“Influencer marketing is one of the most low-cost digital marketing avenues we use”

Indian kitchens have graduated from having a mortar and pestle handy to now owning a separate appliance for almost every chore in the kitchen. A mixer-grinder? Yes. A dry masala grinder? Yes! A toaster? Of course. A vegetable chopper? Where can I get that? An air fryer? Sign me up, stat! 

You get the drift. 

Kitchens are getting an upgrade, and companies like Stovekraft Limited are making kitchen appliances and kitchenware available to consumers at affordable prices to cash in on the trend. Stovekraft is the parent company of kitchenware brands Pigeon Kitchen Appliances and Gilma Kitchens and the licensee of Black & Decker’s kitchen appliance line.

Professional organisers such as Marie Kondo and their innumerous home decluttering videos on social media have driven consumers to maintain their kitchens just like they would maintain their living rooms — tidy, presentable, and aesthetically pleasing. All of this has resulted in consumers turning more aspirational in the kitchen appliance and kitchenware category, says Stovekraft CMO, Dr Manu Nanda. Not just that, even segmentation is fading away, he says. 

“Pigeon is a mass brand but since we started making premium products we saw that consumers who would generally purchase premium brands opted for our products.” This has been especially true for the air fryer that Pigeon manufactures, he says. Pigeon’s air fryer costs close to 50% less than that of international kitchen appliance brands. “Pigeon launched an airfryer at Rs 3,500. That was 1/3rd the cost of buying the other famous brand, and that just revolutionised everything,” says Dr Nanda. The price advantage that Stovekraft is able to give consumers has resulted in it selling almost one lakh air fryers every month, he claims. 

These air fryers, he says, are flying off the shelves on quick-commerce platforms. The company has a large offline footprint with a presence in over 75,000 outlets, yet it relies on e-commerce, particularly quick-commerce, for a significant share of its sales. While quick-commerce initially served as a solution for last-minute grocery runs, its scope has expanded and now rivals e-commerce.

As per Dr Nanda, quick-commerce aids sales in categories where the consumer knows which product or brand to purchase. He believes that quick-commerce is a tough arena for new players. But isn’t quick-commerce a crucial channel for upstarts that are in customer acquisition mode and looking for consumers who might discover them serendipitously? Dr Nanda says such discovery and experimentation might happen in categories like protein bars where the category itself is fairly new and there are no established players who are easily recognised by consumers. 

Stovekraft, which has used traditional mediums like television and print for advertising, has begun making concerted efforts towards using digital marketing to drive sales. Given the company’s focus on e-commerce, it is prioritising performance marketing and influencer marketing. “Performance marketing is the need of the hour for any brand trying to sell online. We use performance marketing on e-commerce platforms and paid marketing on social media,” he says, adding that the company uses digital marketing to drive consumers to offline outlets too.

For the past year, the company has been putting “sizable budgets” behind influencer marketing, says Nanda. The company uses regional influencers to reach a wider audience across India. “Influencer marketing is working very well for us. It is one of the most low-cost digital marketing avenues we use,” he says. 

While influencer marketing has become part of the brand’s marketing arsenal, Dr Nanda is acutely aware of the consumer’s ability to disregard advertising that is in-your-face. Identifying a fundamental shift in consumer behaviour, he says, “the consumer can clearly see through advertising.”

“Typical, plain advertising is dead. They can even see through paid influencer marketing. The solution is to create honest content. That’s the only way to survive as a marketer in the future — one cannot just talk superlatives, one has to be consumer-centric but not in a cliched manner.”