Considering the scale that IPL offers for marketers looking at reaching out to their TG, boAt Lifestyle’s Aman Gupta shares the brand’s IPL game plan.
boAt’s journey with IPL started in 2018 with a tie-up with two teams and in the year 2020, the brand has now become the Official Audio Partner of 6 IPL teams including Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings, Kolkata Knight Riders, Delhi Capitals, Royal Challengers Bangalore, and Kings XI Punjab. Aman Gupta, Co-Founder, boAt Lifestyle talks about the brand’s plans to leverage the ambassadors and their fan bases to engage throughout the sporting event.
Edited Excerpts:
What
was the insight behind your association with six teams?
Due to the pandemic, work from home (WFH), workout from home, learning from home, and cinema at home has become the new normal. With IPL the consumers also witnessed another first - Stadium at home. Hence, at boAt we doubled our promotions and marketing budgets to enable consumers to get deeply involved with the teams they love with.
We also have designed limited edition products with our partner teams and we are also the official jersey sponsor for KingsXI Punjab. In addition to the association with the teams, our brand ambassadors Hardik Pandya, Shikhar Dhawan, Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, Prithvi Shaw, and KL Rahul are also a part of these teams which further gives us an opportunity to be a strong part of this year’s IPL.
What
does the overall marketing plan for the season look like? What kind of a role
will social media play?
Indian Premier League (IPL)
has brought back the excitement amongst viewers and advertisers who were
starved of original sports content. Our motto for this season is to bring the
stadium to your home with boAt products.
Keeping the relevance of social media in mind, we were very particular about focusing our efforts on the medium. Hence, we tied up with influencers and invest heavily in social media advertising to engage and converse with our audience. We are also working closely with Hotstar which is a first for us.
For the pre-buzz campaign on social media, we created excitement by leveraging quizzes and posts with the help of our brand ambassadors.
Also Read: #SSIPLWatch Harsh Pokharna, OkCredit on their maiden IPL brand association
Please
take us through your media mix. How much percent of it is reserved for digital?
Our brand ambassadors on-board actively post on Instagram about their partnership with boAt. We also leverage social media ads along with promotions on Hotstar but the main focus however is our brand ambassadors. We don’t believe in old school marketing.
Around 90% of our marketing budget goes to digital, but we have also been tapping print a bit as we focus on offline.
Take
us through your marketing strategy. Any campaigns or activities lined up to
support your partnership?
We tend to keep our budgets tactical, so that as a brand we remain nimble and adapt to be present where our audience is present, always giving them good content to consume and driving conversations.
Currently, our target group is consumers in the 18-24 bracket, but we plan to expand this to 18-35, going ahead.
Our current IPL campaign is #SoundOfChampions where we have engaged with multiple influencers using Instagram posts by respective IPL Teams, our brand ambassadors, and across all our social media platforms.
What
are the parameters to calculate ROI on your IPL marketing initiatives? Do you
think it will be difficult to recover the investment amidst the pandemic
crisis?
We allocate the budget only after seeing merit in an association.
Where other brands are yet to come to equilibrium, we have witnessed a 20% surge in demand for its products in COVID-19 times.
We used to sell around 8,000-10,000 products every day in 2019 and now we have witnessed a demand of over 15,000 units every day for the last three months. Our marketing efforts also work towards making our loyal boAtheads our brand evangelists.
How
will you be leveraging IPL to bounce back from the pandemic induced business
lull & changing consumer habits created by the lockdown?
IPL season will give the right push to not only our speakers, sound-bars, and earphones but the overall audio industry. We are optimistic with our limited edition of headphones and speakers, the experience for our consumers will be bass-heavy.
We crossed INR 500 crore (FY 2019-20) in gross revenues in just over 4 years with around 20% market share as per the data released by IT market research and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC Q1 2020 Report).
We
believe the focus has already shifted to digital platforms and the higher viewership
on the OTT platforms is adding to our advantage with our association.
Pre corona v/s post corona: has IPL marketing or sports marketing in general changed dramatically? What are the key advertising & marketing trends you foresee?
Yes definitely, IPL marketing or sports marketing, in general, has changed dramatically post corona. Digital platforms and OTT platforms are a viewer’s choice. Brand marketers are interested in - the scale and relevancy of the platform along with the kind of viewership that can be attained through the broadcasting channel. It’s one of the most interesting, as well as challenging, times to be working in the marketing domain.
The focus has now become more targeted, and the brands will spend more on
the digital route and focus on direct ROI.
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