‘Premium products or higher price points are becoming increasingly important’

It’s the season of celebrations and the shenanigans are already in progress. When it comes to the festive season, chocolates and confectionaries play a huge role as a part of treats and also for gifting. 

In a conversation with exchange4media, Varun Kandhari, Director - Marketing, Mars Wrigley India, shares insights on the festive season, overall category trends, localising products for Indian markets, marketing strategy, catering to a larger demographic, leveraging digital and more. 

Edited excerpts: 

What does the consumer sentiment look like for your category this festive season? How do you plan to leverage it? 

In India, with a 45% contribution to overall gifting, Diwali is the biggest gifting occasion. This festive season, we foresee a significant uptick in gifting sales considering the fact that the looming threat of Covid-19 is now almost over in the consumer space which will possibly lead to increased revenge spending despite inflationary pressures. 

In terms of gifting, we are observing that the new-age consumers’ preferences are rapidly evolving, and shoppers are opting for chocolates with premiumization in product and packaging. Brand does matter and when it comes to gifting, shoppers look for trusted brands for their loved ones. To cater to this demand, we have launched gifting options at affordable and premium price points and are targeting strong double-digit growth in our gifting range. On eCommerce, our Gifting business has doubled over the festive season of last year. With Rakhi and Diwali contributing close to 50 percent of gifting online, we are actually building all-year gifting as well as Rakhi and Diwali Gift packs. 

What are the evolving trends when it comes to the confectionery category in India? 

From the confectionery perspective, there are three major trends which we are seeing over the last one to two years.  For example, consumers are increasingly looking for better quality products, and better experiences, and hence we’re seeing more and more launches even at higher price points and consumers are also picking them up. Premium products or higher price points are also becoming increasingly important especially in chocolates as a category. The second thing which is also prevalent is the pick-up in in-home consumption. Third of course, is digital, whether it is from the standpoint of digital commerce with all the innovation which is happening in that space with on-demand delivery, and so on and so forth and also from the standpoint of reaching out to consumers through digital media.

How are you reading consumer insights to develop products that are acceptable to the Indian palette and the Indian market? 

We are doing both things. So, for example, we have a huge portfolio of brands which we call our favourites that work across many markets like the snickers core product. We recently launched Galaxy chocolate in the tablet segment. Wherever necessary to drive more relevance of our products in the country, we are localizing flavours and we have done that with Snickers over the last few years by launching Snickers Almond and then we also did a few limited editions such as Snickers cashew and Snickers Kesar-Pista, with which we generated a lot of excitement, not only here in India, but even outside India. Even in the case of mints, we launched the Doublemint Paan mint, similarly, in Orbit, we have raw mango-flavoured gum. 

When it comes to talking to the Indian demographic, what is the insight that goes behind curating campaigns and communications for this market? 

As far as curating campaigns is concerned, there are two most important things. First of all, we want our campaigns to be culturally relevant. We simply don't believe in picking up a campaign from one country and just adapting it here and sneakers campaigns over the years are a testimonial of the same. Secondly, we want our brands to be relevant to Gen Z as well, we have done many campaigns to reach out to Gen Z audiences so that we can recruit more consumers from this cohort. We recently did a digital-only campaign for Boomer with Radhika Madan and it did really well for us. 

You also mentioned that you are focusing on Re 1 packs. How does this help in capturing a bigger portion of the rural market? 

For us, it's very key to drive our market coverage which means also having the right price point. In gums, mints, and fruity confectioneries price points of Re 1 is still very dominant. And hence, we are present with our brands Boomer and Doublemint at that price point. Our idea is to grow in India and hence, we need to cover these price points whichever is relevant for the category. Earlier, Snickers was available at price points of Rs 20 and Rs 40 but a few years back we launched it at a rupees 10 price point because for us Snickers will be a key brand to drive per capita consumption in the category and hence, we need to be available at those opening price points which are relevant for the consumer and for the shopper. 

How has your digital presence evolved? How are you leveraging it in order to reach your core consumer? 

The way we look at digital is not something which is you do as an add-on, it is part of your media plan. In the last few years has changed from an add-on to a core element of the media plans. Even before COVID, when we saw a huge increase in digital whether from the commerce or the media reach standpoint, we have been making that shift in our contribution to digital media as part of our regular plans and it has increased. In some plans, it ranges from 25 to 40% of what we do. It will depend upon the objective of the campaign and the type of brand that we are promoting, but we definitely cannot ignore digital. In a broader sense, pre-COVID the investment in digital could have been around 20% to now in some campaigns, it is upwards of 40 to 50%. And there are some campaigns which are completely digitally led because now you can drive mass reach even with digital.