“Home appliances, tech products, home & interior to see traction this festive season”

With first half of the year over, the focus of brands and agencies has now turned towards the festive season this year. Though the peak festive period of Dussehra-Durga Puja-Diwali is a couple of months away, preparations are already afoot to woo consumers with various promotional strategies.

Over the years, the festive season has expanded – from the traditional period of Dussehra-Durga Puja-Diwali, it has moved forward to August, coinciding with the Independence Day marketing frenzy, followed by Raksha Bandhan. This then moves forward to cover the entire Onam period – though traditionally Kerala’s biggest festival, Onam today has assumed a more pan-India significance.

The festive season now doesn’t end with Diwali, but we have started seeing marketers beginning to bring in the mostly Western festive concepts of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In January, the traditionally harvest-based festivals of Lohri, Pongal, Makar Sankranti, and Magh Bihu are also being tapped as occasions for festive shopping, albeit on a smaller scale. Republic Day has also turned into a major sale occasion. These apart, Holi and Poila Boishakh/ Rongali Bihu, also see spurt in shopping in regional markets, more specifically West Bengal and Assam.

On top of it all, e-commerce platforms keep the sale season alive all round the year with some kind of offer or the other.

While the two years of Covid disruptions did dampen the festive spirit in the market, with the IPL tournament being held during the festive seasons in 2020 and 2021, saw brand spends on a high during this period, even though consumers mostly stayed away from offline retail outlets.

Adgully’s special column, FESTIVE MOOD, seeks to give a holistic insight into ad spends, marketing strategies, consumer sentiments, promotional and communication plans, and more, around the festive season in India.

In conversation with Adgully, Tanya Swetta, CEO & Founder of Id8, speaks at length about the projections on advertiser spends for the festive season this year, categories that are expected to see accelerated growth, and much more.

What are your projections on advertiser spends during the festive season in 2022? How buoyant is the consumer sentiment compared to the pre-Covid times (2019) as well as the two years of the pandemic (2020 and 2021)? What are the factors spurring this positive sentiment?

Firstly, the entire atmosphere is very positive and the economy is doing extremely well. Inflation is coming down and stock exchange is high. In addition, all restrictions have been lifted from the Covid pandemic. Therefore, now people are able to step out and there is a positive buoyant mood amongst people across the nation. So, it’s also leading to higher consumer spends, definitely more positive consumer spends. We are seeing this trend across all our brands in our planning for the coming quarters. There is tremendous impetus towards doing offline and online events and an increase of budgets in the digital market spends as well as a overall spends towards consumer engagement. So, all in all it looks buoyant and very good as opposed to the years of 2020 and 2021.

Which categories are expected to witness greater traction in the upcoming festive season and why?

The categories that I consider will be doing extremely well in this festive season would definitely be home appliances, technology products and anything related to home & interior, considering the real estate market has bounced back and we see a huge upswing in terms of first home buyers and people looking to grow their wealth by investing in real estate. Here, it again seems to be like the big category. Another big category would be things like gifting items that fall under the food category and non-food category.

Online or offline/ retail – which do you see having a greater share of festive season buying?

Going by live data we are monitoring across various sectors, this time there are larger spends on offline and retail. However, we believe that companies are still being cautious on attributing large spends towards offline. Digital spends continue to grow with so many D2C brands. Digital also is a much better and more attractive entry price point when it comes to digital advertising. Both will see an upswing, however digital spending seems to be on the heavier side.