Data acts as the core of everything we do: BharatPe’s Parth Joshi

The fintech platform’s CMO says that the timing of its recent campaign is incidental as it coincided with IPL's ending and that is when media clutter reduces.

Fintech company BharatPe recently launched a campaign, titled ‘Hai Yakeen’, that highlights the power of dreams and tenacity of offline merchants and SMEs in India. It aims to celebrate the success stories of the resilient community of entrepreneurs, across industries.

“We looked at our consumers and small retailers, and found that the brand has been enabling these people to realise their dreams. Our focus was to take this core insight and build a narrative around it,” Parth Joshi, CMO, BharatPe, tells afaqs!.

The film crafts stories of six small business owners and highlights how they fulfilled their big dreams with innovative thinking and hard work. Actor Naseeruddin Shah has lent his voice to the ad film. Along with the TVC, BharatPe will be running a 360 degree campaign across TV, OTT and digital media.

On why the brand decided to do such a campaign now, Joshi mentions, “The timing of the campaign is incidental, as it was dictated by the ending of the Indian Premier League (IPL). That is when the media clutter reduces. So, the campaign was driven by that.”

It must be mentioned that a couple of brands that BharatPe competes with, have used similar themes in their ads in the past, where they have highlighted the role of small merchants and vendors in a consumer’s life. So, what makes BharatPe’s campaign unique?

Joshi explains, “There is an entire ecosystem that serves this merchant base. However, what is different about BharatPe’s campaign is that it has tried to go beyond the transactional communication and build a relationship with its audience by helping them achieve their goals and aspirations.”

While BharatPe uses a full-funnel omni-channel approach, Joshi had this to say about the media mix, “There is no one ideal media mix, because it depends on what we are trying to achieve, the sub-brand we are marketing for and the particular campaign’s objectives.”

BharatPe has a huge repository of merchant data, which helps its marketing team to execute effective campaigns. Joshi says that the platform’s first-party data is a key differentiator that drives all its marketing activities. It allows the team to understand the consumers better, get under their skin and provide them with real value, in terms of serving the right consumer with the right propositional value at the right time.

“Data acts as the very core of everything we do. The entire marketing tech stack helps us to classify the data and make it usable so that we can differentiate the signal from the noise. And then, we use it to super-charge our marketing campaigns,” adds Joshi.

It is a known fact that BharatPe has placed big bets on postpe, its ‘buy now pay later’ offering. But marketing this offering for people in smaller towns and cities or those who may not be comfortable or even familiar with the idea of credit, seems like a challenge.

Joshi reveals that a large chunk of BharatPe’s consumers come from Tier-II and III towns. He says that it is a myth that people from smaller towns and cities don’t know anything about credit.

However, Joshi does mention that the use of transactional credit is limited in these towns because a consumer’s opportunity to explore and utilise credit here, is low. So, there are very few retail outlets that have credit card machines in these towns.

For fintech players, like BharatPe and many of its competitors, there has been a proliferation of credit acceptance in the retail ecosystem. Joshi says that low credit penetration (about 5%) in the country, provides the brand with a 95% untapped market opportunity.

“And, with the treasure trove of data, BharatPe can get new people into the credit economy, rather than being an old school financial institution, which may not easily allow credit access. The credit on UPI and the capabilities of postpe form a heavy mix to cater to the Tier-II, III and IV towns.”

Going forward, BharatPe will continue to focus on providing real solutions to its merchants. It is also doing some interesting work using AI and VR that will allow merchants to attract more people to their stores.