Pan Vilas' digital adspend to match television

Pan Vilas, a mouth freshener and confectionery brand from Godfrey Phillips India, targets more than Rs 1,000 crores in revenue in the next three years and also plans to spend big on digital marketing. To achieve the target, the brand plans to expand its business to North and East India.

At present, the brand’s business is spread across Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

The brand will also introduce seven to eight new variants of its product to push its business and revenue growth.

Anirban Sen

Anirban Sen, Business Head, Chewing & Confectionery, Godfrey Phillips India, said, “We currently operate in Gujarat, MP, UP and we have a 20-30% market share in these regions. We have a three-year plan to expand into other markets. We have about seven to eight products in the pipeline right now. We are also being very expeditious to increase our geographical spread and in the next three years, we will be available anywhere in the North and East.”

Pan Vilas will launch new flavours of candies and a cardamom mouth freshener in the coming quarters. The brand is also planning a new celebrity face for its new products. However, Manoj Bajpai will remain the brand’s face.

Gujarat is the strongest market and eastern UP the lowest. “Today we have a 40% of market share in Gujarat, including both the chewing and confectionary categories,” Sen said.

The brand’s annual media budget is about Rs 60-65 crore out of which Rs 35 crore is allocated for the overall mouth freshener segment, except for Pan Vilas pan masala. The remaining Rs 30 crore is allocated for the pan masala category as it’s the most revenue-generating product of the segment.

“We are eyeing a 10% growth from pan masala this year,” Sen said.

The brand spends 70% of its budget on TV and radio, 20% on digital and the remaining 10% on productions and installations.

According to Sen, though TV gets a bigger share, digital is a very effective medium for the brand. It’s beneficial for Pan Vilas because it completely reaches its targeted audience. “Since our focus is on the younger TG, we are actively using most of the digital tools available to inform them about the goodness of our brand and give them the option to try natural products,” Sen said.

“It’s because of the reach that we spend more on television than digital, but in digital we are able to do a lot of targeted marketing. We are significantly able to target the geography and the age group in a far more focused manner than TV,” he adds.

 The brand plans a 50-50% ratio between television and digital in the next fiscal.

“We are finding TV an irrelevant medium for our targeted audience today. Maybe after two years, we will completely stop advertising on TV except during topical events,” Sen pointed out.

As of now, however, the brand will continue to create attention through TV.

Speaking on content marketing, Sen said, “We believe good content creation today will tomorrow become the key to making the brand alive. In another six months, we are planning to enter content marketing. We are in the process of signing up with some channels on YouTube, and in social media, for content creation, making sure the brand’s expression is handled carefully. We don’t want to deviate on some content that doesn’t make sense for the brand and dilutes its emotional connect with consumers.”

According to Sen, the brand will launch four more campaigns under this series in the upcoming quarters of this fiscal. “The next campaign will come between Oct-Nov and another in Jan-Feb,” he said.   

Speaking on the ‘Shauk badi cheez hai’ campaign, Sen said the tagline ‘Shauk badi cheez hai’ resonates completely with our product offerings and its nature; it connects well with the Indian thought. To give it a more Indian impact, we signed Manoj Bajpai for Pan Vilas Silver Dewz. In the past, Manoj Bajpai and Elli Avram have together endorsed the product.

At present, the brand has two lakh retail outlets, which will increase by more than 100% in the next two years.

Sen says they don’t find any brand of the same segment as their competition because their product is different. He says Pan Vilas’s chewing segment products have 100% natural ingredients, unlike other brands. 

Speaking on the new products, Sen said, “We are working on Rose, Mulethi, Kesar, Kewda, and Mango flavours of Cardamom. Mulethi is exclusively for winters. For pan masala, we are working on some advanced products, which I can’t speak about right now. But all these flavours can also be applied to pan masala. Rose and Mulethi will be out in the market in the next three months.”

The mouth freshener segment includes Pan Vilas Pan Masala, Silver Dews and Raag in the chewing category and Funda, Naturalz and Burst candy varieties in the confectionery category.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com