Popular biscuit brand Parle has been a name in the market that is associated with great products and also its great communication with consumers. Reaching across the nation in both modern and general trade platforms, the brand has evolved to be a legend in the FMCG category. Dipanjan Mukherjee interviews B. K. Rao, Deputy Marketing Manager, Parle Products Ltd. about the shopper marketing efforts of the company, with the aim to become the chosen brand among Indians.

How important is shopper marketing to your brand?

Shopper marketing is something we seriously look at when talking about our products, as we believe that the last line of contact with the shopper is the point of purchase. Shopper marketing is a vital tool of communication for all our products and new launches.

How do you handle shopper marketing across modern and general trade touchpoints?

Mostly, what we do for modern trade is that we put up our communication on various display options like end caps, aisle drop downs and banners. There are always some innovative displays for combi offers and new product launch. All this helps us in pulling in the new buyers. As far as general trade is concerned, we have a huge number of general trade outlets across the nation which we use for regular brand communication and put in a lot of merchandise. Here we hire the shelves and decorate them with the message of our brand that keeps changing almost every month with inclusions of occasion and offer based communication. It is a continuous marketing effort that goes in there. And while we spend on these initiatives a major uplift is noticed among the consumers due to such shopper marketing executions.

How do you go about conceptualising and designing these in-store executions?

There are limitations we face in order to bring about innovations, given the facilities that are present in the market. There are times we have looked beyond the available but again the cost of executing those does not fit into the budget constraints we have. Given the vast volumes of implementation required, it is not always feasible to step out of our usual list of vendors for the purpose. Still we try to do our best for the modern trade but, for the general trade category it is the usual conventional options that we follow. However, general trade pulls the major share of customers; therefore we try our best to beat the competition with the shelf strips, danglers and other tools that are designed accordingly to catch the eye of the consumer.

What percentage of your marketing budget is chalked out for shopper marketing initiatives?

We do keep a keen eye on the shopper marketing segment and thus put across around 18 - 20% of our marketing budget for the cause.

What is the criteria you have while choosing a shopper marketing agency for your brand?

The agencies we have worked with have been our partners for long and over this time, the reasons to stick to them have grown into many. We surely want our agency to help us make our brand communicate better so we need them to not only understand our way of advertising but also advise us about in what best way can they implement the same for us.

What is your suggestion to budding shopper marketing agencies to service brands in the best possible way?

The key to succeed in every industry is to follow the rule of survival of the fittest. Therefore, the agency needs to be very proactive in what they do. It is not just coming up with great ideas but it is also important to give shape to those on the ground level and make them work as planned. Most importantly it is the duty of the agency to understand and interpret correctly what the brand wants. It is that clarity of thought that can make them have a great work relationship with their brands.