Hence, it is more important to define the objective of the campaign. Once it is done then these are a great set of options to amplify the campaigns. If the intent is to have massive reach and create awareness, then the correct mix of mediums have to be used to create more reach through impactful formats which can be piled up with these frequency builders.

What challenges do you see while working with OOH formats?

The biggest key challenge in the OOH medium is to get a right site because as a marketer, we are very particular in hand-picking sites ourselves where someone from the brand team visits the sites. The whole endeavor is to make the most of every buck we spend. At times, the availability of sites become a challenge. In OOH, it is all the way more essential to pick the right media at the right location because a small right or left turn or a little deflection from the angle is capable of making or breaking a campaign.