Case Study: How Community Marketing helped pave the way for Epigamia's lactose-free artisanal curd

Category Introduction

According to reports, the Indian curd market exhibited a compound annual growth rate of 13% during the years 2010-2017.

Today, nearly three out of every four Indians are lactose intolerant and many of them are completely unaware that they have this condition. Those who are aware are careful to keep their diet completely dairy-free, and hence, lose out on the essential nutrients and gut-healthy bacteria that curd has to offer.

Brand Introduction

Epigamia is the brainchild of a Mumbai-based startup called Drums Food International, co-founded by Rohan Mirchandani. After dabbling in an ice-cream venture called Hokey-Pokey, Rohan quickly realised that he would need to expand his horizons, since ice-cream sales are very susceptible to season. He also noticed that consumers were becoming increasingly health-conscious, and were always on the look-out for healthy, fresh products.

These new learnings helped pave the way for Epigamia, a brand that launched a series of Greek yogurt tubs and granola-infused snack packs in a variety of flavors that almost complemented ice cream. In December 2017, they went one step ahead and introduced lactose-free artisanal curd to cater to consumers who struggle with dairy digestion.

Can't stand the Sun? Don't sweat it. Cool off with Epigamia Greek Yogurt . . . . . . #epigamia #epigamiayogurt #epigamiagreekyogurt #heat #monsoon #dontsweatit

A post shared by Epigamia (@epigamiayogurt) on Jul 11, 2018 at 4:03am PDT

Problem Statement/Objective

To create a buzz around their new product – i.e. their lactose-free artisanal curd.

Brief

To introduce Epigamia’s lactose-free artisanal curd as the answer to a lactose intolerant’s dairy dilemma.

Challenges

• Getting in touch with lactose intolerant readers/ consumers who form a comparatively small, niche target audience (including those individuals who aren’t aware that they are lactose intolerant)
• Convincing lactose intolerants that Epigamia’s lactose-free artisanal curd was indeed safe and nutritious (especially since most of India’s lactose intolerants have no access to the right information and therefore think it’s best to leave out anything and everything dairy from their diet)

Execution

Epigamia partnered with CureJoy as their in-house team of writers who are well-versed with many of the problems write about and believed faithfully in the power of community marketing. This helps them turn out empathetic articles that are far from “preachy.” They planned a series of articles that aimed at:

1. Educating The Community About Lactose Intolerance

With Indians becoming increasingly aware of lactose intolerance and yet, not able to fully understand it, CureJoy decided this would be an opportunity to introduce Epigamia as a means of educating people about this condition.

This involved breaking down the difference between dairy allergies and lactose intolerance and helpful tips on how to manage and even reduce one’s symptoms.

CureJoy also helped their readers understand that it was indeed, possible to eat dairy on a lactose-intolerant stomach as long as one started with small quantities of lactose-infused foods to help the body get used to this complex milk sugar. They encouraged their readers to test how much lactose they can stomach without a problem and keep track of their symptoms, since everyone has their own threshold for tolerance.

2. Generating Nutritional Awareness

In addition to getting adequate protein on a dairy-free diet, calcium deficiency is another common dilemma that lactose intolerants face. CureJoy strove to ease this problem by listing down helpful nutrition tips and dietary alternatives that would allow lactose intolerants to meet their nutrient requirements. They also explained in detail how lactose content varied across different dairy products and how experimenting with high and low lactose-containing dairy foods may help as opposed to going completely dairy-free.

Finally, they neatly tied in all this information with Epigamia, and how the brand, in addition to being lactose-free, strives to solve all these dilemmas by delivering just the right amount of nutrition without the unnecessary sugar.

Every day, the site churns out close to 40 plus articles that have, over time, won them a hundred million loyal readers worldwide who aspire to lead healthy lives.

Results

By reaching out to over 20 million readers who are regularly on the hunt for information on dairy-related concerns, CureJoy’s articles received a response of nearly 50,000 unique views across 6 different metros, namely Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune.

In the meantime, Epigamia’s display ads on CureJoy’s website performed equally well, generating

• over 1 lakh impressions
• more than 300 clicks on the CureJoy website
• 1 million views on social media

CMO Quotes

"Brands use influencer marketing to gain visibility for a few seconds. However, in today’s social media world, content from a trusted source keeps audience engaged for more than 2 minutes while imparting key information. Also, educating customers is a hard enough process, and branded content within highly

engaged communities is the most cost effective way to go about doing this at scale. It’s a good thing that brands are slowly realizing the effectiveness of doing this and pairing these activities with brand lift studies.” – Caleb Joel Peter, Director, Brands & Media, CureJoy Inc.