‘The values of a brand and the influencer must match’
Premium- n an interview, Kashyap Vadapalli, chief marketing officer and business head of Pepperfry, said that the company is focusing on building an omnichannel retail strategy
Competition for furniture retailer Pepperfry has intensified with the entry of Swedish furniture chain Ikea and the acquisition of rival Urban Ladder By Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd. In an interview, Kashyap Vadapalli, chief marketing officer and business head of Pepperfry, said that the company is focusing on building an omnichannel retail strategy. He also spoke on building an aspirational brand and growing a pool of home decor influencers. Edited excerpts:
Where is Pepperfry in its marketing journey?
We run a brand track that measures the top of mind recall, preference and brand loyalty. The place that the brand has reached is that we are the single-largest brand across all of these key parameters in the furniture category. Our tracking tells us that when you ask customers the most recognizable, preferred and loyal brand, it is Pepperfry.
The furniture market in India is very diverse. There are markets where customers prefer touch-and-feel and go to local markets, and there are markets where customers are very early adopters to online. From a messaging perspective, when we first started out, our entire focus was on building this category. Furniture in India is fundamentally an unbranded play.
For the first 2-3 years, the core message of the brand was that we would take care of your experience. Slowly, that moved to value because typically, the second-biggest driver beyond the initial apprehension is value. Right now, we are at the beginning of the third phase, which is about building aspiration—talk to people about beautiful homes, beautiful designs and get them to upgrade their homes.
Is the new Saif Ali Khan-Kareena Kapoor Khan ad aligned with that?
When we used them as brand ambassadors in our campaign, which we ran during the Diwali season, there were multiple objectives. One was to establish a strong connection for the brand with the ideal spokesperson because we are the market leaders and, perhaps, the only advertiser in this segment in this country. One of the dangers here is that your work gets attributed to the category and not so much to the brand.
So, you do the job of building up the category, but the brand necessarily does not register very strongly. It’s a textbook case where you use an iconic spokesperson or a couple. Secondly, because home-furnishings is a couple’s decision—so it made sense for us to go with the star couple. Some of our future, not all, campaigns will continue to feature them and drive stronger identification for the brand.
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How has your media mix changed?
The media mix evolves depending on where you want to focus.
If the focus is on driving intent—in terms of driving visits to the website or getting conversions to happen, then digital is a fantastic way to reach people. When you are actually looking to enter new markets and build awareness, then it makes sense to go wider. But often, television and traditional media can become very powerful tools.
Last year, there was a huge shift of people from traditional retail to online. It made sense for us to focus a lot of our energies and sensors on the mid-funnel and lower funnel, where digital played a big part. But as we look at next year and going from the metros into tier-1 and tier-2 towns, then we need to build awareness… and definitely go back to traditional media to reach more people more quickly.
How do you view the influencer ecosystem in India?
Influencer engagement can start with having well-known brand ambassadors as influencers. And then there are influencers on the ground. So, we have something called a channel partner programme where we have about 1,000-odd interior designers and architects who work very closely with our store ecosystem. They are also influencers because they deal with several clients every quarter and are able to influence all of them.
So, influencers could be very media-led, larger than life, or they could be completely on the ground but able to influence 10x to 30x customers. We have a goal to take it to 10,000 influencers.
There needs to be a very strong fitment between what the influencer stands for, what their ethos is in terms of design and if there is a match between the brand’s values and the influencer’s values.
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