New Delhi: Armed with a ₹100 crore advertising budget for the year, Swiggy, the online food ordering platform, is banking on slice of life advertising and hyperlocal marketing to penetrate the smaller towns in the country. In its ongoing IPL campaign, the platform builds on its quick delivery theme from last year urging consumers to enjoy the cricketing action while Swiggy takes care of their food needs.
In its signature style, it has created tongue-and-cheek ads with simple storylines and minimum dialogues. The execution is similar to Swiggy’s first six-second long IPL ads which changed the fortune of the platform. “Our current advertising narrative focuses on how Swiggy brings convenience in the life of the consumers through 'Swiggy karo, phir jo chahe karo' thought. Swiggy has to be intelligent and dynamic as a brand creating simple stories rooted in real consumer behaviour. Such advertising has worked very well for us cutting through the clutter," said Srivats TS, vice-president, marketing, Swiggy.
Swiggy's IPL 2018 campaign was strategically launched before the exponential scale-up plan. It turned the platform into a national brand creating high recall months after it launched its first television campaign in January 2018. Subramanyeswar S, group chief strategy officer, MullenLowe Lintas Group which is behind Swiggy advertising, said that people don’t like to watch ads during IPL. So it decided to make Swiggy advertising integral to the cricketing event itself. “We decided to create snackable six-second ads which suit the IPL format. We wanted it to be a continuation of the cricket match so we kept cricket commentary as a background score for the ads and leveraged cricket commentators Harsha Bhogle and Aakash Chopra," he said.
The platform - which primarily targets users between 18 to 40 years - is slowly looking to expand the target base as it grows in scale. "We are witnessing strong adoption outside the core TG. We are seeing older age group ordering online in the last one year along with new cities, geographies and other consumers entering this mix," said Srivats.
To be sure, the platform has expanded from 12 cities to over 130 cities ever since its launch in 2014. Having raised $210 million last year it currently stands at a valuation of $1.3 billion qualifying as India’s fastest unicorn. As of 25 April, Swiggy has over 85, 000 restaurants partners and a delivery fleet of 1.7 lakh monthly active partners, including over 200 women delivery partners.
"Last year, Swiggy was scaling at one city every two months while currently it is scaling at one city every two days. In the last nine months (June 2018- March 2019), 45% of the app downloads have been in the newer cities. With millions of users transacting on the platform each month, Swiggy’s transacting user base has grown four times in the last year. The food delivery platform has grown from 12 cities to over 110 cities (as of March 2019) during the same time period," Srivats added.
Taking its IPL association a step further, Swiggy has integrated with video streaming platform Hotstar which allows viewers to order food on the app itself. It has plans to leverage the upcoming ICC World Cup as well.
“There's an organic fit between food and entertainment and the reach that cricket offers is remarkable with a high return on investment," added Srivats.
Swiggy heavily leverages television and digital in building the brand while print and outdoor is strategically used for hyperlocal marketing. Advertising on social media and digital platforms such as Facebook, Google and email marketing and push notifications allows the platform to hypertarget the consumers.
It has also piloted hyper-local delivery concept Swiggy Stores in Gurugram which will help deliver day-to-day essentials such as diapers or cosmetics to consumers in an attempt to diversify revenue generation.
Ankur Pahwa, partner and national leader – e-commerce and consumer internet, EY India noted that success in the food delivery business heavily relies on customer experience which includes on-time deliveries, consistency of deliveries, speed, any time-any day operations. “Companies that manage to build efficiencies in their delivery operations will help in gaining customer trust and their wallet share. Operational efficiency metrics such as unit economics, improvement in margins, lowering customer acquisition costs, utilization of delivery fleet, increasing order values will have to continue being key focus areas to pave path towards profitability. As companies in the space continue to tinker with ancillary modes of revenue generation including subscriptions, exclusive partner tie-ups, in-house kitchens the key is to not spread too far away from mainstay operations," he added.
