CenturyPly banks on TV and digital to increase consumer base

Digital and TV are the focus areas for Century Plyboards, an Indian manufacturer, seller and exporter of plywood and veneer, which has grown 20-25% y-o-y in the last five years in its door segment and 7-8% in its plywood segment.

The brand invests 3-4% of its total turnover on ATL marketing, of which 60-70% goes to TV, 20-25% is allocated to digital and the remaining is for radio. The brand’s TG is males in the age group of 30-40 years.

Navarun Sen

Navarun Sen, President, Panel Division, CenturyPly, said, “We use digital medium to be able to use the micro segmentation that targets individual customers depending on their search. The segmentation would further give us the opportunity to remarket them. For targeted delivery of our communication, we are much dependent on digital.”

According to Sen, digital gives an opportunity to remarket to consumers who are surfing for a product while TV targets new consumers and reaches to the rural and urban TG.

Putting its focus online, the brand has increased its digital marketing spends to 20-25% of its ad budget, up from 3-4% in previous years.

Capturing a 5.5% share in the Rs 25,000-crore ply industry, CenturyPly’s marketing plan for the remaining quarters would be to augment its ‘SabSaheMastRahe’ campaign.

“There are two more such campaigns in the pipeline, which will again be informing consumers about good quality branded ply. But the tonality and humour will vary,” Sen said.

The brand is strategising on new marketing communication to win over consumers. “Our upgraded communication will come out in the next five months, which is when I would talk about it,” he said.

Lodestar UM handles media buying and planning for the brand. Plan B handles its creatives and its campaigns.

Every year, the brand runs a campaign titled #CenturyHeroes around Durga Puja in West Bengal. “Our campaign ‘Century Heroes’ has successfully turned into a property now. It gives recognition to unrecognised heroes who work hard to make the holy occasion happening and, of course, campaigning on such days gives us huge visibility,” he said.

Apart from the TVC, the brand rides on distribution strategy, local-level visibility, and ground-level influencer marketing for the rural market. Brand influencer marketing is done through contractors, carpenters, distributors, architects, etc.

Sanjay Agarwal

Speaking about the focus areas for the remaining quarters, Sanjay Agarwal, MD, CenturyPly, said, “Our current three major focus lines are value-added sale increase, increase in distribution and the facility in Gabon for the sourcing of face veneer.”

According to Agarwal, the brand expects more than regular growth in the plywood and door categories this fiscal end. However, the growth will be single and double digits, respectively.

“We have also planned to add variations in our existing categories to make our consumers pickier,” he adds.

CenturyPly as a whole targets entire India but for Century Doors, the East and North are strong markets. The brand is strengthening its presence in West and South India too.

Speaking on the benefits from campaigns, Sen said, “Through campaigns, we got recognition for the brand and its segments. Our current campaign has already fetched some seven lakh views, which give us the idea that people are noticing the campaign and it is successfully engaging consumers.”

In order to grab consumer attention, the brand added humour to its campaigns. “Humours increases campaign views as well as gives us a brand recall,” Sen said.

For its door category, the brand did an outdoor campaign titled #EnterLife four years back, which did not yield bring much results.

Earlier, Century Doors’ TG was the premium crowd. But the brand understood the market and ventured into ‘strong security doors’ considering the basic need of consumers across the country.

“We realised that the market is much larger and the basic intrinsic need to catch this large market is to have strong security of front doors. Realising this fact, we came out with the campaign, #Suraksha ki guarantee, to promote good quality doors,” Sen concluded.

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