New Delhi Samriddhi Dasgupta joined premium pet care brand and retail chain Heads Up for Tails in October as Chief Marketing Officer from Bombay Shaving Company. Pet grooming and products firm recently won 277 crore in Series A funding round. Apart from its online presence, it has 40 offline stores across seven metros. Dasgupta said that new age consumer companies are creating unique playbooks for marketing their brands. Heads Up for Tales relies on organic consumer posts on social media platforms and seeks to include pet influencers as they enter new markets. Edited excerpts from an interview:
What is your mandate in the firm?
We are here to make the lives of pets and pet parents easier. It is a very happy journey. I’m a pet parent myself, so I’ve been through this journey for the past 39 years. And one thing I’ve realized is that you never have the most relevant knowledge or products to aid in that journey. The mandate here is to really try and influence people to reach out to them in the best possible way to do so. We are sitting at a crossroads of content and commerce, we truly believe that we have the opportunity to spread awareness, connect with people in a meaningful way where they are able to learn.
We have 14 years of experience…and we are also able to forecast a lot of trends. So, we create products that are a little ahead of time, but as you move forward, they become extremely relevant. We are also extremely omni-channel. In fact, we have our own stores, so the experience is completely under our control. So the mandate is also to make sure there’s a technology layer on top of our omni-channel integration, and really a unified customer experience and journey across our touch-points.
Who is your target consumer?
The SEC (socio-economic categories) and age groups are the old school formats of classifying clients. We categorize customers according to aspiration and stages of life. Anyone who has a dog, or a cat, anyone who is a pet lover is our audience. This is a very large, diverse set of age groups for which we address. We are doing solutions for emerging markets, so it is not just in the top five cities, we are continuously entering the top 15-20 cities.
The market has expanded similarly in the last 18 months. Two or three things have happened. There has been a demographic shift, which has enabled young people to adopt dogs and cats, and really start allocating their share of the wallet. We are also seeing a growth curve between the 18 and 24 age groups, which was 24 to 45 earlier.
Tier-II markets, which are essentially people who have moved back home and are now working from home, but are used to the kind of products they were in when they were in big cities, which has led to a re-influx. accessibility. And the third part is that many couples, and many singles, have adopted dogs for companionship during this pandemic period – this is also another emerging area of development.
What is your overall social media strategy?
The brand is organically built. We don’t have a lot of influencer affiliations. Our influencer engagement is actually user generated content. We are a very manufacturer first brand where, for us, everyone who buys our product is a manufacturer.
People are buying it and speaking up because they love it, they come back to us and if they don’t like it. For us, social is about listening to them. If you visit our Instagram, you’ll see that every comment is very thoughtfully answered—95% of our direct messages are replied to within a period of four to six hours. However, this could look very different as we move forward as we enter new markets. We’re looking at emerging influencers and pet parents who are influential and we’re trying to see if there’s a way we can create content with them.
What have you learned from working with new age brands?
My first foray into the Internet was around 2015 when I was a Dineout leader (marketing). This access to technology, no code solutions, and an ecosystem that comes together for better engagement and better access to products and options for the end customer-I think it has become extremely prevalent and easy.
It’s not too hard to pursue an Internet-first business with an omni-channel business.
I don’t think the ecosystem has changed – what has changed is consumer preference behavior. Now we are able to track the consumer across the channel and then we have an integrated view of how you buy and what is your behaviour. So the difference is that marketers today are equipped with a lot of data that enables us to bring you products that are more relevant.
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