I think our biggest competition is the offline market: Vineet Sehgal, CMO, Quikr

Sehgal, who has over 19 years of experience in marketing and business strategy across diverse industries, speaks to BestMediaInfo about the classifieds industry, their biggest competitors and how technology has been a game changer

Roshni Nair | Mumbai | June 10, 2016

Vineet Sehgal

How difficult is the market of classifieds?

Classifieds have always existed in the market. Now it is a question of online v/s offline. Like a lot of things that have gone online or digital, the market is huge. Classifieds fundamentally offer the consumers a great platform to essentially connect with other consumers or businesses in a very efficient manner. So actually we are seeing a huge growth in the market and I don't think there are any challenges in terms of market beat. The kind of categories that we are seeing consumers are adopting, classically you would think people will post houses on rent or cars or bikes or furniture but today on our platform we have close to 180-plus categories, which we officially classify. There are many more. The second thing that digital is doing is that it is expanding the market from the reach perspective. So earlier if you wanted to reach out to something you would typically have to depend on newspapers now with digital we cover 1000+ cities. Therefore, there is expansion both in terms of reach and expansion.

Who do you consider your biggest competitor in this market?

I think our biggest competition is the offline market. I think that is true for any e-commerce company or digital company. If you ask them the first thing they will say is that this market is so nascent, so early in the stage of growth that to try and play the market share game will be limiting yourself. Second is the fact that you need competition for growth. One company cannot grow the market. If you look at classifieds, you compete with everybody. You compete with Times of India, you compete with Dainik Bhaskar, you compete with Facebook and then there are the other who are in the market like OLX, 99 acres, MagicBricks. Ultimately, it is not about competition as much as it is about what are you doing to grow the market.

Quikr ads have always been quirky and humorous. Is this a conscious decision?

I think Quikr has always been a quirky brand and that's been the DNA of Quikr. When we start making an ad we don't start by saying we want to make it humorous. We start off by thinking what is the core proposition we are talking about? Who is our target group and fundamentally what is our DNA as a brand and when you put that together, there is a certain brand personality and brand image that you want to play with. So in that sense we believe that humour or any kind of connect with the consumer always is a much stronger appeal to the consumers. What we look at is a storytelling approach and that is critical.

What do you think about OLX's ads?

I like their ads, I think they are very good. What we have also observed is whenever competition advertises and if their messaging is good, the market grows and we also benefit. In fact one of the unique features of the classifieds market is if the consumer wants to sell a car, he or she is not going to put an ad on only one platform but everywhere else. But whereas if you are thirsty and you want to buy a Coke or a Pepsi, you will choose one at that moment, so it is a zero sum game. But with classifieds you can technically put an ad on five portals. So therefore the sum total of all the ads put together is not 100% of the pie, the pie can be technically 300-400%.

How do you ensure differentiation in ad communication?

Quikr's core philosophy is that we want to differentiate ourselves by solving consumers' genuine problems. We should be able to solve the problems of the consumers and remove the barriers of adoption of online classifieds in the market. Only then the consumers will come back. If you look at the last two to three years, we have been the pioneers in a lot of new things. We were the first ones to start the missed calls service. We also came up with MSP calculator for estimating the value of the car you want to sell. We came up with Quikr NXT, which was a chat platform, we also came up with street vision for Quikr Homes. If you see, each of these is solving one or two of the specific pain points of consumers and that is the core difference. Of course, we then weave it into an interesting story from a communication perspective. But the product, the feature is the king.

Earlier classifieds were just restricted to yellow pages. How has the segment evolved?

Digital is influencing every part of life. Look at every part of the eco-system in the country, from railway ticketing to buy things online to grocery shopping, everything that makes the consumer's life easier they will adopt. With Yellow pages, the process of collating would take a lot of time and the process of updating was also difficult. Now everything is at the fingertip. If there is some shopkeeper in Saharanpur who wants to list, all he has to do is log onto the Quikr site, upload an ad and he is out there. It is constantly updating, it is constantly refreshing, it is as small as your phone and not bulky and most critically from the consumer's perspective you can discover it anytime from anywhere. It is a classic case of technology disrupting an industry.

Where do you place yourselves alongside competitors like Sulekha, OLX and others?

It is not a market share game. I think all of them are very respectable competitors who are helping to grow the market. They are creating awareness, consumers are discovering it. I think in this kind of market, you will win if you are able to grow by solving the pain points of the consumers or the business community and that has been our endeavour.

Are rural India and small towns opting for such e-commerce services?

A lot of them are. One of the differences between classifieds vis-à-vis the pure play e-commerce is the fact that we are not selling a product. Independent of which city people live in or what strata of society people are from, there are certain needs in terms of aspirations. If consumers find a platform which gives that, they will adopt it. What remains different is the internet penetration, the ease of comfort and penetration of smart phones. But just like e-commerce is growing, consumers are increasing in rural India and small towns.

What is the kind of download divide between the urban and the rural population?

It is predominantly still urban; 80-90% is still urban.

How differently the process of marketing and advertising works for your different verticals?

It is like in any other category today. It is similar to how you would market soap differently from tea. For us, these are different categories, these are industry segments. So you have to first figure out what is the target group is, where the target group is, what is the core proposition, how does the target group behave, what is their lifestyle, what is their media viewing habits, where can we discover them more. For example, for Quikr Cars, our target group includes people who are relatively well-off, digitally savvy and more educated. So classically we would do a lot of marketing on television, on digital media, in newspapers and on the other hand we have something called Quikr Jobs which is a completely different market. There will probably be no TV ads or digital ads for that. For Quikr Jobs we will go to the smaller towns and advertise at bus stops and railway stations. So it is a completely different audience, different mind-set and so the marketing channel mix and the metrics have to be completely different.

You have worked with telecommunication industry and FMCG industry before. How different is working for the classifieds industry?

A lot of things are different and a lot of things are similar. What is different is the speed. We are all in the middle of an internet revolution which is disrupting a lot of things, so there are a lot of unknowns. The changes in the FMCG industry, for example, are very incremental but here you are virtually creating newer segments, categories, tools and product features. So that is a big difference. Speed and disruption is of essence and how you tackle problems and get technology to solve them is a big challenge. Where it is similar is that the core fundamentals of marketing don't change.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com