Godrej Interio saw 15-20% overall growth across categories in Q1 FY24: Sumeet Bhojani

Godrej Interio, the furniture arm of the brand Godrej & Boyce and also a constituent of the wide ranging Godrej Group, is a leading furniture brand in both institutional and home segments in India. The company began manufacturing furniture way back in 1923 with the Godrej Storewel cupboard. Godrej Interio has a 15% share of the institutional and home furniture market. It has over 56 showrooms across 20 cities in India and 800 dealer outlets all over the country.

Recently, Godrej Interio has come up with its new campaign, titled ‘Welcome to the Family’, revolving around the heartwarming stories of a quintessential Indian household, as narrated by their furniture, the silent observer, which is like a part of their family. The ‘Welcome to the Family’ campaign comprises five ad films showing how the family members are attached to the furniture in their homes and cannot live without them. It shows how furniture has become a fashion statement for people and at the same time unites the members of a family together and is a part of the family.

In conversation with Adgully, Sumeet Bhojani, Head of Marketing Communications, Godrej Interio, said, “Furniture is a focal point of interaction among families and getting the families closer. From there emerged the thought that the piece of furniture is not simply part of our homes, it is part of our family.”

What is the core idea and objective behind the campaign ‘Welcome to the Family’?

One of the key insights that continues to emerge in our research is that consumers form a very special bond with their furniture. Over the time, a piece of furniture almost becomes like a family member participating in special moments and memories. And that’s the emotion we've aimed at capturing through this ‘Welcome to the Family’ series. It's like a slice-of-life take on a typical Indian family's relationship with their beloved furniture and interestingly narrated from the point of view of the furniture itself. So that is the core idea of the campaign. As far as the objectives of the campaign are concerned, there were two fold objectives. The first one was to show that some of our hero products and their features and how these features are used in everyday lives of a typical Indian family. So as a brand, our products are designed to prioritize both functionality as well as aesthetics. And the idea was to show this in a very engaging and a relatable manner.

So, that was the first and the second was to build an emotional resonance with the consumers. Our target consumers are a typical Indian family that is progressive, that’s modern and looks for products that are not just durable and long lasting, but come with relevant features that enrich their day to day lives. And these set of films show such life situations that the consumers can relate to with respect to the usage of their furniture. These are the two objectives that we started off the campaign with.

How did this idea of humanizing furniture first come about?

It has an interesting story behind it. We were having a brainstorming session with the agency on the brief itself. The brief was how do we make our demo films which are showing the features of our products more relatable, more engaging and add a layer of story. So basis our research and insights, we always knew that the furniture purchase is done keeping in mind the context of the family needs and comfort. Secondly, all important life moments, memories happen around furniture. Families interact together, they grow closer when they share furniture.

For example, the families eat together at the dining table. Kids play with their grandparents sitting on the sofa. The wardrobe is used to store all sorts of things and not just clothes.

So, furniture is a focal point of interaction among families and getting the families closer. From there emerged the thought that the piece of furniture is not simply part of our homes, it is part of our family. Now this gave us a crux of the idea that why don't we show the furniture like it is an actual member of the family and participating in discussions and narrating some life stories. That’s how the idea came about.

Which agency has conceptualised this campaign and what are the expectations out of this campaign?

Pari Studios has conceptualised and produced this campaign. The expectation from the campaign is that people are able to relate to Godrej Interio as a brand which has a certain connect with the way the Modern Indian Family is.

Secondly, we want to come across as a brand which has well-designed, aesthetically pleasing furniture and comes with relevant features that are important to life context. So, in the context of the life that happens as it does with Modern Indian Family, we want people to be able to relate to that, to be able to relate to that situation and see how the furniture can add value to their lives. So, one is to build that emotional resonance with Godrej Interio as a brand that understands Indian consumers like nobody else.

And second, to be able to give consumers a relatable life situation with the furniture and how the furniture and its features can add value to their lives. Those are the expectations that we have from this campaign.

How is Godrej Interio leveraging technology to promote the campaign?

