Your doorstep — The best platform ever built
Tags: Marketplaces

Dunzo is reshaping the way new products are launched!

Breaking into the market for a new brand can be tricky; one might even say that it has a certain appeal to it when it’s done right. But think about it, there are quite a few things the brand has to do, for the user to be interested. From the brand name to the packaging, every brand goes through the right of passage to find that balance to strike a chord with their audience. Gone are the days when brands would put a print ad and expect themselves to be a little closer to their TG than they were before. The day and age we live in, it’s quite possible that your message can get lost in a sea of advertising. With so many channels of communication at your disposal, brands are faced with the conundrum of how it should target their audience. But moreover, should it be the message that reaches your TG or the product?

Sampling is no longer a new concept and it has advantages over other channels, a brand might consider it while they sit down to discuss their marketing play. FMCG brands have always used sampling as a method to keep their audience interested in the brand or to launch a new product in the market. While the traditional approaches in sampling, like in-store and distributor-led sampling, is still seen at large, the problem they face is finding the TG relevant to the product, leading to horror stories for the Brand Managers.

One of India’s premium pet supplies brands conducted a free sampling campaign with a leading grocery e-tailer. The grocery e-tailer bundled every order with a sample of the pet food. This led to two major setbacks for the pet food company; this approach resulted in 80+% leakage, as not every customer had a pet. More importantly, this led to a massive backlash from the customers, as a non-veg pet product was being sampled to vegetarians. The e-tailer had no visibility about the audience's preference.

A leading FMCG brand launched a premium consumer ‘dishwasher’ detergent and conducted traditional feet on the street sampling campaign through a leading sampling agency. They faced two major problems with this exercise; there was a leakage to fulfill the quota — and this resulted in 3x more sampling done than the actual number of dishwasher owners. To add to this problem, they hadn’t thought of an efficient way to get feedback, as it needed to happen T+3 for detergents. The agency realized that they had a broken last mile in the supply chain and had to put together another campaign to collect the feedback.

Though the traditional sampling methods still hold water in some, if not all cases, Dunzo is now able to provide a smarter, faster and more efficient method to do the same. So how is sampling with Dunzo different? It is a case of Push vs Pull strategy- while most traditional methods of sampling use the ‘push strategy’ to make the product available for a wider set of audience, it doesn’t necessarily reach the relevant TG and results in leakage. While a ‘pull strategy’ presents the relevant TG with access to the product, resulting in them engaging more with the brand on a need-based scenario.

D2C: From the store to your door

In this need-based industry that we thrive in, getting things done in real-time while there is a demand for a certain product, can result in the most delightful experience for customers. This has been the mantra for Dunzo from the very beginning, and needless to say, it is a tried and tested theory for us in this industry. Going one step further, we were able to draw sensible data for the brands about what packaging works better and tried creative testing on social channels using content and communication for brands like Coke, Sprite, and Durex.

This approach helped us format the strategy for engagement with brands like Xiaomi when they launched Note 7, and with Puma, when they came out with the limited edition One8 series for the Cricket World Cup. We also observed that there was a lift in demand for the World Cup jersey on our platform recently; as accessibility increased for our users, Dunzo started behaving like a proxy store for many products, that would otherwise be only available in specific stores. Last Christmas, we had tied up with Chumbak to promote their products on our platform, where users could directly pick an item and send it as a gift to one another. Considering how busy our lives get, many users opted to use Dunzo to send gifts to their near and dear. So how is sampling with Dunzo a smarter choice?

Keep insights in sight

With data and insights, Dunzo is capable of targeting the right users for the right brand. This makes the sampling more focused and the result you yield from this exercise will help you gather valuable insights about your target audience. For an upcoming snacks brand, we were able to map the samplers with their purchase behavior to understand where they typically shopped- be it kiranas, chains or gourmet stores. This helped the brand fine-tune their market strategies, and whether they should focus on Modern Trade or General Trade. These days the amount of data up for grabs is only limited by your imagination; did you know that people who order Pizza and Biryani prefer Cola over any other aerated drinks?

Reach is important

To be honest, it is not just about the right TG, your brand must also have good reach while setting forth for a sampling exercise. With Dunzo, considering how sampling is driven completely on our app, it is independent of dependencies like logistics and other factors that sometimes affect such activities, the brand is able to reach a wide set of audiences across different cities in the county.

In another case of sampling we had conducted for a premium chocolate brand, it showed that their product was in high demand in stores like Nature’s Basket and Foodhall as compared to any other store in the city.

Summon the sample

On-demand services have flourished so much over the last decade, we have a countless number of apps that have tapped into this category. Dunzo can provide on-demand delivery of samples that provides instant gratification, and perhaps will yield better results. Think about it, some of the FMCG products like chocolate, ice cream, and other comfort foods work for the user based on mood, and it’s a fleeting window on opportunity- if your TG has access to your product at that very instant, it results in a conversation that goes beyond conventional advertising techniques.

The world is getting smaller every day when you put companies like Amazon in perspective; what started with a 7–10 days delivery window, has come down to 2 days to 2 hours with the arrival of Prime. While this window continues to shrink, Dunzo is already making deliveries within 45 minutes.

Tailor-made for new categories

With users ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other, Dunzo presents itself as a fine platform to conduct a litmus test on new products entering the market. There’s always something new coming up every day, and it may be a new source of renewable energy or a new beverage in a new bottle. One such sampling we had done recently was for Kingfisher Radler, a non-alcoholic malt-based beverage that was sampled across all cities, and turned out to be the most popular product on our platform.

At the end of the day, most FMCG brands will keep sampling as a method to arrive at a sensible picture of their TG. Sampling with Dunzo provides the brands a more cost-effective and efficient form of marketing, while it would cost them a whole lot more had they gone with a FoS marketing agency without any guarantee on reaching the right TG. For instance, we launched the brand Popodax (ready-to-eat appalam snack) exclusively on Dunzo, which helped an upcoming FMCG brand to sample their products in a cost-effective and more targeted manner. Most importantly, at 1/4th the cost of traditional marketing channels!

Needless to say, convenience is a priceless feeling, and the idea of having your brand get delivered to the doorstep of your target audience, and to draw insights from it, will help brands leverage huge benefits from the exercise. It is still an alluring pitch for many, and an enticing opportunity for others; so perhaps it’s true when we say that the doorstep is indeed the best platform ever built.