Due to a sluggish start to the fiscal year with steep corrections in the market, the pressure on this year’s festive season is huge. In this brand-exclusive series, we speak to brand custodians to understand their FestiveBrandBrief22 for the upcoming season, which, despite the slow start to the year, is likely to provide a much more high-spirited and profitable fiscal.
In this exclusive FestiveBrief22 interaction, Suman Varma, Chief Marketing Officer, Hamdard Laboratories (Medicine Division), speaks about how the brand advocates for natural products and how it leverages Digital. Varma outlines the brand marketing strategies Hamdard Laboratories leverages and underlines its importance on customer engagement.
Suman Varma is Chief Marketing Officer at Hamdard Laboratories (Medicine Division). Varma joined Hamdard in February 2020, where she is responsible for driving the growth plan through various marketing initiatives and strategies.
Suman has more than two decades of experience collaborating with brands and businesses in India.
Prior to joining Hamdard Laboratories, Varma was associated with the WPP group – JWT and Rediffusion Y&R. During her career, Suman has worked across categories for leading multi-national and home-grown brands.
She has a Masters in Comparative Literature, Sociology, and Political Science from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta.
Excerpts from the conversation.
What is your 100-word Brief for this festive season?
We are a Health & Wellness company. So my brief for this festive season would be for people to stay healthy, be happy, and be loved. And always remember that natural is healthy; incorporate natural products into your everyday life.
What are the need gaps in the product/service category you compete in?
If you haven’t thought about switching over to natural products, now more than ever is the time to start.
With a push for more access to natural products, many people are starting to see the benefits of incorporating natural products into your lifestyle.
There are many different reasons why you should choose natural products and why they are better for your body, especially in the long run.
Natural products can not only improve our overall well-being but our physical being as well. This can lead to boosting your mood when you feel like you look better, which is also better for the body too.
It’s good for people’s general wellbeing. Synthetic chemicals made in a lab can contain harmful substances that even if they don’t harm the body immediately, they definitely can over time. Hence, Natural is gentle on the body and mind.
Additionally, products that have any potential side effects should never be consumed in our opinion and the gamble is not worth the payoff. Natural products have no side effects.
If you struggle with mobility issues either due to inflammation or other ailments, natural products are great ways to treat and manage the pain.
Natural products can also increase your immune system as well, which is excellent news for your body’s health.
How are you filling in these need gaps?
Covid has given birth to dime a dozen natural products/brands. Many have launched fairly innovative products that fire people’s imagination, especially the youth. We don’t have such products in our portfolio today.
While at this point in time, we are more than confident in what we offer. It is a fact that we cannot ignore what the youth are seeking and have products that can appeal to them as well.
How have your brand- and your brand marketing strategies evolved in these past two years of the pandemic? What is the perfect media mix for your brand?
During the pandemic, like most brands, we did not spend money on ATL, unless absolutely necessary especially when we were launching a few products. We focused on engaging with the audience digitally.
There was much learning for first-timers like us in the digital space. We kept the brand engagement alive only digitally. But post the pandemic, we have come back to the pre covid spending and have gone live with TV, Digital, Outdoor, Radio, and print.
Our perfect media mix includes Digital and Outdoor.
Which are the most important categories that will see a big uptake in the upcoming Festive season?
Skin category, Hair category, Single ingredients as a category will all see a big uptake in the upcoming Festive season. Also the Cough & cold category will witness uptake because of the changing season.
Would you recommend more and more brands should also have, in time for the upcoming Festive Season, their own E-commerce platform on the web or app, online, for direct selling to consumers? Why?
Speaking for ourselves, I think few health and wellness products have a seasonality skew, otherwise, ecom is a 24×7 platform for us.
Your marketing campaigns for the festive season – will they be mostly customer-acquisition-focused, or will there be brand-building elements too? And how important a role is the emerging AI-powered outdoor medium likely to play?
Without building a Brand, brand connects starts slipping yet the customer acquisition focus we can lose out on. So we focus on both, we use ATL which is inclusive of outdoor but not necessarily AI-powered outdoor medium.
