How Mother’s Recipe is converting love into a successful marketing strategy

Mother’s Recipe is redefining the language of love through food and is extending its relevance to the rising wave of aspirational millennials. Its new proposition & tagline - ‘Taste the Love’ - aims to break stereotypes and celebrate womanhood not just on a particular day, but throughout. Mother’s Recipe has come up with this unique campaign for women where the brand will enable and encourage women to follow their passion. The product offering from the brand will help women to save substantial time for themselves in a day and in turn, help them to pursue things which they love.

Speaking about the campaign, Sanjana Desai, Chief Strategy Officer, Mother’s Recipe, said, “In the effort to look after the entire family, the ‘I’ is often lost, but as individuality is rising and the guilt slipping away, as a brand we should pave the way for her. So, with this campaign, our objective is to highlight and address a larger challenge faced today. Mother’s Recipe strongly believes in offering lifestyle solutions, making a meaningful difference to the lives of their consumers. With our products, we want to enable our consumers in the kitchen, enrich them and not replace them. By helping them save time in the kitchen so that they could spare some time to do what they love.”

She further added, “It is not about celebrating one particular day, hence we deliberately stayed away from launching the campaign on Women’s Day. It is about looking beyond a specific day, aiming to bring about a change every day of the year.”

The brand plans to amplify this campaign further through various unique online and offline engagements and radio presence.

Elaborating on the campaign thought, Virendra Saini, Executive Director, Triton Communications, the agency behind the campaign, said, “Women in today's scenario have just forgotten to spare some free time for themselves to follow their hobbies. They have restricted themselves to a set framework in which they operate in a monotonous manner. With this campaign we really wanted women to realise their potential and take time to fulfill whatever they love doing. The idea is not to eliminate or compromise on the existing responsibilities, but enrich and empower by gifting them some valuable time for themselves; hence ‘#Giftoftime’.”

The campaign is surely expected to challenge certain existing norms and stereotypes, providing some food for thought for women to realise their dreams and celebrate themselves more often.

Metrics for Gift of Time

The campaign has been conceptualised by Sanjana Desai and Mothers’ Recipe team along with the creative agency Triton Communications and is live on multiple digital platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The campaign has garnered exceptional response so far from the target groups with 1.8 million Facebook views and 11.7 k-plus engagements. On YouTube, it has received 62k views so far.

In conversation with Adgully, Sanjana Desai, Chief Strategy Officer, Mother’s Recipe, sheds further light on the campaign strategy, the brand journey, marketing strategy and more.

Tell us about the brand journey of Mother’s Recipe.
Discovering the taste of tradition has been a proposition that Mother’s Recipe has been known for, especially for its pickles. We’ve expanded our category beyond pickles to include products with convenient packaging offerings for the consumer at home, at work or on the go. We have already garnered a substantial market share in the country for our ginger-garlic paste. We have a range of ready to cook spice mixes. We also have a range of papads. In the past one year, we have launched our new proposition – ‘Taste the Love’. When it comes to processed food, a lot of people think that because it is packaged it must have preservatives, but all our products are completely natural and we don’t use any preservatives or added colours or chemicals like MSG in our products.

In the last few months you have launched two new campaigns – ‘Taste the Love’ and ‘Gift of Time’. What is the thought behind the campaigns and the brand positioning in the market?
The brand positioning is clear in ‘Taste the Love’. The ‘Gift of Time’ campaign is an extension of the ‘Taste the Love’ proposition. We are speaking to the consumer who doesn’t cook either due to lack of skill or lack of time. We want to communicate that as a brand Mother’s Recipe is there for them. Mother’s love is synonymous with our brand. We really want to epitomise her love and that’s a challenge in itself. We know everybody’s mother cooks the best, but we will aim to get close. We are not here to replace mother’s cooking, but to evoke the same emotion when you open a pack of Mother’s Recipe. We are taking the directive of Mother’s Love ahead and we wanted to encapsulate that love in our product and communication. We are a big supporter of ‘maa ke haath ka khaana’.

What has the reaction been to the campaign?
#GiftOfTime was something that we emotionally believed in that jumped out of a consumer emotion that I had personally observed in Kolkata. I was part of this team speaking to the women of the house. We were asking her various questions and when we asked her what her hobby was, she actually froze for a second and then got emotional because she hadn’t thought about herself in a really long time. That emotion really struck a chord with me. I really started thinking about all the women who take care of their entire families, putting them first. Whether these women are working or managing the house, they don’t have enough time for themselves. That is the emotional chord I really want to touch with this campaign. The campaign has been received well and has worked for us. People have reached out to us with gratitude, saying that they will help out more at home. While that was not what we were communicating, it is nice to see the positive response, especially from men who do recognise this and want to help out at home.

What are the marketing touchpoints for the two campaigns?
We began Gift of Time a few weeks back. The campaign went live on social media, OTT platforms and we made use of mobile marketing.

When did you launch your e-commerce website?
We began our e-commerce site 2-3 years back and all our products are listed on the site, which is shop.mothersrecipe.com. The only thing we don’t sell are our glass bottles, because unfortunately the courier service does not deliver it.

What are the markets where Mother’s Recipe has the strongest presence?
Mother’s Recipe is a national brand. We are present in every region of the country. We are seeing a really strong growth in the North and the South, which is Delhi and Bangalore. That could be for several reasons apart from market demand. Overall, Mother’s Recipe is spread quite well across the regions of the country. We are also present abroad in 42 countries. In those markets, we are seeing growth in the Middle East, the US and Australia.

This growth is being led by your pickle brand?
While our pickles are still growing steadily for us, our other categories are growing a lot faster, especially our Ginger-Garlic paste and our ready-to-cook categories.

What is your marketing strategy for the year 2019?
We are looking at the Cricket World Cup this year. Elections are already upon us, but you will see something from us during the World Cup this year. Other than that, we really just want to take the Taste of Love proposition forward. We really want to amplify our positioning and support our sales plan. We are amping up our distribution and availability. We really need our marketing to support our visibility in lower Tier towns this year.

How are you looking at the digital platform to grow your business?
Digital has played a big role for us in the last 3 years and it is going to continue to do so. Every year we increase our spends online and every year there are a lot of new things you can do. We are using OTT platforms like Hotstar and Voot for our campaigns, especially #GiftOfTime, apart from social media. In app advertising is also a part of our marketing mix. Digital is so dynamic that new opportunities keep coming and the accuracy with which you can target your TG is phenomenal, so that is something we will continue using and keep increasing our spends on.

E-commerce has done wonders for our brand and helped us reach out to consumers when they want us. Bigbasket is a big supporter of ours. We do constant marketing initiatives with them, whether its offers or new products.