Burrp! aims to get its mojo back with new brand identity

As competition intensifies in the food technology space, Burrp! revamps its brand identity to woo consumers to its platform.

One of the early movers in the dotcom space, Burrp dominated the online food and event recommendation space in India much before Zomato was launched. Founded in 2006, the platform has undergone a brand revamp unveiling a new logo and an app to take on the increasing competition.

Speaking about the objective behind the new brand identity, Abhishek Chhajlani and Pradeep Prabhu, co-business heads at Burrp!, tell us that a lot has changed in one year for the company and this move is in line with those changes.

"It's a new product, a new team that has a new vision and wants to write a new story. We could write a new story only if our logo would represent this new approach we are about to take. We also didn't want to be stuck in the laurels of our legacy," says Chhajlani.

The platform has moved away from its green blue colour scheme and has instead chosen red in its new logo. The tagline 'Let it out', however, remains the same. Msl Group (part of Publicis) is the agency that has worked on the new logo.

"The earlier green and blue colour scheme wasn't working very well with what we expected the brand to communicate. The colour of the logo was considered keeping in mind the vibrancy and vigour of the refreshed app," informs Prabhu.

Burrp! targets consumers between the 15-25 age bracket, a target audience which has no affinity for status quo and is irreverent. It also tends to be experimentative and has a passion for food.

The platform has been enhanced with features to provide a superior food discovery experience to its users. Burrp! claims to have 65,000 restaurants listed on its website currently. With the new app, coupled with an aggressive marketing push, Burrp! aims to create a great experience for food and fine dining.

Apart from the new brand identity, Burrp! is also pushing its revamped app to the users. The app provides recommendations of similar places that consumers have browsed before, 160 character tips of things to do and not to do at a particular place instead of long reviews, and multi-keyword searches on the new app.

When asked if the push on promoting the app is delayed, Prabhu says that the food tech is a hot segment and can still be leveraged.

"Burrp! was a pioneer that created this space. The brand has been around for nine years. For any brand that's been around for such a long time, it takes time to fix things that are broken, let alone the time taken to innovate and potentially disrupt," he justifies.

According to Chhajlani, it is Burrp! which has created the tech product vertical in the Indian food and beverage industry. Currently present in 13 cities, the company now aims to expand to 35 cities in the next two years.

"We are adding about 10,000 listings on a monthly basis. With absolutely no marketing, in a good month, we get over a million searches. Ever since our new avatar was launched in the first week of October, every metric we can possibly imagine is witnessing over 500 per cent growth," says Chhajlani.

Unlike Zomato, which has branched out in the food delivery space, Burrp! is currently focussing on food discovery and recommendation.

"People have experienced Burrp! sometime or the other, but have not necessarily felt the need to download the app or use it exclusively. This is a low-hanging fruit and comprises a significant chunk of the TG. We want to give them a reason to come to Burrp! every single time they want to search for food online," says Prabhu.

Leading in the food tech space is Zomato which has rolled out a mass media campaign promoting its delivery service Order. Foodpanda and Faasos are other players who have been promoting their offerings as well.

Chhajlani feels that the expenditure incurred on impact advertising is not commensurate with the returns. He says that much has been spent in discount vouchers and other gimmicks that don't hold water in the long run.

"But, this has essentially made every new entrant to offer discounts as a value proposition to use a product. The biggest challenge we see is breaking this mindset of the consumer," he points out.

Burrp! was co-founded by Anand Jain as a restaurant and event recommendation platform. The portal mentioned best hangout places, restaurant recommendations and things to do in a particular city. In April 2009, Burrp! was acquired by Infomedia18 Ltd.