Leveraging Ecommerce In Low-Price Point Categories

BW Golden Cart Awards 2021 hosted a plethora of industry experts, one of which was Rajesh Ramakrishnan, Managing Director, Perfetti Van Melle India. He expounded how the confectionary category, which has not been under the spotlight much, outgrew itself through some very basic marketing strategies in today's booming ecommerce ecosystem. 

"Clearly, a lot of action began when the pandemic hit. Ecommerce saw a significant spike, giving a fillip to FMCG categories that were not doing so well previously. However, these categories were quick to leverage ecommerce to its full extent, and confectionery was no different." he says.

Describing why the confectionery category is low on salience, he points, "It is because confectionery products are typically something that you go buy in a neighbourhood kiosk. They are available anywhere, anytime. However, these are also the products that do not get stocked at home. Therefore, people don't end up ordering them online.

The other challenge is that the price point for most of our products is Re 1. When you're buying a low price ticket item, high customer acquisition costs make the model very unviable. And, of course, since it's a nascent category, there are not too many channel shopper insights available. 

Lastly, the challenge lies in the category itself, since it is not very well developed."

Ramakrishnan further shares the kind of strategies that the brand used in order to stay afloat online. "The first thing was to fix how can we continue to trigger the impulse in our high-impression assets as well, how do we continue to build our category in a basic, fundamental manner, etc. 

All our brands have their own campaigns, which are not mainstream media, and of course, extended into digital media as well. Hence, the second part was to understand how we drive category traffic from those social media campaigns, maybe through a 'Buy Now' button. This was one way of building shopper awareness for the category in general."

Reverberating a positive momentum today, Perfetti's key brands like Center fruit, Center fresh, Alpenliebe, Chupa Chups are all growing well and are almost back to pre-pandemic levels. Launch of innovative consumer relevant products, supporting them with insightful communication and distributing extensively across the country remain the brand's fundamental pillars of growth.