Weikfield will invest about 30% of the overall media budget on Digital: DS Sachdeva

Since 1956, Weikfield has been creating a world of wholesome and delicious products, bringing the goodness of global cuisine to homes and delighting the taste buds of millions all over. From iconic products like custard powder, cornflour and baking powder, the company is now a leading brand for pasta sauces, green tea and mushrooms. 

With India discovering or re-discovering its love for cooking during the lockdowns, Weikfield has become a favoured cooking companion to scores of Indians. Amid the pandemic situation last year, Weikfield underwent a brand repositioning and refresh with a promise of ‘Giving life to life’s little celebrations’. 

In conversation with Adgully, DS Sachdeva, CEO, Weikfield Foods, speaks about how the brand has strategised to increase its share of the consumers mind, introduced new product categories and strengthened its media strategy, with increasing focus on digital. 

How has the lockdown impacted the availability of your products, consumer mindshare, and positioning of your brands?

The lockdowns have impacted our product availability significantly. The big impact of the pandemic has been on the disruption of supply chain, with both inbound as well as outbound logistics having been impacted. The micro-lockdowns have meant that our teams were unable to take orders or service the orders since the market opening hours had been curtailed.

However, one silver lining of the pandemic is that consumer mindshare for the brand has been positively impacted. With the onset of the lockdown last year, a lot of consumers took to cooking and with our wide portfolio of products, Weikfield become a kitchen companion for them – from baking to pasta to desserts to Chinese dishes. We significantly scaled-up our brand investment as well at the same time, predominantly through digital media and recently through TV which helped the brand to remain salient. 

What is the media strategy that you are looking at to maintain top of mind share?

We are extremely focussed as far as our media investments are concerned. Over the last 12 months Digital has been the key media vehicle for us – and we will invest about 30% of the overall media budget on Digital. Starting 2021, we went live with our first TV media campaign and about 40% of our media monies will be invested on TV. Apart from that, we are investing significantly at the point of sale and shopper activation. 

How is your role as CEO undergoing a major transformation amid the pandemic and an increasingly digital-first focus?
This pandemic has been once in a century event, which will have far reaching impact driven by significant changes in consumer behaviour. The 1^st wave, now the 2^nd one and a possible 3^rd – the constant uncertainty is likely to keep consumers on their toes for a while. There has not been any such disrupting event in the lifetime of many of our potential consumers.

So, the biggest role as a CEO that I am performing today, in words of McKinsey, is to serve as the chief calibrator – deciding the extent and degree of change needed in company’s response to the disaster. In the last one year, we have performed a few tasks which previously were unthinkable internally. Despite the pandemic hitting and disrupting our supply chain severely in the beginning of pandemic, we went ahead and unveiled our new branding. We doubled our e-commerce operation with increase in the digital media investments. Also, we are investing significantly in digitising parts of our business model which have predominantly been legacy system driven. Today, we are trying to think bigger and faster and stretch for more – and hopefully the very fabric of our company itself will change by the time this pandemic ends. 

In an omnichannel world, how has the content role of CEOs been intensified?

We are a food company and content plays a very important role in activating our brands. In fact, a major chunk of our digital investment is made towards content around interesting recipe videos, method of preparation videos, influencer marketing, etc. However, given that Weikfield hasn’t been very heavy on media investment in the past, we are very early days in that journey. So, we are taking a calibrated approach – trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. As the CEO, my role is to set the direction, evaluate the strategy, review and advise course correction required if any and there are specialists who take care of the execution. However, I need to keep myself abreast of the latest developments and with everchanging landscape, that’s definitely intensified the challenge. Personally, I believe that at the end of the day it’s about fundamentals – a deep understanding of one’s TG. As long as that’s in place, everything else becomes manageable. 

What are the new ideas for creating effective branding in a volatile world?

It’s not new news that consumer today are warming up towards purpose driven brands, and sooner or later brands need to start taking stance. In Simon Sineks’ words – brands need to find their WHYs and start with the same. It’s not going to be an easy switchover. But brands like Nike, which have always stood for a purpose, have reaped enormous long-term success.

The other big change that I see is the role of design and aesthetics in the brand definition. I often find consumers are picking up brands which appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities and I believe that this can become a significant brand differentiator and help in at least in getting a trial. Typically, in my experience, design has been an outcome of the brand definition. However, it needs to become an integral part of the brand definition process itself. 

Given the constant flux in consumer behaviour, especially in pandemic times, what is your go-to market strategy to understand your customers’ unique wants and needs?

With the current pandemic, face-to-face interactions for consumer insighting have stopped and hence, we had to tweak our methods to suit the need of the hour. For example, we have moved to complete online mode for our brand tracking study. Last year, we undertook a communication assessment study which was conducted over Zoom on pilot basis. And as it worked well, we are continuing to use the same. Online listening, which was not a significant part of our process, will become a major channel for insighting going forward. As we speak, we are also working on creation of online consumer panel to aid our consumer insighting process. 

(Edited and additional inputs by Shanta Saikia.)