D2C Brand Playbook - Part 6 - Defining Target Audience - For a Niche or for Everyone?

Brand's Dharma?

To go deep & be meaningful to a niche 

OR 

To go wide & be just a solution for everyone?



Brands exist to enable charging a premium & hence delivering profits.

Not labels.

Labels exist to just exist. As a commodity. To be a me-too thus commanding no premium.

Of late, founders are talking about making profits. A sustainable unit economics.

Not growth at cost of profitability.

But profitability at cost of growth.

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Wanting to go deep.

To become a niche, to serve a smaller slice of a market, but differentiated.

Where consumers relate with you as you help them solve a pain, so effortlessly.

Because you chose to study it in greater detail, to devise a product, that ends their discovery!

Delivering a deeper experience with a meaningful story.

Over a period of time (with consistent efforts), more people start resonating with your story,

expanding volumes. Multiplying growth.

Brand becomes bigger and delivering higher profits.

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Vs wanting to go wide.

To offer to everyone.
To get more volumes.
To just grow, petering out long term benefits.

Becoming undifferentiated, to match the needs of everyone.

Becoming like a commodity with a label.
No deeper experience or story.

Just a label, an identifier.

In short term you win volumes.
Over longer term, you lose that growth vector.
More buyers find you as a solution, but meaningless.

Like bread, anyone could do.

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How to do it once figured the audience?

1. Identify the jobs to be done from functional, emotional, social perspectives for the cohort/s chosen.

2. Zero on one of the cohorts where the JTBD's are powerful & your product is doing that.

3. Define your Target audience persona at a deeper level - demographics, psychographics along with Behaviours (how do they use category, how they shop, who they ask, how they consume media) & Attitudes (who do they like/dislike, how do they feel about category)

4. Next step - Use the naunces in the Persona to define your brand positioning.

50 years of Eno in India - From antigas to dhokhla

50 years of ENO in India - A tale of Acidity & Dhokla!

#ENO antacid dates back to the 19th Century, when James Crossley Eno first introduced it as a “fruit salt” to help sailors stay healthy on long journeys.

The pharmacy from where it was sold was situated on a seaport with a lot of sea traffic. This was a boon for ENO as sailors used to eat large quantities of food on return and faced acidity issues.

India is the largest market for ENO. We know it as the no 1 remedy for acidity issues thanks to its ‘fastest acidity solve’ claim, hammered over the years into consumer psyche via brilliant #advertising. Lines like -

ENO ON, Acidity Gone.

ENO gets to work in 6 seconds.

ENO ON, gadbad Gone.

show that the consistency on #positioning and great creative executions have ensured that consumers can’t think anything else. 

Do you remember the no 2 brand in quick relief antacid salts?

Its a great legacy brand known worldwide for its 100+ years of history and its focus on consumers acidity issues.

But if you dive deep in India, the kicker is the use of ‘lemon’ ENO in a dish called dhokla. As per popular recipes for the dish, one can use lemon ENO in place of baking soda + citric acid for this popular dish. Not sure how much sales it commands for this end use; but YouTube is replete with recipes of eno Khama dhokla. Statewise per capita sales share might validate whether in states where the dish is popular, is there any correlation or not. 

As a composite result of all, it commands ~45-50% market share, with ~600-700 cr sales and is now celebrating 50 years in India!

#marketing #brand 

Pic credits - tastecooking.com

New Modern Sarees from Tata, Birla & Ambani

Indian modern Sarees - now from Tata, Birla and Ambanis!

India sells ~50000 cr worth of Sarees annually. Out of which ~27% was organized market in FY20, which is slated to grow to 40% by FY25.

New cool brands have been growing with modernised play on sarees. Taniera by Tata, Navyasa by Birla and Avantea by Ambanis are some those new brand launched in last 5 years. 

The erstwhile biggies - Nallis, Kalyan Silks, Pothys, Chennai Silks have been there since ages selling buildings full of traditional sarees.

Interesting play in retail with again expansion of exclusive stores by each of the new brands. 

Definitely, there is a gap in the market with the dearth of modern sari specific brands, contrasting to plethora of western wear brands. 

W and Biba capitalised on this gap earlier in non-saree ethnic market earlier.

Interesting to see, how things pan out.

Where do you buy your sarees from?

#fashion #retail #brand #sarees 

Is your product a must-have?

Picked up a book recently - 'Hacking Growth' by Morgan Brown & Sean Ellis to decode this popular term. The book explains it as 'Creative growth strategies executed at low budgets to acquire or retain consumers, applied with a multi-functional lens - marketing, product, tech and what not'; rather than just plain hashtag#Jugaad'. The book explains various steps on how to get started on GH. One of the steps which is peculiar and important in today's times of hashtag#covid19 (when a lot of services are under lockdown), is to assess whether your product or app is a MUST-HAVE. What is a hashtag#musthave hashtag#product? A product that brings an AHA moment for hashtag#consumers; the moment where utility of the product really clicks. For eg, for Uber it is 'the cab reaching you at a click of a button' or 'finding friends' photos and updates instantly' for Fb. So, how to find that your product is must have? Do a MUST-HAVE Survey with your customers & ask - How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow? 1 Very disappointed 2 Somewhat disappointed 3 Not disappointed 4 N/A—I no longer use it. If 40 percent or more of responses are very disappointed, then the product is a must-have! Its an interesting read and i recommend it. Which hashtag#book on hashtag#Marketing do you recommend?