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, Sumit Garg, Co-founder and MD of Luxury Ride, speaks about the brand’s journey and charts the growth of the pre-owned cars segment. Garg also outlines Luxury Ride’s festive season strategy and underlines its dependence on digital marketing.
Sumit Garg is the MD and Co-Founder of Luxury Ride, a final shopping destination for the foremost exclusive and fascinating pre-owned luxury cars. Right after college, he founded KoiBhiCar.com in 2012, an online marketplace for pre-owned luxury cars. After a quick realization of the industry, Sumit shifted his business to an offline model and established Luxury Ride in 2015 along with his two friends.
At Luxury Ride, Sumit oversees various departments and his prime focus is the exponential expansion of Luxury Ride across India. He is also highly involved in the day-to-day functioning of the company in order to get the DNA right which can support business growth and create a strong foundation.
Sumit has been fascinated and passionate about cars since his school days; in his personal time also he likes to go on long drives.
What is your 100-word Brief for this festive season?
Festive seasons have always been a great time of the year for us, as more and more people are buying new things for themselves. So as soon as the ‘Shraadhs’ are over, we see a huge increment in the demand from the consumers during the Dussehra/ Diwali timeline. Especially during ‘Dhanteras’ a lot of people are interested in buying metallic things as it is considered to be auspicious.
The past two years were slightly difficult for us during the festive season due to the pandemic. Consumers were not in a positive state of mind, therefore the previous two festive seasons did not meet our expectations for us. But I am positive that this festive season will make up for it.
What are the need gaps in the product/service category you compete in? How are you filling those gaps?
Considering we deal in pre-owned luxury cars (buying, selling, and servicing), the biggest need gap is good quality pre-owned luxury cars. As we all know, people are usually hesitant to buy pre-owned luxury cars because of a lack of trust, or maybe they are worried about vehicle servicing hassles they might face in the future.
At Luxury Ride we combat this problem by providing a 15-day money-back guarantee, in-house service centers, insurance, and a loan facility (the loans are at a very competitive price as well).
Also, all our vehicles go through 151 checkpoints of inspection and are backed up with 6 Months Engine & Gearbox Warranty. These factors instill faith in the customers who eventually look at the services and make decisions in the favour of pre-owned luxury cars.
How have your brand- and your brand marketing strategies evolved in these past two years of the pandemic?
Yes, in the last two years our brand marketing strategy has evolved and we have moved our focus towards online branding and social media marketing.
We have significantly reduced our budget allocation towards offline marketing as we have realized that our consumers are more active on social media and using online marketing tools will help us in amplifying our reach.
We will soon be launching our own app and we are also working on our new website as well, so we can say that our prime focus will be on digital marketing.
What is the perfect media mix for your brand?
I would say online marketplace portals and digital branding are the perfect media mix for us. Together these help us in connecting with our actual target audience. Earlier we used to give ads in newspapers and because of that, we used to get random calls from people asking for Range Rover in Rs. 5 Lakhs, which does not make any sense.
By focusing more on social media and online marketplace portals that focus on pre-owned cars, genuine customers approach us making it easier for us to close the deal.
Which are the most important categories that will see a big uptake in the upcoming Festive season?
In our industry, it has been observed that buying and selling as a category projects major growth.
We have observed over the years that during the festive season the service goes down a little as people don’t want their cars in service centers during the festive season, they want their cars at their disposal during this time.
As we have discussed earlier as well, people find the festive season as an auspicious time to buy new cars for themselves.
Would you recommend more and more brands should also have, in time for the upcoming Festive Season, their own Ecommerce platform on the web or app, online, for direct selling to consumers? Why?
The festive season is fast approaching, so if you launch your app or website during that time I think you will be a little late to the party. Consumers take time to get used to apps and websites of any kind and to boost business through these platforms you need your consumer to be completely familiar with them.
But if you launch your app or website well in advance and allow some time for the consumer to get used to the UI then I think you will reap great benefits through them during the festive season. Internet literacy and traffic jams during the festive season have also helped the case for online shopping or the E-commerce market.
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?
See anytime you acquire a new customer it helps in your brand building as well. Having said that, I believe the festive season is the best time to focus on customer acquisition. Therefore, our marketing campaigns will be majorly focused on customer acquisition and servicing.
Regarding the AI-powered outdoor medium, I would say that we have not yet discovered or explored that segment for our business. Our main focus is still on digital and social media but we will soon be exploring that genre as well. All I can say is that AI is the way to the future and sooner or later every brand has to leverage it or else they’ll be left behind.
