We have filed almost three dozen copyright cases against our competitors: K Madhavan, MD of Peps
The mattress company plans to innovate more in order to avoid the replication of its marketing activities by other players
Peps, a leading mattress company, has filed about three dozen copyrights cases after witnessing a number of themes and ideas used in their marketing communication replicated by various other players in the same segment. K Madhavan, MD of Peps Industries, talked about how these alleged infringements worry and bother him and spoke to e4m about the company’s expansion plans.
Excerpts:
What is your marketing strategy? How does it help you to stand out from your competitors?
Key to any success is building a brand. It has given us the revenue for that belief. Just brand building is not sufficient. You need to distinguish the brand, not the product within the category. We shouldn’t be one among the category, we shouldn’t be a lookalike in the category and we have to stand within the category. We made sure all our actions and activities are unique from the others in the market. Right from our product, our creative design and the conceptual inputs we put out there, everything has to be unique. We don’t like to imitate anyone else.
We thought being a mattress company, just talking about sleep in our communication would be too monotonous. So, we began to show people that although mattresses denote sleeping, they are not built just for that purpose alone and the users can play the guitar on it, jump, dance and more. We came out with this hashtag #PepsLife. The theme was that if you have a good sleep in the night, the next day would automatically become energetic. We spent quite a lot of money on this.
The next campaign was that a good night’s sleep will make you active and energetic but you need to maintain it. Then we rolled out another campaign ‘Stay Awake.’ Our current campaign is about how to hold on and stay awake after a good night’s sleep.
Talking about uniqueness and imitation, there are some competitors in this segment who have similar jingles on the radio and other media. What are your views on this?
The biggest issue is competitors copying. When I expressed this to others, they said being a leader they will copy you. But there is a limit for copying. We cover all our properties under Intellectual Property Act (IPA.) We are the only company which has about 92 copyrights and registrations and over 15 patents in our hand. But despite that, we see rampant copying. We have filed about three dozen cases against this. As a leader in this segment, I think I should face the brunt of copying to some extent for the company. But we are in the process of innovating ourselves. All the ads we’ve done are copyrighted and done by us in-house.
We have also set a trend in the packaging of the mattress. We have given a finishing to the mattress similar to that of cigarette packs. We have made it look like an ornament. It is all about perception. How a person views a product gives us a great mileage and works for us. Today, everybody copies our packaging. We change the packaging every alternate year. The old packaging comes out as new in the market courtesy our competitor.
How is Peps doing as far as digital marketing is concerned?
Today, digital marketing is taking a big leap but 95 per cent of our revenue is coming from our open segment. A little bit is coming from the digital marketing. We have developed an e-commerce platform where transactions could happen in a user-friendly manner.
We have approached many online portals. We are currently with Amazon, Flipkart and Pepperfry. We are planning to go strong with them. This is yielding a better result for us. Gradually we want to be strong even on the digital front. We have a few videos for digital which run for a few minutes, unlike a TV Commercial where a little more than 20 seconds costs you a lot. Here, we have taken care that the essence of the campaign is connected to the digital lives of people than using the same techniques as TV. I am sure competitors have already copied this.
Going forward, what are your marketing plans?
We have this other brand with us now, Hypnos, which is a registered property currently present on Amazon. Any of our online activity will be projected through Hypnos now. We will be coming out with a range of bedroom furniture and augmented products under this name. Trial production has already started. We want to be a big player in the upholstery and furniture industry. By the end of this year, we will be a name to reckon with in that sector.
