Mediaboss Marketing

Rahil Virani, Co-founder& CMO ofMYFITNESStalks to us about how their media and marketing strategies are evolving to keep pace with the brands growing offline footprint.

Can you shed some light on your brand journey and how it has strengthened over the years? The journey began 14 years ago with my father who came up with the plan to start manufacturing peanut butter. He started off with a very small sized factory, and his main objective was to get into export, because back then the awareness and the demand for peanut butter, as a product, was not so much among Indian consumers. It was in such a scenario that he set up his export business, and it was also doing quite well. This was because the peanuts that are grown in India, in parts of Gujarat, are one of the best - very flavourful, aromatic, and of very good quality. So, there was good demand internationally for the product that was being generated from India for the last many years. But four years ago, we felt that the trend is changing and theres also growing awareness among consumers; people had started asking about peanut butter. They were requesting their friends and family members who were coming from the US and the UK to get it for them. Fitness enthusiasts who were regular at the gym had also become aware of its benefits; peanut butter was an essential part of their diet now. More and more people were increasingly switching to healthier foods.

And thats when we, my brother-in-law and I- the next generation in the business after my father- decided to take a step ahead and broaden our scope by starting our own in-house brand for the Indian market. We already had the manufacturing part sorted, which is the first thing that anyone who starts a new business has to figure out. For us, that became an advantage because by then, we were already making it for about 10-11 years. The year was 2018. Online marketplaces likeAmazon and Flipkart were doing very well, and so we were also quite clear on how and where we want to sell our products. It was primarily these online channels where we decided to sell as well as scale up. So, that is how MYFitness started.

Initially, the objective was to target people who are fitness enthusiasts, hence the name MyFitness, which resonates with someone who wants to eat healthy. That was our initial TG, but slowly, of course, as a brand, we started targeting children, adults, and the elderly also. However, TG and the majority audience today are the 18 to 35-year-old males. That being said, we are also looking to expand this bracket now.

What are some of the innovative marketing strategies you use to reach out to the masses?At the time when we started out, Saffola and FunFood were already established in the market. Being traditional, conventional brands with lakhs and lakhs of touchpoints, it was very easy for them to reach the customers by being present on the supermarket shelves. So, we understood, quite early on, that this is not the route we would take. Online was the way for us, and we pursued it aggressively. We signed up on Amazon. Flipkart and PayTM. PayTM used to have e-commerce channels back then. Initially, we used to receive 5 or 10 orders a day. Then slowly it grew to 100- 200. Today we're shipping almost 14,000 orders a day of which about 65% comes through the e-commerce channels. At number one is Flipkart, then comes Amazon and at number three is our own website. As the brand grew, we were able to pull a lot of customers online.

This was also due to the fact that we invested a lot in marketing our product during the subsequent four-year period. We had brand ambassadors such as Hardik Pandya, the cricketer, actor Kriti Sanon from Bollywood, and from the South Industry we had Samantha and Dulquer Salman. And with that, slowly, the offline channel also grew. One great thing that happened as the business grew, and our brand MyFitness began to get recognised was that the store owners started asking for our products. It was not the case before. Initially, when we used to go to the stores, they used to ask us for high listing fees, high shelves fees, and everything else. That had changed.

Which medium do you generally use to grow your brand visibility and why? We had realized in the first three months of launching the brand that we need to reach out to a larger set of audiences. So, we onboarded Sahil Khan- heis someone who is very popular in the fitness and bodybuilding industries, and a lot of gym-going people follow him on social media. We took him on as a brand ambassador. The promotional campaigns with him resulted in the initial growth. As we were not a conventional brand, and were operating largely in the new-age, D2C space, we opted for Instagram and YouTube as our medium of choice. How it worked was, first Sahil Khan would promote the brand on his Instagram and YouTube channels, and later we would run the same content as an ad on our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.After the early growth, of course, we onboarded many more ambassadors like Hardik Pandya, Samantha, Kriti Sanon, and Dulquer Salman.

TV news is a very popular medium of communication due to its reach and loyal viewers. Do you think brands should advertise more on TV as compared to other media platforms?

Yes. If I speak for our brand, in the coming years, we are going to make a nominal shift from being a pure play digital and social media brand to being a conventional brand for the masses. Going ahead, we intend to do campaigns on TV. We have both TV shows and sports properties such as IPL on the radar. We will be exploring a lot more TV in the near future.

When we started out, it was only reasonable for us to go with social media and digital/ online branding because we were not available offline. But now that we are also growing our offline footprint, the strategy also changes for us. Now we will begin to spend on TVCs and other traditional media channels. Needless to say, the media mix will keep varying and evolving based on how the revenue is spreading out. In the near future, you'll also see us on billboards on the highways. Basically, as we grow offline, our media strategy and communication will also evolve to include more conventional mediums.

What is the marketing mix of your brand campaigns? We usually stick to the basics. It helps us to keep things simple and uncomplicated. Our current channel mix for sales is 65% online and 35% offline, and therefore, our marketing mix and spends also follow the same equation. 65% of our spending is online, which includes Facebook ads, Google ads, and YouTube ads. The remaining 35% spends are on those media channels from where the offline sales come, i.e., TVCs and outdoor ads. And, that is also what we will continue to follow in the future.

Do you think brand messaging and propositions in India have changed post the pandemic?Yes. When the virus hit us, initially we had to face a lot of logistical and operational problems, even though the demand was always there. But during the later days of the, pandemic, we witnessed a growth in demand, instead of de-growth. So, as soon as the logistics and operations resumed, we were at once able to start fulfilling the orders again. The pandemic has given us a spike, as during that period people were always looking for healthier options. Everyone wanted to live healthy and eat healthy.

From the marketing perspective as well, we never felt there was a slowdown. We continued to do what we were doing. We continued to market how we were marketing. As the brand was growing, and the sales was growing, the profit was also growing. We always kept utilizing that profit to market and advertise. We kept reinvesting it in building the brand. There was no slowdown on the front for us. As the brand grew, the marketing spends grew, and overall, we kept growing.

Another significant development that took place during that time was that we came up with an innovation to address consumers concerns. We noticed that in other peanut butter brands, there was always an oil separation taking place. So, we felt the need to come up with a product which could address this issue. We leveraged our collaboration with an Israeli food agency to come up with a peanut-based stabilizer which ensured that there was no oil separation happening. That became one of the USPs of our brand.

Do you advertise on news channels? Can you share some insights on how you plan to market your brand on TV?Honestly, not so far. Whether we will? It is too soon to make a decision on that. That decision-making will happen at a later date, once the production of our new campaign has begun. We never look that far in the future, we always live in the present. We only think of what we are going to do in the next three months. Once those things are achieved, we plan for the next three months. So, I don't have an answer for what I'm going to do in the coming years. But in the coming months, what we are going to do is discuss and decide on what the next campaign should be for MyFitness to start becoming a household brand. I can only say that it will be a mix of both digital and offline, including TV.

Is TV news included in the marketing mix specifically during slowdowns? What are your views on this?

I think it will always vary depending on the kind of brand that you want to build and the kind of brand that you have built so far. So, a Rolex or a Rolls-Roycewill never advertise on TV, they have customers in different places interacting in different ways. Whereas someone like a Nescafe, they're always there on TV. So, there is never a standard answer for this. It'll all depend on the kind of brand and where its customers are.

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