"To expand reach, we've changed our advertising from English to Hindi": Pepperfry's Kashyap Vadapalli

The company's fourth campaign focusses on expanding reach and building trust with the consumer, to facilitate the shift to online furniture buying.

Pepperfry, an online furniture and home marketplace, has launched a campaign which comprises three TVCs. Executed by Saatchi & Saatchi, the campaign will also be extended to digital, outdoor, cinema and social media, apart from TV.

The brand had executed two large-scale campaigns before this, to build presence. The latest one hopes to appeal to a larger audience and communicates the brand's propositions of quality, value and service. The campaign builds on the key drivers that motivate customers to purchase furniture online. Besides that, it also tackles the apprehensions around buyer dissonance by showcasing the ease of returns.

Three ads have been released in the series, each focussing on a different aspect of the brand's service. The first ad features Shruti Seth and Sumit Vyas, a couple, having a debate over buying a coffee table online. The girl asks, "What if I don't like it?" to which the man casually replies, "We'll return it", emphasising on the company's easy return policy. The next in the series stars Radhika Apte and Zeeshan Ayyub Khan. The man seems aphrehensive about buying a new bed, and the woman surprises him with one. Here, the brand tries to say that the furniture is inexpensive.

The third ad shows a man sitting on a new sofa he's bought, when the woman (Shahana Goswami) enters, wondering if he knows anything about sofas. However, she approves of his choice when she finally sits on it, highlighting the quality of the furniture.

"Our communication focusses on quality and value, which are the key barriers that keep people from buying furniture online," says Kashyap Vadapalli, CMO, Pepperfry. While its earlier ad was English-heavy, this one is peppered with Hindi. Vadapalli says the change is deliberate. "To expand reach, we have changed the ad language from English to Hindi. There is also a big shift in our media plan, from being very English-programming-led, to being Hindi and regional-led," he reveals.

The ads will be run across a bouquet of English infotainment, entertainment, movies and lifestyle channels, select South channels and Hindi GEC HD channels/properties, for the next few weeks, as 40-second spots. They have been dubbed in four regional (South) languages. An outdoor campaign is also being executed in five cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. The campaign will also have a high digital presence, along with cinema ads.

"While we have a wider TG, we chose to feature nuclear couples as we wanted to build a stronger connect with them," adds Vadapalli. While Pepperfry targets individuals from SEC A, starting from the age of 25, most of its sales comes from customers in the 30-40 year age bracket. 70 per cent of the marketplace's sales are from Tier I cities, but it hopes to expand reach through the new campaign.

On being quizzed about using niche actors for the ads, unlike its previous campaigns, Kashyap says, "It was the demand of the script. We needed more seasoned actors to do justice to the creative structure of the narrative."

The company has grown manifold since its first TV campaign in September 2014, Kashyap claims. "Last year we grew four times over 2013, while this year, we have already grown three times over last year, as of now. We hope to achieve four to five times growth by the end of season in October-November, this year," he says, positively. The company has a registered user base of 21 lakh users and 50 lakh hits on an average, per month.

Kashyap says that the portal's main marketing challenge is of trust building. "Consumers aren't experts on furniture; hence, trust matters when buying. We have used the tagline 'Happy Furniture to You' in an attempt to build credibility," he says.

Sameer Aasht, founder-director, Alma Mater Biz Solutions, and former stratergy head, Taproot India, isn't convinced about Pepperfry's communication strategy. "Some startups are running on steroids; so, in the euphoria to grow fast, they tend to skip a few steps. The brand needs to articulate its differentiation and leverage it in the proposition. While e-commerce, as a category, is much better entrenched today, the sub-category of furniture e-commerce is still unfamiliar territory," he observes.

The brand, in his opinion, should consider doing category building ads the way Flipkart & Myntra did in their earlier days. "They should consider taking physical retail head on. They need to give prospects a reference point / place holder," he suggests.

Aasht comments that the ads may be entertaining for a niche audience, but might not help clarify why they should shop on Pepperfry. "All in all, it could be more hardworking," he concludes.