This campaign is not like a regular ad campaign. It has five videos. It is essentially what we call as long form content, with each video of about minute-long duration. Our approach has been to use two large social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram – to promote this content. So, we have deployed a three pronged strategy with this.

The first is to use the native targeting capabilities of both Facebook and Instagram to finally target cohorts of users on this campaign and engage with them with this kind of content. So, that uses the targeting capabilities of the two platforms very effectively. Second, we have curated a set of influencers that align with our brand values to create content which amplifies the message.

We wanted the message that furniture is a member of the family and comes to life through this set of influences. Therefore, they created content around this concept. This is used to amplify the message.

And third, we then needed this content with a host of community pages and used retargeting capabilities of both Facebook and Instagram to take the audience that engaged with our influencer content previously, and then target them with our videos to be able to engage with them. So, this is helping us with fine tuning our reach and engagement goals and amplifying the message for ‘Welcome to Family’.

What kind of traction have you received on this campaign?

The traction has been quite good. We are already live with these five videos and both the influencer set of videos as well as these videos are getting a lot of social media attention and engagement. In fact, these are some of the highest performing videos on our social handles currently.

More importantly, we are seeing a very high rate of click throughs. So, we’ve also used these videos to be able to lead people to our website and we are seeing very high percentages of click through rates where people are looking at the video and then are becoming interested enough to go to the website and build intent to go through the product listing, to go through the product imagery. And these are typically going to be people who are in the purchase cycle.

Thus, in a way we’ve moved a certain people from the middle funnel of intent and consideration to the bottom funnel of actually trying to evaluate purchase itself. So, in that sense it has performed very well for us.

What are the other marketing activities that Godrej Interio has undertaken this year?

We started the year with what a consumer offer, called the Summer Carnival, and this was our quarter one offer. This was typically run as a digital campaign on both YouTube and OTT platforms across the country, supported by print media as well. We finally targeted a set of 60+ cities using YouTube targeting capabilities as well as OTT targeting capabilities to focus this campaign on cities where we want to prioritise our sale, where our channel partners are present so that we get the most out of this campaign.

This was an offer campaign that we ran in Q1, typically May and June. We also did BTL campaigns across more than 500+ offline stores that we have, the stores as well as dealer networks during this period. This included things like in-store merchandising, society, activation holdings, etc.

We have amped up our social media again in Q1 with very new content formats. We have engaged with influencers to keep the engagement level high on our social media campaign. I would also like to mention we have an online blog called Godrej Interior Inspire.

This blog is a brand agnostic content platform that we’ve created and in quarter one we’ve got really good traction on this blog. This puts up relevant articles on all things related to furniture, handy guides on home decor, tips for choosing furniture, tips on home decor, festive decor, etc. So, that’s one platform that we’ve seen a lot of traction which is happening in quarter one because we’ve promoted it on social media and we got influencers to promote it as well. That’s the set of marketing activities that we’ve conducted in quarter one.

How has the first half of 2023 been for Godrej Interio and what are the expansion plans and future vision?

The first quarter has been quite good for us. We’ve clocked an overall growth of about 15% to 20% across our categories. We are on track to expanding our e-commerce footprint to over 5,000+ pincodes this year to provide more accessibility to consumers. We are also expanding our offline presence to around 100 outlets this year in Tier 1, 2 and 3 towns. Our consumer offer has got a great response from consumers. So, we’ve seen an increase in walk-ins in this quarter to some of our stores.

In as far as the marketing mix is concerned, I think increasingly our spends have been premediated towards the digital space. We are seeing increasing traction out there through precise geotargeting and looking at market and affinity powers. We are significantly improving our ROI every quarter on some of our marketing spends.

In terms of customer experience, I think focusing on digital technology and strengthening our online presence is going to be very pivotal for companies like ours. So, we’ve started our journey and our website has become a pivotal point for people discovering the brand online. And not just that, we are looking at expanding the scope of the website by including blogs, by including rich content in our product listing pages.

Thus, improving the quality of customer experience that the consumers get on the digital space has been a big focus for us and that has continued for us in Q1 with some of the initiatives.