Baskin-Robbins takes OOH route

The company mainly targets youth in the age group of 15-28 years in SEC A, A+ and is looking at reaching out to SEC B through the Choco-Fest campaign

The one of the world's largest chain of ice-cream specialty shops, Baskin-Robbins, recently rolled out an out of home (OOH) campaign to celebrate the festival season in India.

The OOH campaign of Baskin-Robbins aims to promote its chocolate flavours through the Choco Fest initiative. "Our brand is known for chocolate flavours and they are our hot sellers," says Ashwin Uppal, who came on board early this year as general manager, marketing, South Asia, Baskin Robbins.

This is the first time that the brand has used the OOH medium in India since its entry into the country 17 years ago. "Through the OOH campaign, we are trying to get a sense of how our brand responds to this particular medium," says Uppal, who adds that the response to the Choco Fest campaign in seven-10 days has been phenomenal.

The campaign, executed by TDI International, has been rolled out in four cities including Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. In every city, the company has chosen 10-12 sites. It has also undertaken bus and bus shelter branding with BEST in Mumbai.

"Ice-cream is basically a product which is bought on impulse and we realised that if you ensure that the visual of ice-cream is carried along with the offer, it can create a desire to purchase," Uppal explains.

Therefore, the objective of bus and bus shelter branding was largely to give a visual appeal to the product and thereby create a 'drool factor' that would, in turn, initiate a desire in customers to buy the product.

The company is also using other media such as newspaper inserts, SMSes and the Internet (Facebook) to promote the Choco Fest campaign.

The company mainly targets youth in the age group of 15-28 years in SEC A and A+. "There is a huge customer base building for us in SEC B," Uppal elaborates.

The company sees about 20 lakh people walking in every month in its stores across the country. "There are months when this figure doubles," Uppal adds.

Baskin-Robbins currently has about 408 stores in India, with a strong presence in the western region, followed by the South. "We are yet to make a serious dent and huge opportunity lies for us in the northern region of the country," Uppal states about spreading the footprint of the chain in India. The company plans to add about 80-100 stores every year.

In the last six months or so, the company has become fairly aggressive in terms of marketing the brand. This is mainly because it witnessed a period of lull in the past seven-10 years, where the only kind of marketing the company did was to tie up with movies.

"We realised we need to go beyond that and since the beginning of the year, we have taken marketing to a different level," says Uppal.

The company started with a very aggressive promotion on scratch and win and later did a radio campaign, where it tied up with Radio Mirchi to celebrate its 65th birthday in July. Subsequently, the company also tied up with another radio station to promote a flavour and co-branded it with the programme on the radio channel.

OOH and radio gets the lion's share in its marketing budget, followed by BTL (below-the-line), print and digital. "We want to acquire new customers and try out new markets, so radio and OOH are the two main media that we want to focus on," Uppal tells afaqs!.