Content marketing is about featuring in people’s consideration set: Kaushik Mukherjee

The Impact Digital Influencer Conference held on November 30 saw an engaging fireside chat between Kaushik Mukherjee, co-founder & COO, SUGAR Cosmetics, and Nawal Ahuja, co-founder, exchange4media.

“Cosmetics & beauty is a category that lends itself naturally to the use of influencer marketing. In fact, it is one of the categories that has the highest use of influencer marketing,” Ahuja said opening the session.

Agreeing with Ahuja and taking the discussion further, Mukherjee talked about the strategies adopted by SUGAR Cosmetics that has made it one of the most followed brands on social media.

“They say that at some point you run out of mistakes and things start working. I think we have seen that happen, and that has compounded over a period of time,” shared Mukherjee.

He continued, “When we started building SUGAR, a lot of our investors and marketers asked why we were building cosmetics category as it has a smaller base. We observed something very interesting back then. Because consumption of content was happening on personal devices, it was easier to get traction and engagement on a category like cosmetics. Back then, people were just figuring out what to make of the content. It was a very hungry online population that wanted to learn what to do with make-up and how to use it. So, it was a mix of education and entertainment. But we cannot always over-index on engagement. We have got to be true to what we stand for.”

Mukherjee further stated that content marketing is a lot about featuring in people’s consideration set.

Speaking about the scope of influencer marketing and the use of influencers, he opined, “The best part about last decade is that it has comprised influence on purchasing, thanks to the rise of digital influencers. What we do is we ask ourselves why are we thinking of engaging with someone. And that has very clear, distinct answers. We are either engaging an influencer for a content or we are engaging them for media or just trust. If there is a campaign that needs to be amplified using media, that is when we really hit the celebrity accounts and that is when we invest money in the macro accounts. But on the daily basis, we have a casting director whose job is to uncover people who have under 5k followers. We have done this before wherein we spotted someone who had exceptional talent. Now with collaboration posts, it has become easier to give credit to them, and they see a huge follower boost.”

Concluding the session, Mukherjee mentioned that in the past, they have made the mistake of pushing different adapts of the same content on different platforms and it did not work. “People do not care about the product. They care about what you do with the product and what you are creating with the product. So, for a beauty brand, it is incredible how much engagement you can make with what you can create for example, the looks. What you create with a product, is very important. Earlier, you had 6-7 minutes to explain your point and show how the look has been created. But that duration has got crunched to 30 seconds for a reel right now. So, the attention span is going to decrease.”