You need to listen and have conversations to build brand purpose: Naiyya Saggi

Community building is a combination of both art and science, says Naiyya Saggi, Co-founder of the Good Glamm Group and Founder of BabyChakra, which is a one-stop platform for baby and parenting needs.

In a fireside chat with exchange4media Editor, Naziya Alvi Rahman, at the inaugural edition of the e4m Connected TV Conference, Saggi emphasised the need to listen to consumers and have conversations to build a brand purpose.

“Community building does not come easily as it is both art and science. Art is when you put others before yourself. As a brand, you need to listen and have conversations to build brand purpose.

“The science is what we are really tracking and what is the success of the community. You need it to build a business out of the community. The pillar is technology. We have a very large data stack. A lot of work happens from the data science team that helps you predict what interest a person would have, not just with beauty but within beauty. They help us predict a strong predictive analysis model,” Saggi said.

The Good Glamm Group is a content-to-commerce D2C house of brands with several business verticals, including the Good Brands, the Good Media, the Good Creator Co and the Good Community.

The Group has acquired and partnered with several brands under these verticals, and has even roped in film stars as brand ambassadors.

In 2015, Saggi founded BabyChakra, which caters to parenting and baby needs of over 2 million families through community conversations.

Asked how BabyChakra ensured authenticity of its content considering it is simultaneously monetising it, Saggi said credibility was never an issue with the company.

“Credibility came with social groups. Product reviews and recommendations are available and you cannot go wrong with hundreds and thousands of voices.”

She said the communities are not paid influencers. “They are genuine consumers with real views.”

“So that helps build the brand voice for BabyChakra. Many a time, we have also said no to brands that do not meet our philosophy of being in service of mothers,” Saggi said.

Sharing the challenges that she faced while starting BabyChakra, Saggi said building trust as a young brand in 2015 was a big test.

“Baby Chakra started in 2015 and the premise was how to help parents, specifically mothers in making the best choices through pregnancy and parenting in a very personalised way.”

“Every mother goes through a very different journey. The first insight was that people learn best from others, they learn best from peers. And the second insight was you need experts intervening at critical junctures in a serendipitous manner,” she said.

She highlighted how the brand won the trust of people as it provided expert consultations at a point where parents did not even expect it.

“Sometimes you don’t even know that you need expert help and if you have an expert step in at that point in time, it just adds tremendously to the healthcare outcomes.

“The two challenges I faced were the scaling process of getting mothers upfront, which was a very interesting one. We did a lot of growth hacks to crack that model. The second challenge was that of building trust as a young brand. Communities helped us crack that,” she said.

Talking about the recent initiative of tying up with WhatsApp to build Good Communities, Saggi told e4m that The Good Glamm Group has access to more than 20 million community consumers.

“Good Communities is the fourth vertical of the group. We have access to more than 20 million community consumers across the group. The belief is that communities are the future of the internet.

“Building on the experience and learnings we have, how do we now build communities across interests in brands and localities? We have created GlammFam, which is the largest community on beauty. We have these communities - Sirona Circle, Momstars, and the Organic Squad. They exist on our app and WhatsApp. We have them hyper-locally mapped. We are achieving a lot of lift in our brand amplifications,” she said.

Asked how her company has achieved lower consumer acquisition cost, which is very important to increase profitability margins, Saggi said conversations around brands bring down that cost.

“We had two parallel journeys and now we see them convert. One journey has played out with MyGlamm and POPxo. When those two brands came together, they found the whole content of the commerce journey. When we integrated product conversations and product branding and launches, in the content spaces, the cost of conversion and the cost of customer acquisition came down to less than half a dollar for MyGlamm at that point in time.

“We see a similar journey playing out with Communities. With communities, we saw two things – one is the power of amplifying conversations that communities can do. Second, is using these conversations in our marketing journeys which has helped cross-sell using real people’s reviews and experiences,” she explained.

Talking about the challenges of building an interactive experience which also takes care of brand safety, Saggi said that there is a need to mimic the behaviour of community members and be with them.

“You think about where the consumer or your community member is. We have 20 million of them. They live online-offline. We must mimic that behaviour and be with them on that journey,” she said, while citing the examples of two popular shows on television where MyGlamm was a sponsor.

“We invested in Bigg Boss and Koffee with Karan. We were sponsors there. What we did there was a very differentiated format this time around. We ran a MyGlamm experience zone. We also ran contests for our community members providing them a platform like on MyGlamm App on the community section to vote and express what they felt about a certain aspect of the programs they were watching,” she explained.

Actors Shraddha Kapoor and Akshay Kumar are investors in the Good Glamm Group, Saggi said, adding that they will soon launch a male personal care product in collaboration with Akshay Kumar “as he is really passionate about this space”.

“Few more exciting updates are lined up on the celebrity’s investment front,” she noted.