Brands have always seen value in marketing to gated communities: Anish Anthony

Security has always been a concern and to provide better options regarding security, especially during the pandemic times, MyGate, has been enabling gated communities to vastly enhance their security and convenience through a number of innovative features, such as Visitor Management, e-Intercom, Accounts & Payments, Leave at Gate, and Daily Help Management.

Founded by ISB-IIM-IIT alumni, MyGate is an eponymous mobile app that allows residents to approve entries and exits, manage visitors/ deliveries, communicate with their neighbours, log attendance and pay society maintenance bills and daily help workers, among others. Launched in 2016, it is now used by over 3.5 million homes every day in over 25,000 gated communities across the country.

With the nationwide lockdown, newspaper circulation had been hampered. To resume the delivery of the morning newspaper to the 1.6 million homes on its platform, MyGate had also partnered with leading publications, including The Times of India, Indian Express, Deccan Herald, Deccan Chronicle, Financial Express, Loksatta, Prajavani and Jansatta.

With these partnerships, Housing.com had also announced a tie-up with MyGate, which enabled users of MyGate’s newly-launched property platform, MyGate Homes, to simultaneously list their properties on Housing.com, while .5 the same time helping Housing.com to expand its customer base.

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Anish Anthony, Business Head, CEP, MyGate, speaks about the rationale behind this platform, how it is transforming brand engagement, growth plans of its Community Engagement Platform (CEP) and a lot more.

How will the launch of CEP boost the business of MyGate? What was the purpose behind this launch?

For over a decade now, there has been a reversal in shopping trends. Rather than heading out to shop, everything is now delivered to the doorstep. Communities have become little microcosms of commerce. Brands have, of course, long known this and have been reaching out to us for opportunities to showcase themselves directly to these ecosystems in the form of an experience (food truck, kiosk, event, contest, etc). The pandemic accelerated this process exponentially and created an environment for us to test this out as people were left craving the experience of shopping in the real world within the safety of their homes and communities.

As an organisation focused on enriching life within the community, we decided to run a few experiments by bringing brands into communities and received excellent feedback. Communities were very receptive to the idea. And for residents, the prospect of, for example, a pizza brand bringing its food truck into the society or an EV manufacturer conducting informational camps and test drives along with contests and engagement activities has been very hard to resist.

Such experiences have firmly established the credibility of this ‘brand to home’ or B2H model and we strongly believe that such kind of disintermediation has numerous possibilities for brands. Think group buying, product launches, sampling, etc.

The CEP, therefore, fits seamlessly into our vision of enriching the community experience. MyGate is the perfect platform for brands and communities to engage with each other through various digital and phygital formats. From a business perspective, it is showing very promising results with significant interest from brands and strong user acceptance.

What are the marketing strategies that MyGate adopted to reach potential brands? How are you planning to channel the communication of brands onboarded?

Brands have always shown interest in reaching out to our user base, so there was sufficient interest before all this began. However, they did not have an avenue to engage at scale. Considering a lot of decision makers for brands stay in MyGate communities with each campaign we roll out, we inevitably receive requests from them to explore this medium.

The MyGate platform offers multiple channels of communications that are already in use by the communities, such as the notice board, opinion polls, discussion forums, etc. Brands can leverage these channels to showcase their narrative and also tap into our understanding of community behaviour to create immersive brand experiences.

How many brands have you onboarded for CEP and how many do you plan to onboard? Can you name the categories of the brands?

Since inception over the past 6 months we have run experiences for over 270 unique brands on the platform and have a healthy lead pipeline, since both the platform and the audience is sector agnostic. Consequentially, we’ve worked with major brands across categories from Auto (Jaguar, Porsche, Volkswagen), Real Estate and Home Furnishing (Godrej Properties, Asian Paints), F&B (Domino’s, Starbucks, Swiggy, Grofers), Clothing (Pantaloons, Marks & Spencer), Finance (Bajaj Finserv, HSBC), Consumer Durables (Samsung, MI) and even Edtech (Byju’s, Great Learning), etc. Many of the brands have signed up for long term recurring engagements.

As MyGate has been the most necessity application during these unprecedented times, what have been the marketing and communication strategy routes adopted since the inception?

Since our inception we have made innovation, client delight and dependability the bedrock of our growth. For the past 18 months, our teams have been really geared towards innovating features that help communities tide over the pandemic. We have released 12 COVID-specific features, such as Temperate & Mask Check, Society Vaccine Status, Containment Zone Identifier and much else. Our quick response to the situation brought a lot of good word-of-mouth and contributed to our growth in metro cities and expansion into smaller cities as well. In March 2020, MyGate was in 6,000 societies; today, we’re in 25,000 societies. To put that in perspective, we are adding about 5,000 homes a day. The addition of a variety of community features, such as classifieds platform Buy & Sell and property marketplace Homes, have also been a further draw for societies to come onboard.

How is MyGate different from any other advertising and marketing platforms in the market? What is the USP that you offer to brands?

Brands have always seen value in marketing to gated communities, but largely stay away because there are too many challenges. Our USP to brands is the ability to offer both scale and depth in community engagement.

For starters, it is practically impossible to reach out to more than a dozen communities at a time. MyGate can unlock up to 25,000 communities in 27 cities with no effort at all. Moreover, we can suggest societies based on location and cost of the apartment. For example, we are currently doing a 4-week activation for 1,000 communities across 10 cities for a popular food aggregation brand.

Also, we enable a blended experience of a phygital engagement within the communities. We offer a range of in-App digital mediums to inform the App users of the upcoming physical event, experience, contest or offer before it actually goes live. This not only maximises the impact, but also ensures that the community as a whole indulges in the experience.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, brands are unclear about what will work in a community because they have limited understanding of behaviour within them. Here again we are able to offer up our expertise in devising and refining experiences based on the type of community.

How is the Community Engagement Platform (CEP) going to be beneficial for the consumers? How is it transforming brand engagement?

Both consumers and communities benefit from CEP. Consumers benefit from the direct attention they receive from brands. It could be a discount, a free sample, a contest or lucky draw, a product launch, etc. These are exclusive programmes run exclusively for the society and consumers are very interested in them. Consumers also benefit from the life such campaigns breathe into the community. A mundane Thursday evening is transformed by a food truck into a ‘no cooking’ day for many of the homes. It’s a fun experience and really adds to community living, whether or not you end up purchasing from the stall.

The brand, on the other hand, gets to leverage the benefits of a blended phygital (physical and digital) engagement.

What are the upcoming strategies and launches that we can expect in the coming days?

Our primary focus has always been on enriching the community living experience. We are constantly helping brands to craft some really unique campaigns on a daily basis. Our first milestone is to ensure that all of our 3.5 million homes get exciting and unique brand experiences on a constant basis via CEP.