Mr. Sheikhawat, you are a dominant brand in the market, how have you evolved in your media to consolidate and grow in market share?
It gets tougher every year. For a brand like Kingfisher, it is important to be young, fresh, aspirational, sexy, dynamic, relevant and glamorous for a new and ever evolving consumer dynamic. A lot of people don’t want to drink the beer brand but go for the father brand and the only way to do it is to remain as aspirational and desirable for them as for the previous generation. So, everything we do for Kingfisher is centered around that; whether its participating or being the content creators for some of the sports, music, fashion and food activation programs to being ubiquitously available across the country. We have the strongest distributional capability and the largest footprint in the country in terms of manufacturing capability. We have the largest environment handling competency because the government handles close to 60 % of the alcohol business in the country. With third generation distributors, we have the strongest and largest distributional network in the country with powerful brands and sharply defined exciting marketing activational platforms. So, when all these work together in harmony as one then you have growing value in market share.
what is your media strategy to remain young and sexy in the market?
There are several things that you need to do. A. a target audience- knowing what they do, where they go, what they buy, what drives them, their choice of music food , entertainment, travel, dining and see where your brand can fit into that lifestyle and that thought process. One really intervenes at that points of occasion and medium such as digital and mobile are big forces and our way of leveraging and using them is what helps us.
You have associated yourselves with social events such as the Kingfisher derby and sports events such as the F1 or the IPL, what are your future plans to own event platforms to promote your brand?
Sports and cricket are going to be our number one platform and it’s not just cricket, we also have a football club called the Kingfisher East Bengal Football Club. We also associate with the running events such as the Bombay marathon and the Delhi half marathon and others such as the Bangalore and Hyderabad 10 and 15 km runs, respectively. We have also associated with tennis tournaments, hockey tournaments, the rugby tour, F1, horse racing derby and so, we do a variety of sports. We associate with every genre of music and we were the first to bring music and big bands into the country and we continue to do that. Food is a critical part of our association because beer goes very well with Indian food and all our programs across pubs, bars and restaurants have food festivals which are big part of our marketing. Fashion also because we are the only beer brand that participates in all the nation and international fashion weeks. And so these are the four major platforms that help us achieve our objectives.
The hunt for the Kingfisher calendar girl is a highly acclaimed initiative of yours, how is this added to your brand value?
Well, I think, driven desirability. It is the most up market and exclusive calendar show and reality program in the country. The calendar itself is a highly prized object with only 3000 copies that are not for sale and you can only get them if your are on the chairman’s mailing list and there is thus a huge desirability that we leverage with audience participation and the reality show called the ‘hunt for the kingfisher girl’ on NDTV Goodtimes. This year is going to have a tighter programming, bigger names as hosts, exotic locations, and production values far superior than the past. The glamour drives the desire, style and fashion quotient of the brand and since this is the eleventh year, it’s going to be bigger and better.
What do brands in India not understand about experiential marketing?
Some of the best brands understand experiential marketing very well but the one thing one needs to understand is that Indians, by and large don’t complain very much and are tolerant consumers. We are willing to put up with a lot but this not going to continue. The younger audience which has money and customer service and so, the bar is continually raised in terms of what experiences the consumers expect and you cannot thrust it into their lives.
There is need to interweave it seamlessly into their lives and they should see value in it and need to be educated, entertained and informed. A bad quality program thrust onto the viewer who may or may not be engaged is really not the way to go. Content is going to be king. Mediums and channels to access content are exploding. Content itself is exploding. And all these experiences need to add up and consumers need to participate. So you either need to entertain them, or educate them or inform them. Preferable all should be ticked but at least one of these three should be ticked.
