MobiKwik to spend Rs. 100 crore on its new Brand Campaign

MobiKwik, India’s leading mobile wallet company with over 17 million users and more than 50,000 merchants, today announced that it plans to spend Rs. 100 crore this year on its 360-degree multi-media brand campaign. The campaign will include exposure across television, out of home, radio and digital mediums, with the first leg kicking off in May 2015. With the advertising campaign, the company aims to further catalyze the booming market for wallet services that currently stands at around 35 million users, and gain a larger share of the pie.

MobiKwik has awarded its creative duties to Happy Creative Services and its media duties to XPosure mass media. Havas will be leading the OOH campaign for the brand. The company has put up almost 1000 OOH and ambient media units across the top 6 cities in India, which include Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. The first campaign will run for duration of 3 months, followed by another campaign that will be launched during the festive season. For the first campaign, the brand’s TV campaign will follow close on the heels of its radio and OOH campaigns.

MobiKwik is already the leading player in the mobile wallet space in the country and aims to disrupt the payments space further in 2015 by opening up the digital payments space for the millions that do not have access to banking services. The company plans to do this by creating an offline retail network of more than 100,000 merchants across India that will serve both as points for cash loading into the wallet and for wallet payments acceptance. MobiKwik has also applied for a Payments Bank license in February 2015. With a potential Payments Bank license, MobiKwik aims to leverage the power of mobile technology to make financial services accessible to people that the existing banking networks have been unable to reach.

A recent example of MobiKwik’s offline strategy is their tie-up with Café Coffee Day, where customers can now pay for their coffee and snack across all CCD outlets via their MobiKwik wallet. The company had also recently appointed Saurabh Srivastava as Chief Marketing Officer. Saurabh was previously VP – Marketing & Product Strategy at ixigo.com and has extensive experience in media, marketing, retail and branding. The company aims to double its marketing team from 20 to 40 people this year. 

Saurabh Srivastava, CMO, MobiKwik said, “Access to digital payments and the quality of payment experience are the two big consumer problems that we at MobiKwik are addressing through our mobile wallet. The age of standing in queues is over. With the massive penetration of mobile internet and smartphones in the country, we aim to make MobiKwik wallet a ubiquitous way to transact on the go, cutting across geographies and consumer cross sections.”

“With our brand campaign, we aim to make MobiKwik a household name across the country and ensure many more consumer interactions with the brand. The campaign also aims to fuel the adoption of mobile wallet as the preferred mode of payment amongst a host of new customers who are as yet unaware of its benefits. With this campaign, we are confident of increasing our user base from 17 Million to 30 Million in the next 3 months and achieve a user base of 100 Million users by the end of the year”, Saurabh added.

Kartik Iyer, CEO & Co-founder, Happy Creative Services Pvt. Ltd. added, "We are extremely proud to have been chosen to partner with MobiKwik to take their brand forward. There are many brands who operate in the payment space but yet don't operate like a true wallet. MobiKwik is actually the one true player in the digital payments space. In a scenario where the country is quickly changing its behaviour due to tech interventions at various touch points, it is an exciting time for a brand like MobiKwik. We see immense possibility of the brand to rise as a true leader in the space. This is just a starting point."

MobiKwik has recently raised close to $25 million in a Series B round from Tree Line Asia, Cisco Investments, American Express and existing investor, Sequoia Capital. The company plans to raise another $100 million in the latter half of 2015.