Piramal plans to deepen penetration into Tier 3 & rural markets: Nitish Bajaj

Piramal Pharma’s Consumer Products Division has seen a steep growth in demand during the pandemic period. To tap into the digitisation economy, Piramal has strengthened the presence of its brands presence on e-commerce marketplaces. The company recently launched its D2C website to make its brands available to consumers directly.

Piramal has also fortified its efforts take its legacy baby care brand, Little’s, to wider markets across the country and has roped in star couple, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor as brand ambassadors for Little’s.

In conversation with Adgully, Nitish Bajaj, CEO, Consumer Products Division, Piramal Enterprises Ltd, speaks about how the company has become a leading OTC player, and is also strategising to establish channel marketing in the burgeoning geographies across the country.

Being an OTC brand, what has been your overall marketing strategy across all brands? It is a challenge to promote OTC brands when you do not have the backing of doctors. How have you managed that and ensured that your brand is top of mind?

Piramal Consumer Products Division has a rich and long history, and is among the leading players in India in the self-care space, with established brands in the Indian consumer healthcare market. Our marquee brands include Little’s, Lacto Calamine, i-know, Polycrol, Tetmosol, I-Pill, Tetmosol across key OTC categories such as Baby Care, Beauty, Women intimate care, Gastro-Intestinal, Pain Management Vitamins and supplements.

We have a wide commercial presence across India, all major towns, giving the company chemist coverage better than most OTC players.

We have made concerted efforts to ensure quality products are accessible to consumers at affordable prices. This approach has helped us garner the enviable leadership position that we enjoy. As a leading OTC player, we have relied on developing a strong channel marketing strategy and combined it with creative advertising campaigns that resonate with the audience and make us the brand of choice across product categories.

Staying true to this approach, we have roped in celebrity endorsers for different brands that can speak authentically on the product and resonate with our intended customers.

Little’s brand has been present in the market for over 40 years. How has the brand journey been in the baby care category as there are many unorganised players as well as some well-established brands in this competitive market?

We take great pride in being the custodian of this legacy brand. It has been a brand of choice for key markets in the country and we felt it was the right moment to double down our efforts and bring the brand to wider markets across the country and also go deeper into the heart of Bharat.

There is intense competition from the organised and unorganised sector, but our promise of quality and integrity serves to command a high level of loyalty from our customers who are also our advocates for new customers each year.

You have also roped in Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor to promote the Little’s brand. How has it helped the brand and why did you choose Saif and Kareena for the same?

Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan are not only one of the most recognised and admired faces in their own right, but are also well appreciated new parents. Taking them as brand ambassadors felt like an authentic decision as they have an empathetic perspective on the lives of young parents and the travails of parenting. The campaign itself lands with their individual authentic voice and has immediate resonance and evokes the right emotions.

The campaign has been very successful as it raised brand awareness in geographies where it has not been a dominant player in the past. The success of the campaign has vindicated our decision of associating with the star couple.

The pandemic must have also impacted your business. At the same time the pandemic has also helped brands to explore new channels to engage with customers. How have you leveraged omni channels to reach the last mile? Does e-commerce contribute significantly to your business?

On the contrary, Piramal Consumer Product Division saw a steep growth in demand, which prompted us to invest our efforts in the creation of new product lines and product extensions.

The well established channel network and the fact that a large part of our distribution is through the chemists and drug stores (essential during the pandemic), we did not see any disruption in our sales. However, not to miss on the digitisation economy we have made all our products available to our customers through the digital channel in the form of our presence on e-commerce marketplaces. We are increasingly building our strengths in this direction, however, we are early in that life cycle.

What will be your growth strategy for the next 3 years? How do you plan to tap the smaller towns which are growing and also showing market potential to grow?

Our strategy is to proliferate our trusted and esteemed brand in the market and establish channel marketing in the burgeoning geographies across the country. We have an established network of distributors and entrenched ourselves in the retail market in large parts of the market, our intention is to deepen our penetration into the Tier 3 and rural markets that are growing in their aspirations for our premium products offerings. Our approach will be to build on the power of our legacy brands and project their halo on our new offerings. Together with careful choice of celebrity endorsements that strike the right chord with the masses is a winning combination.