OOH is used to create excitement about the brand: Amlan Mukherjee

How these festivals branding help in creating a brand’s presence?

Beauty bands are always a part of continuous lifestyle. Durga Puja is a festival of beauty where Maa Durga is the epitome of beauty and all Bengali women in the Durga puja await these days to look beautiful. And no brand other than Lakme can become a better partner for them when it comes to look beautiful during the auspicious occasion. Hence, Lakme plays a very important role during festivals from quite some time. 

What are the advertising opportunities available at Durga pandals? How do you leverage them for your marketing?

We don’t merely look at advertising opportunities in pandals but look for the synergy and the way it can be related to our brand. When looked at from beauty perspective, Durga puja is the only one occasion for Bengali women where every day is different and clad with different look. The way Lakme presents the special look is relatable to all 5 different days’ themes. Hence it is less about promoting any product on Durga puja pandal but more about selling concepts which becomes a culmination in a particular pandal and tells a different tale.

There are beauty advisors in all stores across Bengal, trained by the renowned celebrity make-up artists Anirudha Chakladhar where he has created 5 different looks for 5 festive days. These looks have been given to the retail chain of Lakme where the shoppers get to know about the products required for creating a look to bring alive the makeup. Hence it is directly related to shoppers about the way they are going to wear them. The imagination of the shoppers literally beats our expectation.

Since it’s crowded with audience and other brands, what are the challenges due to clutter?

Definitely there are challenges during Durga puja as the pandals are cluttered and we don’t believe in putting only hoarding or simple HUL branding. All initiatives undertaken are clutter-breaking properties. Lakme Aparupa Tumi 2019 is a clutter-breaking property which we started 20 days back through digital media and outdoors, ended with the Grand Finale. Hence, we don’t participate in such an area where our brands get lost in the clutter. We only participate when we know that we can stand out. Lakme Aparupa Tumi 2019 is a 360 complete degree campaign where we did not use electronic media for the fact that digital is our biggest leg and almost 100% of our consumers can be reached through this medium and it is helped by OOH, word of mouth, campaigning, celebrity endorsements and so and so forth.

Could you share the budget allotted for such branding? How do you measure the reach?

For us, it is never about the budget but creating a complete 360 degree is indispensable, budget has never been a constraint for an organisation like HUL. We always consider the reach and we are very satisfied when the reach has been created. We occupy large formats such as overhead gates, L-shaped gates, etc so that the brand becomes the talk of the town.
Every individual media is by far measured with different metrics and it is too early to measure the OOH reach at this point.

Apart from festival season how do you create brand presence in the east market with the given media options?

Beauty is a very engaging category. Women ask for a lot of confidence and assurance in order to reach their final beauty statement. We have 100+ beauty advisors who are trained professionals all over Bengal and even beyond. We have plenty of customers all over India, who take advices of the beauty experts and the latter turns almost their beauty partners which makes the huge difference.

This is how we interact with our consumers about our beauty products.

This time we managed to create a complete 360-degree campaign to increase our reach and create our brand presence.

What kind of media options do you consider for your media strategy?

There are two ways of promoting a brand- ATL and BTL. We deploy ATL in a simplest way and try to reach as many consumers in the best possible manner and that’s why we do with available options in TV or with outdoors. However, put today, digital media play a significant role. Throughout the year including festival time, we choose OOH for brand activations to create this additional excitement for the consumers which keeps our brand at the centre of our TG’s consideration. We deploy OOH strategically but it again depends upon the requirement to reach our consumers. OOH platform compliments to the main media platform. We always use OOH medium but obviously we have our own standards and reasoning to use this media effectively.