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Krutika Lal, Senior Marketing Manager, World of Play, Gurgaon, talks to us about her work in IT-enabled gadgets such as bluetooth headphones, nekbands, smartwatches etc in different geographies and the challenges involved in it.
How do you devise the marketing plans and strategies for 2022 with regards to different geographies and consumer expectations?
Krutika Lal - We have been focused on turning around state-of-art device experiences. Our strong word-of-mouth, courtesy our customers, have led to the brand growing popular amongst our set of customers and we feel extreme pride for the same. As a brand, we will remain focused on making investments in Design and development, manufacturing in India and also on our retail expansion plans. A huge part of providing a great customer experience is making sure that customer outreach is ongoing and focused on keeping your existing customers, rather than just attracting new ones.
We are a new age start-up but with a leadership team that has over 20 years of experience in distribution, strategy and channel management. This not only helps us pursue the long term and consistent branding, but also relish our individual customer acquisition and upgrade. From an availability perspective, we have focused on being omni-channel and be available on both online platforms as well as offline retail stores. We continue to believe that for an AioT category, the customer does find it convenient to have a device experience before making the purchase plan. We aim to expand our distribution availability regardless of platform, or ecosystem. At the same time, based on our customer outreach on social and other digital platforms, we continue to be a knowledge-sharing-lifestyle partner, making our TG aware about our brand philosophy, design processes, new launches and also relevant product upgrades for existing devices. As the portfolio is quickly building in variety, we look forward to stretching and aim for higher customer reach and brand awareness/popularity and there are a slew of marketing initiatives being planned for the same in the coming times.
How has the company done financially in the last 2 years?
Krutika Lal - We are extremely delighted with the love the customers have shown for the brand. Within a span of 24-months, the brand is being loved by channel partners as well as customers for the sheer quality and value for money the brand delivers. Over the last 2-years of being commercially operational, we have grown in categories like Acoustics and wearable devices. Today the portfolio boasts of about 20+ products across the two categories and about 100K+ “HAPPY” customer acquisitions every month. We believe over the span of next 12-months, we will be able to incubate at least 2 more new consumer categories, double our retail footprint and at least double our monthly “HAPPY” customer acquisitions (in the country). The company remains self-funded and profitable.
Geographical expansion of the company
Krutika Lal - We are completely cognizant of the diverse interests and tastes of our consumers and also a fine balance between their wish list of technology experience and the price of the product. We remain focused on ensuring our presence is not only on the online platforms like Amazon and Flipkart but also offline channel partners, thereby providing an opportunity to our consumers to appreciate the look-feel of the products and also their build quality and have a pre-purchase experience too. Over the next 12-months, we target to double our offline distribution footprint and aim to be available in at least 100K retail outlets. Constantly innovating and designing key products and categories is one of our strategies to grow “Total Addressable Market (TAM)”. It's been extremely encouraging to see that the self-adulation and indulgence is not restricted anymore to Tier-1 cities but even in smaller cities, customers have started spending for an upgraded device experience. The industry is maturing and the consumers have quickly changed track from being inquisitive about the cheapest product to now being fairly aware and motivated to buy an appropriate quality product at the corresponding price. We continue to enjoy the love of our customers from Urban and rural India quite equally.
What are the challenges in your segment? How do you resolve them?
Krutika Lal - We live in an era where the most exciting advances in future technology have changed our world and will continue to amaze us. Whether it’s improving health, security, Artificial Intelligence or just making entertainment better. At PLAY, while 2021 came with a lot of challenges especially for a start-up, courtesy the pandemic and subsequent retail-lockdown, our entire team PLAYers were not daunted by the challenge. We used the forced indoor time to strengthen our design/Development team, product-portfolio and also lay the stone for manufacturing in India. Obviously the scarcity of the chipsets across the globe has indeed had an impact, we remain motivated to continue our stride forward towards design, development, manufacturing in India, for PLAY, the manifest is, Made-by-India, Made-in-India and Made-for India.
We have embarked on a journey to continuously look for ways to transform these technologies and make them accessible to common people seamlessly. We collate all consumer inputs received from our outreach be it, customer care, social platforms, advertising platforms as well our retail store fraternity and indigenously improvise our product and hence the experience accordingly. We have already started seeing fruits from our R&D & Innovation Centre and the industry has never been more exciting in the types of technologies that we can work with to bring forth a never-before consumer experience.