The coming of age of brand Youva

Youva, the domestic stationery brand from the house of Navneet Education, has undergone a brand refresh, including a new logo and tagline – ‘Think. Create’. The brand roped in leading design agency DY Works for the rebranding exercise.

The Navneet brand has been around for 60 years since 1969 and has been associated with academic publications. Navneet launched their stationery business in 1995, which began with long books and notebooks and over the course of 20 years has expanded to drawing books, practical books, case bound books, scrap/ project books, craft papers, paper rolls. While the non-paper segment comprises pencils, erasers, sharpeners, geometry boxes, rulers, crayons, oil pastels, plastic crayons, synthetic and white glue.

In 2016, Navneet decided to branch out their domestic stationery business under the brand name Youva to create a brand identity that was more in tune with their youth audience. The Youva brand reaches out to three key audience segments – kids in the age group of 13 years and below who primarily buy crayons, oil pastels and colour pencils. These kids are primarily influencers and not purchasers, so the secondary target group is young parents. The last target group is youth in the 13-23 age group, who are still completing their education in college or high school. Navneet primarily addresses these audiences via digital and TV platforms.

Abhijit Sanyal, who has recently taken over the role of Chief Strategy Officer of brand Youva, speaks to Adgully about their marketing strategy and transformation of Youva as its own brand in three short years. Edited excerpts:

Inception of Brand Youva

Navneet Education sold guidebooks to help students pass exams and had acquired a serious reputation. Brand Youva was created to reflect a personality which was more oriented towards the youth and their creativity. The Youva rebranding brings a synergy between our non-paper range and paper range, where the products look more harmonised under the new brand.

In the last 3 years, the Youva brand and Navneet brand were juxtaposed. Our audiences knew that Youva was endorsed by Navneet as a parent brand. Now we believe, Youva has its own cache and niche in the consumers’ mind and, therefore, it has come to its own as a standalone entity.

Marketing Strategy

Through the Youva brand we wanted to reach out to the youth who were smart and wanted to be associated as a brand used by the ‘cool kids’. We brought in Prithvi Shaw as the brand ambassador for a year to represent the brand in TVC campaigns. Apart from TV and digital, we also do a lot of BTL activity at the ground level to increase visibility.

Prithvi Shaw was a perfect fit for our brand because he was 19 years old, in school and had joined the Indian Cricket Team. He was the epitome of our values of youth, aspiration, success and achievement. He has since had an injury due to which we have disassociated ourselves. Our new brand campaign is centered on the nucleus of the brand.

Millennials are our core target group. Due to the explosion of the Internet people have access to the latest goings on in the world. Most of the youth today want to stand out from the crowd and are looking at value added products with design innovations, technical innovations and product innovations that stand out.

We launched a Denim product last year with a cover that had a pocket attached to it, which was a huge hit.

Our digital activity has seen explosive growth over the last three years and we have seen an increase of people following us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We have generated 10 million+ impressions, engagements, and views across digital platforms.

We do three types of digital marketing. One is occasion-specific like on Friendship Day, Teacher’s Day, and Raksha Bandhan, etc. The second is theme advertising. Once our main TVC campaign comes along, we will create engagements around the tagline – ‘Think. Create’ – to engage audiences. The third thing is new product announcements which happen from time to time.

Growth of the brand

There are different market segments for the stationery brand. There is the paper stationery market, non-paper stationery and paints market, etc., so it is difficult to share generalised growth numbers. Over the last five years the market has been growing in single digits while we have been growing at double digits.

Our sales are well distributed across Tier 2 to 3. In terms of digital connect, it is more skewed to Tier 1, but the amount of smartphone usage in Tier 2 towns is unbelievable and students from those towns are even more engaged. The net usage is growing rapidly across the country.

Marketing
@adgully

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